SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter
theregister.com
theregister.com
Almost everyone is beholden to an employer, a committee, or an oversight board of some kind so we all have to censor our public thoughts to a huge extent. I think some people are upset that Elon doesn’t have to, and they’re upset that he’s “above the law”.
Woke culture truly is the new church.
Back when I was a student, there was a professor emeritus of communications who liked to say things like "communication usually fails, except by accident". The idea was that if you intend to say something but many people interpret it otherwise, that was you failure to communicate. Musk is certainly smart enough to realize that his tone changes the meaning of what he says, but he keeps doing it anyway. That makes him a kind of a troll.
The thing with trolls is that people often don't like them. They may barely tolerate trolls they agree with and actively hate ones they disagree with.
Musk reminds me of another person: a former communist (of the minority faction who supported the USSR) who later made a 180-degree turn and became a successful investment banker. He is one of the richest people in Finland who didn't inherit their fortune, and he is probably also one of the most hated people in the country. And he genuinely enjoys trolling. Often when business leaders or right-wing ideologists have something that needs saying but can't be said aloud, they let him say it.
Are you talking about Osmo A. Wiio? https://jkorpela.fi/wiio.html
Today, as far as I understand, people who are trying to be serious communications professionals approach the same issues from a constructive angle. They try to minimize the chances for misunderstanding, which leads to those bland and thoroughly vetted corporate communications.
I feel like I don't understand this. Is the idea that you need to try very hard to communicate well?
Folks on HN lauded the CoinBase stance that people should check their politics at the door; Musk is doing the exact opposite of that.
How exactly? People can't focus on their work on engine design, or combustion simulation, or reentry trajectory because Musk is involved in some Twitter fights? Or maybe because Musk fails to be a role model? Are they kids, or grownups?
You missed the first sentence of my comment, then?
> Or maybe because Musk fails to be a role model? Are they kids, or grownups?
He's a petulant manchild, now that you mention it, a horrible role model for the company, its leadership on down. Is he fit to be a CEO, if he can't act like one?
Without him, these employees wouldn’t have a job. They should be grateful.
It’s wild to see people so deranged and obsessed with the bandwagon hating to comment something like this and trying to be dead serious about it.
Anyway, for a good laugh you can check out the lawsuit and read past the “Elon rage porn” headlines on it.
Highly suggest if you are ever on the Internet and find yourself getting hyped angry about something to shut it off.
You might note that I didn't say anything about my emotional state (calm, bemused) nor the viability of the class action suit. But to deny that the suit, and the complex of behaviors leading up to it, are not a distraction to Musk's companies and the employees thereof is patently absurd.
To insist that his subordinates put on blinders, ignore the news, and just focus on doing their jobs, don't speak up about their working conditions, is some peak totalitarian bullshit. We live in a free society, deal with it.
To paraphrase OC: how dare the new church criticize the old church!
Why anyone credits anything he says will forever escape me.
Musk called Bill Gates fat because he shorted Tesla stock. Is that a pleasant surprise? A breath of fresh air? Finally, someone is speaking their mind!
Musk doesn’t have to be woke. All he has to do is be professional and that will clean up his image.
Amen.
The subtext is the unspoken 'culture war' - everyone sees it, so it's a bit bizarre to me that it's unspoken - between, on one hand, a subculture in society (including on the Internet and in business) that celebrates power (including its abuse and corruption) and disruption; and on the other hand, one that advocates responsibility, basic human dignity, productivity, and innovation.
IMHO, the former subculture, of power and disruption, is indefensible. Maybe that's why the contest is unspoken, and instead we debate Musk's behavior as a proxy.
Look at the people who love to defend sociopathic behavior in every form (or at least, that's what I perceive). That's one side of it.
While I suspect that all the info I have about what people actually thought of those things is biased by the beliefs of the people telling me today, the issue of taxation and wealth redistribution was listed in my GCSE (UK highschool) history of Great Depression USA and the transition from Hoover to Roosevelt.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/16/23170228/spacex-elon-musk...
If prior letters like this are any indication, it's on the order of 12 out of 12,000.
"It was shared and discussed on HackerNews, a forum with reportedly more than 1,000,000 members"
there's a lot of spam posted in large company channels that doesn't drive any engagement.
