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Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

Strange statement. Why would a business guy be judged on firing people. Its not like he is running a charity.

I like SpaceX because of what they do, not because they 'provide jobs to the community'.

You can't think of a single instance where people have thought poorly of business guys for firing people?

It's really revolting, but these days, Wall Street will buy stocks that are announcing layoffs. "Better margins!!!" is all Wall Street hears from layoffs now, not "market headwinds".

And of course the human aspect of losing a job is completely immaterial to the Wall Street trader's mind.

EDIT: A downvote without a rebuttal enriches none of our minds.

They're investors. What else are they supposed to do?

They should consider that the best companies with the best profits also made costly investments into quality employees that later paid off down the road after initial unprofitability

i think

A business has to remain in business in order to keep their employees or hire new people. Jeopardizing the employment of existing employees to keep employees a business has determined that they do not have work for is not fair to them. Do you have any concrete evidence that the specific employees are being fired in bad faith?

"Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us."

So they’re not a profitable business, and not a charity. What are they exactly?

A mission-driven organization, that wants to make enough money to continue its mission.

An unprofitable business.

The very next sentences after that one are:

"What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable. That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla's history to date."

It’s a valid criticism they seem unable to tackle without massive layoffs, which seems problematic. Taking credit for clean energy is good PR though... maybe they’re a PR company?

They're a business that's not yet profitable. It's not that complicated.

"profit is obviously not what motivates us" is just corporate-speak, it doesn't mean anything. Amazon also isn't exactly profitable, yet no one would accuse them of being financially unsuccessful.

Twitter has not produced a single year of profit in 12 years.

Are they a business or a charity or what?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/25/twitter-p...

They’re a profitable business, and became one in three years less than Tesla, without the need to tackle a hard problem like manufacturing cars.

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