Hacker News Reader

Comment by asd88 | Hacker News Reader

Good for TWTR but not great for its employees given how Elon runs his companies.

As a Twitter user, I'm very OK with this.

Depends on the person, doesn't it? If I were at Twitter, I would be excited about this. I would be expecting the work to become more challenging, but also more important.

Praise for Elon tends to diminish the closer you get to him. He’s kind of notorious for being a bad boss; impulsive, poor temperament, and petty. Even if you like his achievements, chances are you would very much not enjoy having him as a boss.

I honestly could not care less. Steve Jobs was the same. I think you are criticizing the very things that made them great.

The idea workers have to suffer under "great men" to produce things of value is provably untrue and just an excuse by those "great men" to act in unacceptable ways, while taking credit for the work done by those people.

A good CEO can of course provide value, but pretending they are alone responsible for success, and abusing staff is a good way to achieve that success is just wrong. Burning out passionate people is a good way to create short-term profit, it isn't "greatness".

If it were provably untrue then you would have proved your point. My opinion is not invalidated by your opinion.

"In the absence of data, I'll take my opinion over yours." - Former Boss

My post wasn't saying that my entire point was provable, just that it was specifically trivial to show you can create great work without that suffering.

If you can't think of a single example of a valuable thing being made by a company without an abusive auteur CEO, then I guess we see "value" very differently.

The rest of my post argues that there is no way to justify that harm given we know the work can be achieved without it.

It’s kind of like how some actors really only get into “method acting” when it allows for them to behave like assholes on set. The idea that one must be a jerk to do “great things” is a self serving lie by rich and powerful people who want to excuse their misbehavior.

Suffer? What are these workers - slaves? Duped cult members?

You people are crazy. Since when is hard work and ambition something to be scorned?

It's pretty easy for you now, from your obvious position of wealth and privilege, to now ridicule those values which built the very civilization you are now inheriting and trashing. Talk about not having skin in the game.

I'm genuinely confused by your post. Do you personally know the person you're responding to? Nothing about his public information seems to warrant this level of vitriol, but maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not sure how you read any of that into my post, but it doesn't follow at all from what I said.

Working for someone who transforms industries?

Many do enjoy that very much, clearly. Amazing engineers, who can work anywhere they want, choose to work at SpaceX and Tesla. And we all benefit from the electrification of the grid and advances in space.

Bad human beings can still contribute good things. That doesn't excuse bad behavior.

Hard work and ambition is now bad behavior? I weep for the future of humanity if this is the best we now have to offer each other :p

Where did the person you are replying to indicate that "hard work" and "ambition" are the issues he is faulting? It seems like you're being rather disingenuous.

Musk's bad behavior includes things like forcing Tesla employees back into office, against local health restriction, mocking trans-folk because an ex started dating a trans-woman, pumping and dumping cryptocurrency, posting multiple tweets that violate laws (stock and union related), repeatedly lying about his products, etc.

Don't worship the man. Hard work and ambition are aspects of his character deserving respect, no doubt. But he's not perfect. Not all aspects of his character are worth emulating, and he has his blindspots like everyone else.

This is flat out not true. JB, Shotwell, Mueller, Riseman and I could name many more are mostly positive on him.

From what I'd heard, he's the perfect boss; adverse to workplace politics, interested in truth & results above all else.

How does Elon run his companies any differently than the vast majority of tech companies out there?

He calls himself of founder of some things he never founded!

People are so obsessed with that detail. Elon and JB wanted to start their own company and they had the money.

Tesla had no money and was going nowhere without Musk.

Instead of creating his own company he agree to join forces and basically fund Tesla.

Seems like not just starting a competitor was the nice thing to do. As doing so would have 100% doomed Tesla.

I don't care either way. Nor about Tesla, nor about Musk. Calling yourself a founder when you aren't, regardless of the merits of him funding Tesla, is still very odd.

I don't think the OP was referring to Tesla since technically they are a car company, not a "tech" company, but still you can find interviews with real founders of Tesla who stated on record they don't understand why Elon calls himself a "Tesla founder", but since they took his money, he is their boss (or was).

I think he was referring to PayPal, a tech company. Even now all over the net you can see articles claiming Musk founded Paypal. Nothing further from the truth. Musk started X.com and designed a very simple page where you put two peoples email addresses and you "could" send them money. It was happening at the same time as PayPal had the same idea and similar website. Problem for PP was that back then no sane bank or financial institution would touch any company that is hooked up to the internet. Musk had a tremendous leverage because of the only bank who would go ahead and plug their gateway into the net (I believe it was Stanford Federal Credit Union, but I don't remember) was okay for doing it because personal leverage of Musk father, who owns multiple diamond mines in ZA, and put a huge collateral "just in case" something goes wrong. Musk didn't have to have a working website to have a $300,000,000 leverage over PayPal and PP knew it will be years before they get any bank to agree to work with them. It was smart for Thiel to offer large stake of PP for Musk just for ability to change which site will be using the bank's gateway. This story was somewhat easy to find and popular back in the old days of the internet, but - putting my conspiracy hat on - these days you find nothing about it at least not by Googling. So I don't really know - to me it doesn't sound he founded PayPal, they would eventually got their permission from some bank but at that point we would be X'ing each other money, not "Paypalling" it.

