Elon Musk on Remote Work

I think OP is referring to how Musk acts like a drug addict. Because he does.

I think he was doing well over the 6-10 year timeframe. It's the past 6-10 weeks that are out of character.

The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? I'll take the people who risk it for progressing tech and innovation any day of the week.

> He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him today.

Maybe in your echo bubble, but that is factually quite incorrect.

Elon has made some questionable choices over the years and while I not a fan of many of them, I think he generally at least tries to use his capital for the betterment of the world. I think his "mission" is in fact the reason he uses to justify harsh behavior like described in this article.

Apart from a few things like union busting and this remote policy, I've only liked him more and more over time. I was never a "musk fanboy" whom it's hip to whine about and degrade today (you agree with something mean space man said? bOoTlIcKeR sImP!111) but all that whining and degrading has only had the effect of pushing me to like him more. I love that he seems to stand by what he believes instead of letting society tell him what to think, and he's in a position to do so with "fuck you money." I can see a lot of what I would do in what he does so it's a kind of vicarious satisfaction when that makes Twitter droves mad. It's hip to hate cars, he still has cool visions using cars like hyerloop which I love; people whined about the aluminum ships, I love seeing some classic style brought back into things; ungrateful diver guy deserved to have his name dragged through the mud; etc.

Sure, except him being probably the most productive human being ever, revolutionising 2 industries, and actually doing something useful with his wealth (looking at you, Bezos, Gates & Buffet)

> . He certainly had his detractors before then, but it's hard to find a single person standing up for him

What rock do you live under? He has a huge fanatic cult following and they won't ever shut up about sucking his dick.

Was it? The recipients was not clear.

We can meet at Taqueria Las Vegas & Bar across the street where you can buy me a carne asada burrito.

> everyone else working remotely is "pretend working"

Can you quote? I didn't see this in the sent emails, which is the news being discussed. He said everyone working remotely is pretending to work?

> Seriously, no one else except Tesla in the whole world ships great products?

Taking pride in ones own products is very common in companies. In any case, I don't think these qualify as insulting, if you feel insulted, I'm guessing you'll be feeling offended very often.

To be fair, I am working remotely and pretending to work as I read this thread right now. I did a lot less pretending when I was in the office.

Maybe software. I personally know multiple mechanical engineers (smart ones from Berkeley) who were worked into the ground at Apple. Like >55h work weeks.

Even if tsla is massively overvalued (which I agree is likely) that doesn’t mean it’s a failed business plan, a crash of stock price back to “normal” does not mean the business plan is a failure. Aka even without high valuations tsla could have a toxic work place and still be stably producing successful cars.

Some OS teams were pretty stressed with extremely tight timelines and no additional headcount.

“Subsidy truffle hound” is how I’ve heard it described.

It's healthy to be skeptical. At the same time, Musk wouldn't be the first successful person who came from a crappy background.

I didn't say that - just pointed out that he was loaded way before Tesla.

If working 40+ hours at Tesla makes you into a millionaire in the same way using other people's money to start a company does, then I will stand corrected.

Elon is a smart man, many of these executives are smart people, they know working for a company does not pay off in the same way that entrepreneurship does. They admit as much when they describe why they deserve so much money.

I'm not even saying employees should expect that type of return, what I'm saying is that executives should not use their hard work to become massively wealthy to try and influence their employees to work just as hard, when they know the payout is not there. It's manipulative.

Everyone knows Musk "slept on the factory floor" to get Tesla working. That type of investment has paid out well for him. It won't pay out well for the workers on the factory floor.

Because the average nameplate capacity of solar is below 20% globally, and infill is natural gas. Solar is only zero carbon if you look at it out of context.

This planet has nighttime. This planet has bad weather. Solar fans usually say "batteries," but that's absolute nonsense; there is nowhere near enough copper on this planet to wire them up, or lithium or lead to make them. When they're not grid backed, which is what we're discussing here, they'd have to be half the size of your house, they'd cost $600k, and you'd have to replace them every 25 years. You think the housing crisis is bad? Wait for the battery crisis that solar fans want.

There's a reason that every time they build a solar plant, they build a natural gas plant right next door.