The Verge is eager to play up the significance of this effort to drive clicks, as they're "breaking" this story. They've timed the release well to capitalize on the Elon coverage
Which company? All of them? Elon has no individual identity or voice any more?
Elon on twitter is obviously speaking as and for Elon, not representing a specific company.
Then you can say whatever you want. Even journalists can blatantly lie. It gives you complete indemnity! Those are the rules of engagement bestowed upon most blue-checks on Twitter.
This is absolutely incorrect. I don't know about SpaceX, but Tesla notified the markets in a 2013 filing that it intended to use Musk's Twitter account for official announcements. There was very well-covered SEC enforcement that followed.
(Starship is wholly inadequate to even start colonizing Mars. It might be just barely adequate to start an outpost with a half-dozen staff. It probably could support an active moon base.)
He has anyway not lied about the possibility of suborbital passenger or freight service lately, to my knowledge. BTW, Shotwell has, too.
Starship is wholly inadequate to take more than 17 crew to Mars; that would be if you don't mind some killed on the way there. So, you send 4 or 5 cargo ships, 500 tons of stuff, and two ships swinging on the ends of a cable, so their bones don't melt on the way there. (Which, BTW, takes 9, not 6, months.) Maybe one is a spare, with everything duplicated. The main ship fits 8 crew with just-tolerable comfort, with stuff you will actually need for 9 months unimaginably distant from all possibility of help. Change of underwear, you think? Water, food. Air? Space suits, to go outside when they arrive? Maybe a hand truck.
They get there, and now have to unship and set up 500 tons of crap. It only weighs 170-some tons, which is not much better. Set up a massive solar farm and methane and oxygen factory. Debug it. Assemble vehicles, freight handlers, bulldozer and excavator. Individual pod huts, so crew can sometimes get away from others they have come to detest.
Look around and think, "This place is a dump." Because every last detail is way worse than the worst place on Earth. Cold, dim, featureless, bone dry, dusty. The dust sticks to everything, seemingly leaping up to soil any clean surface.
Enough is enough, but nobody can go home until the launch window opens, and the fuel is banked.
The difference is instead of walking out in space every now and then you occasionally work outside in an alien world. The dust storms would be intense, you probably wouldn't leave shelter then, but if you've ever been out in the desert, it can be really beautiful.
Personally give me internet and A/C and I can stay anywhere for years, outside time or not, it's what I do now essentially. The alien backyard work is a bonus.
Different strokes for different people. You don't seem to have a settler attitude, and that's okay.
(To add to your list: I wouldn’t want to be stuck somewhere where Musk was in change, but again, that’s not a Starship problem per se).
8 people per Starship (which you have not justified, given its 100-150 tons to LEO design and refuelling in LEO for such missions and the 1000m^3 interior volume; I’ve shared a 70m^3 apartment with another person comfortably for longer than the trip duration, and that’s 14 such units and 28 people in the same volume, and my university accommodation was much denser even than that, so what machinery fraction do you imagine?), and let’s say they can transit one way on each conjunction even though that’s probably only true for the first few trips before fuel generation and storage is done reliably prior to arrival, is still 200 per vehicle-in-the-fleet per century, or million people in a century with a fleet of 5000 Starship-equivalent vehicles. Which is a lot of Starships, but there are more 737s, so it’s not like aerospace can’t be built at this scale.
Now, criticism of Musk’s target price per seat given your beliefs of the maximum occupancy per vehicle to Mars, that would make more sense.
As would arguing that once you have Starship as a launch vehicle, it would make more sense to use it to build some Aldrin cyclers rather than use Starship for everything.
Oh, and we may ban it from operation at that scale because of the environmental concerns. That’s certainly possible.
But that’s not what it looks like you’re doing, it looks like you’re saying it can’t rather than it will be too expensive or that its mere existence creates better solutions or it might be held back for legal reasons.
Everything I've listed is similar to saying "I know the Model T is limited, but you must try harder if you wish to convince people that Henry Ford is a liar and the automobile cannot replace the horse".
> The main ship fits 8 crew with just-tolerable comfort,
From where do you get these numbers? Your own private analysis, or a published source? How can we verify these claims you make?