> record they don't understand why Elon calls himself a "Tesla founder"

And I explained why it is really not that insane. It was basically him throwing them a bone, they should be grateful. And of course they were horrible and ran Tesla into the ground and hid facts from Elon.

> I think he was referring to PayPal

I don't think so.

> X.com and designed a very simple page where you put two peoples email addresses and you "could" send them money. It was happening at the same time as PayPal had the same idea and similar website

This is not true. X.com from the beginning was payment company. Confinity was originally a security company for Palm platform. From there they switched to payments.

From Wikipedia:

> In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk.

The two companies merged so all the people of both companies are rightly called founders. And non of the others disagree with that.

> because personal leverage of Musk father, who owns multiple diamond mines in ZA

Please provide evdience. This 'dimond mine' nonsense has mostly been discredited. The best researched story about that basically showed that it was like a 30k investment sometime in the 80s. Certainty not enough to convince a bank to do anything.

Musk father was wealthy because he was an engineer.

> This story was somewhat easy to find and popular back in the old days of the internet

And well researched probably ...

I don't care about all that.. I just think he is a liar for claiming he founded Tesla and for spreading bullshit that he founded PayPal... I literally thought he founded both..

He compensates below market and his employees are expected to work harder than big tech companies.

He can get away with it at SpaceX because, well, spaaacccceeee!

I'm not sure how he gets away with it at Tesla.

They're not slaves. They have choice. In fact, an unending list of jobs available in the tech industry.

Why is it Tesla's / SpaceX fault for being a cool company for many people to work at and they're willing to take a pay cut? It is 100% their choice.

There is absolutely no counter argument here that I can see. I am trying.

I was responding to someone asking how they're different than any other tech company. They're known for underpaying and overworking people. That's how they're different than most others.

The implication being that if Twitter switched to that culture, then it'd generally be a really bad thing for most of those who currently work there, since they did not sign up for that.

How is this different from M&A or company going bankrupt or getting laid off? Are you saying the software engineers and fully functioning adults that work at Twitter are unaware of this and would be betrayed? They totally signed up for it and has been compensated well for the risks they take and the services they provide.

because the stock grew like crazy and everyone got rich?

Anyone can buy the stock though, while working at a company that pays better and has better work/life balance. Is the stock grant particularly generous or is there a better-than-average employee discount on stock purchases?

Racing cars and environmentalism is cooler than optimizating ad revenue.

He's known for running his employees into the ground, generally treating people poorly. Pay is sub-par compared both to big tech for tech workers (although not really when the stock does well) and to skilled labor for laborers. You can compare ratings of the company on sites like Indeed to other big tech, and I'm sure you can find some articles about the working conditions (I recall some being published over the years).

My former boss went there, his whole team quit shortly after, he got promoted twice and made a boatload of money from stock grants, and now he's one of the higher ranked engineers and a few of his family members went to work there as well. But these guys are workaholics, brilliant but not humans of normal working capacity. I think it a lot depends on your expectations.

3.4 out of five stars is not bad. Low score due to lack of advancement. 3.0 for work life balance is pretty good:

https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Tesla/reviews

They have a culture of overwork and moving fast. I was looking at job postings for SpaceX & Tesla a couple years ago, and every single one of them explicitly mentioned that you will be expected to work more than standard work hours and put in time on weekends, which is very different from all the other companies that stress work life balance. I'm sure it works for a lot of people, but you should be sure of what you are getting into. And I don't expect employees will stay happy if/when the Musk stock rally stops.

I worked at SpaceX. I was well compensated. It was a good time.

I didnt even have to find your username to know who this was...

As long as it's honestly communicated beforehand, and employees are not deceived about compensation and workload as they voluntary sign the contract, is it bad or immoral in any meaningful way?

I'd say no. But given the trend of people calling 20 hours a week "slavery", demanding debt forgiveness; and such. It seems like it's becoming a minority opinion to let consenting adults make their own informed decisions (and deal with the consequences of them)..

Oh, bullishit. Corporations will take every inch you give them, right up to the red line. Then that becomes "normal". And then you'll cheer them on for it, probably.

> Corporations will take every inch you give them

So would employees. So would any self-interested agents on an any open market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com