After that, someone inevitably insists that we can just cover the planet in transmission wires. And I mean, if you even think that through for a tenth of a second

On top of that, *solar plants don't work*. Ivanpah has wanted to shut down for 20 years straight because it's bleeding money, and produces less than 10% of the power it was expected to, but the state won't let it, because then their green laws aren't satisfied anymore (and they're only satisfied now because nobody counts the infill carbon.)

Another thing nobody seems to understand is flywheel smoothing. The variability in power is being physically smoothed by (usually) a large spinning piece of rock, similar to the metal disc that smooths power demand in your car. You remember how the one at Level3 cut a notch through the highway when it spun out of the building? That was with a professional maintenance team. You want one of those in every house, or at every city block?

Energiewende failed for a reason. Germany threw almost two trillion dollars at it for 14 years, and all they did was 6x their cost of power, drive their reliability down, and increase their carbon output (even with flywheels, start/stop cycles aren't free; turning those gas plants on and off is a disaster.)

Solar only makes sense if you look at it on paper, driven by an amateur who's googling shit.

As soon as you look at what actually happens at plants, start folding in all the topics you didn't know about, experience, look at whether there are materials to support the fantasy, look at what can be recycled instead of just saying "recycle it," etc?

It just doesn't work.

One of the world's largest and most industrialized nations tried for 14 years, and it was a disaster.

Just look at the real world evidence.

> I'm not parent, but it sounds like you might have the causality of this backwards. Parent wouldn't be a fan in the first place if he didn't think that he's done good things.

You seem to need a quick brush up on what marketing is.

Parent is a fan because the internet told him to be. Parent is a fan of great things that Musk explicitly has not actually done.

Imagine thinking that bringing up a one time gift for someone else was a way of explaining why the world's once richest man should be considered a philanthropist for giving a sum of money that is worth less than the average hiring bonus in his AI department.

A man worth a hundred billion plus may not be considered generous for giving away less than I have. No. I am in no way rich or important. He can do more than I have, and you absolutely will not hold up a pittance like that and pretend it forgives him the insane damage he's done.

This level of apologism reflects on you. Please stop putting it in front of my face.

When we as a people have grown, we will judge billionaires for their allowing the starving to die, instead of gathering in groups to show that we're wise enough to admire them.

Stop looking up to those who could stop the death, and choose not to. They are not worthy of your respect, and you should learn that.

I'm not religious, but there's a lot of wisdom in what nearly every religion says about rich men. Here in the West we tend to be familiar with the Biblical phrasing: "Indeed, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

I have no expectation to go to heaven, but my fat ass is getting through that needle, because there are dozens of human beings who eat because I mail my dollars. Every time someone in a pope hat tries to stare me down, I get to look back with clear eyes. Feels pretty good.

The UN World Food Programme makes it easy. The hardest part is using a British spelled word every month. (Indeed, if I ever become rich like him, one of my plans is to go to them and tell them I will fund fixing world hunger if and only if they switch permanently to the American spelling. Makes my skin itch.)

Put your signature on food for another person. Try it, one time. You won't stop.

Pretty soon you'll get why I don't care about a couple hundred grand, from a man who spends tens of millions on car commercials every month.

And you might understand why I think you shouldn't be impressed either. And why I think that if we all started expecting him to do better, and stopped being impressed by silly tricks like fake flamethrowers and smoking pot on vaccine denier radio, we might be better off.

Do you know how much he's had removed from his taxes through lobbying for exemptions? That's a pittance. A trivial pittance.

Elon Musk challenged the UN to explain how $6b could help against world hunger, and said if they did it he'd foot the bill. They solidly answered.

It's been years, and he's trying to buy Twitter for $44b instead.

He's literally got all the resources he needs to solve world hunger, and instead he's wasting time trying to put two block subways under sports arenas which even trivial video game simulations can show would never, ever have worked.

Can you imagine anyone being in a position to solve a job like that, and choosing not to?

At least Bill Gates is tackling malaria. But the ones who aren't doing something like that? Not my favorites. I'd say something more severe but HN has a habit of treating criticism of the rich as bad behavior.

With that amount of money, he could just rent an academic to tell him how to do good, and he chooses not to. I don't understand how anyone, ever, fails to judge that. I genuinely don't.