I think the reason I can’t find an answer to the general case is that you wouldn’t typically have any crew on board a starship that’s designed for cargo.
NASA figures are a maximum of 17 in that volume, and then only if you leave behind, e.g., spacesuits, and they sleep the whole way.
It does make a dumb mistake insisting centrifugal gravity on the way wouldn't work
You’ll still probably die of course but the point stands that the logistics side of the equation seems fine with startships.
If one crewed ship of 8 colonists needs, say, five cargo ships for support equipment for that population on Mars, and a seventh as counterweight for centrifugal gravity en route, that is 77 launches. The six that land on Mars don't get re-used, although their superheavies do.
The point here is that you need an absurdly large number of launch events just to provide for 8 colonists. Multiply that out to a million colonists, and you exceed the industrial capacity of the world. And, even a million colonists is very, very, very far from self-sufficient.
There’s nothing remotely sensible about a million colonists, so that’s a pointless straw man.
Lastly, the necessities to support 8 people aren’t that different from the necessities to support 100. They scale wayyy better than linearly.
Again, the issue with supporting people on mars is not the vehicles to get there.
It is very far from clear that Mars can physically support 100M inhabitants.
100M is 100x stupider
Like, thank you Musk for backing smart people like Gwynne and JB and giving the powder that they need to fire their flintlocks of excellence.
Dislike, no thank you Musk for your distracting and pointless pre-occupation with meme currencies and "I am 14 and I just read Heinlein and this is deep"-tier libertarian twitterings.
You are allowing your emotions and dislike of Musk to cloud your judgement.
You say they are entitled - high skill, difficult to replace workers are actually entitled to make demands of their employer which are proportional to the value they offer, in particular when they act collectively.
If you just like rockets, and want some work-life balance, you can always apply for the SLS team, or Boeing Starliner.
The U.S. CFR Title 14, Part 1, Section 1.1 defines "pilot in command" as:
...the person who:
Has final authority and responsibility for the operation and safety of the flight
Edit: Mind that there is an obvious conflict between positions like, "you do as I say, because my money", and the complex relations that constitute a corporate business.
Also, "final" implies an iterative process of multiple steps, like a discussion. (Which in turn implies a certain degree of openness to such a process.) Otherwise, it would be "exclusive" or "total".
That's not how it works with Crew Resource Management.
There is a reason planes still have two pilots -- and it is not that the need two or even one to function most of the time.
PIC does not order anyone around, but is the actor/writer. The other pilot verifies and overrides/calls issues. And certain operations, for instance during take off, are done together.
Maybe companies work that way, but if you fly a plane with that approach, I am joining as the second, crew or passenger.
The point is that employer-employee relationships are inherently imbalanced. A corporation has far more freedom to make choices like that than their employees.
No, you can't just "get another job" if all the companies are abusing employees in the same way.
The fact that corporations are set as mini-dictatorships never made sense to me. Everyone's at the mercy of the whims of the CEO.
Karl Marx said that workers should own the means of production, and this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about. In capitalism, shareholders have more power over the company than those doing the day-to-day work who know the business, and those shareholders could easily tell Musk to tone it down if they wanted to – and Musk would listen.
The employees could never sway him. "Take it or leave it," which really just means "go work for the other asshole."
I think it wouldn't be such a bad thing if corporations had mandatory employee democracy on certain workplace issues. I think the ownership class has too much power over the individual. Just because you own assets shouldn't mean you get to play games with people's livelihoods.
But really the goal is to make SpaceX as productive as possible, to do something productive for the world, not to serve Musk's whims. If there is a trade-off between the whims and the productivity, it's clear which should be sacrificed.
Sometimes the only way left to communicate a message is to burn something down.
It is always better to run an organization such that the above do not apply to it, particularly.
…and then be quite concerned that the CEO’s attention is seemingly quite scattershot now, and perhaps too focused on a social media site that nobody outside the chattering class uses.
I’d argue there probably isn’t enough substance to the complaint yet (Space-X brand is probably still a net positive having him in front of the company), but your line of argument would cause a quiet brain drain from organizations, not keep them healthy with open discussion. The fact that this open letter was described outside of the company might be the only reason I might side with you.