I don't understand how we've gotten to a position of not hating rich who don't give back. It used to be socially normal to loathe these people, to the point of calling them robber barons.

Nine million lives a year. A holocaust every eight months. Ten thousand children every single day.

People like to pretend that they have some deep insight into the money not being liquid and people not being able to and blah blah who cares, he got it together for Twitter, it's just apologism

What is the meaningful difference between having the ability to stop that and choosing not to, and actual evil? Like, really. I know it's the kind of statement that seems exaggerated and misplaced, but make a genuine attempt to answer it.

We still punish someone for causing a death, even if it's through inaction. If you're standing at a train control panel in that Rocky and Bullwinkle thing with a person tied on the tracks, and you can pull the lever to switch the track to save them, and you just choose not to? And you knew? Even if you had nothing to do with the situation, you're still going to jail for negligent homicide.

If you ask the average American who the worst person of all time is, they'll typically say Hitler, and justify it with six million dead. Better educated people might instead say Stalin, Pol Pot, or Andrew Jackson, on similar grounds.

Most academics count the largest single human's death count as Stalin at an estimated 12 mil.

Nine million by starvation every single year.

Should we have the concept of negligent genocide?

I will ask it again. What is the meaningful difference between having the ability to stop that and choosing not to, and actual evil? Really.

We all pay a substantial portion of our income in taxes. They skate. That portion on just Elon and the Waltons - on just five people, to pay our tax rate - and three holocausts every two years are prevented for the rest of time.

When do we start judging them for their excesses, their lack of doing their share, the harm they're doing to the rest of us?

When do we stop admiring the gilded cage, and realize that it's denying us our basics?

Shouldn't you have government health care, manageable rent, and a non-carbon grid by now?

Of course, given where I'm posting this, this comment is probably bad for me in the long run

Statistically speaking, most academics believe that altruism evolved because it's an effective cure for tragedies of the commons

Really, do you read that as something other than "he threw away a couple hundred grand to impress a girl?"

Do you actually think that was charity? Genuinely? Why just that once, then?

And from that lens, do you realize how little money that actually is, then, and how easy a real amount would be able for him to give?

I was not talking about tesla, i was talking about working 60 hours in a risky environment, but hey why not work 120? Or better, sleep in the factory eat there and pay for it?

>My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime.

Yes that's normal, sometimes you have to do overtime, but 60 hours at a regular basis is something else.

HSBC, Airbus, Deutsche Telekom, AXA, Shell, Nestle, Barclays, Metro, L'Oreal, BP, Michelin, AstraZeneca, Air France, Christian Dior, Philips, Anheuser-Busch, Vodafone, Lufthansa, Volkswagen, Siemens, Allianz, Bosch, Unilever, Maersk, Renault, Saint-Gobain, Bayer, Nokia, Ericsson, BT Group, Accenture, Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH

Disagree with that statement but I get the sentiment.

Look at Asia and how many new companies they produced despite overworking themselves to death.

The problem with Europe is not mainly this but that we truly do not have a common market.

We cant pool resources and talents into one place and launch a pan-european project. Europe is still countries actively engaging in competition among themselves.

I mean, you can also hit up the Shell website and read all about how good they are for the environment, driving the transition to clean energy etc.

You're still maximizing value for shareholders, it's just wrapped in baloney about a Mars mission.

I don't recall any FAANMG CEOs writing threatening emails to employees mandating them to work more than 40 hours. Do you have any examples?

I've worked two FAANGM jobs as a salaried engineer and or manager, rarely put in over 40. Draw boundaries, stick to them. Long hours mean the company is underfunding your team, and there's no reason you should be picking up their mistakes.

Sounds shitty

Maybe your subjective opinion about the working conditions is not universally held. Recruitment data would remove individual bias in favor of the collective bias of the actual workers, which is what's most important in my opinion

Sure. But it's not like he wants it for personal consumption. You gotta ask what is "reason why" is. What is he after? And I'd say it's something like a better nervous system for the human species as such. I'd say it's a world in which ideas can compete with one another based on merit. And that, again, is something money cannot buy today. Just like an electric car with 500 horsepower and 400 miles of range wasn't something you could buy back in 2008.