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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

>The letter asked SpaceX management to publicly separate the company from Mr. Musk’s personal brand, and to take steps to address what it said was a gap between SpaceX’s stated values and its current systems and company culture.

>“Blanketing thousands of people across the company with repeated unsolicited emails and asking them to sign letters and fill out unsponsored surveys during the work day is not acceptable,”

So it was a mass internal email chain, using company resources? And it sounds like they were asking Musk to be gone, with plausibly deniability. Is it honestly any surprise that they got fired? Hijacking internal systems for a publicity stunt like this will always put a target on your back.

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Surprised? No. There's no large company in the world where attacking top management won't lead to major consequences.

Of course, SpaceX (and Google, along with a stack of other "tech" companies) wasn't supposed to be just another large company; they wanted to disrupt things, and wanted fanatical buy-in from their employees, customers, and fans. (Corporate fans? Really?)

It'll take a while, because religions don't die easily, but eventually it will become clear to anyone except the die-hard that it's just another company.

I'm not sure I fully understand your point. Are you saying that because they wanted to be "different", they should allow behavior like this?

Not quite.

Say you work for General Motors. You can gripe about management all you want, but there's no expectation that you are going to be able to send out a company-wide memo saying the board should boot the CEO.

Now say you work for Tesla, or one of the other companies that is desperately trying to hang on to their "startup culture" as they get bigger. For that, it's vital that you buy into the mission, believe that you personally are changing the world.

The other half of that intellectual and emotional investment is the feeling that you have control and input. If the company makes a business deal that you don't agree with, you threaten to organize a walk-out; if the CEO is behaving like an idiot (and not like your own lovable idiot), you feel like you can get everyone together to tell the board to boot him. After all, you, personally, are changing the world.

But that's not how it works in a company that won't fit entirely into a single conference room. You as an employee may have dedicated your life to the company, and you may think the company should be responsive to you. But that's not how it works (see example 1 above), you just haven't realized it yet.

He's saying SpaceX is just another company. They demand full loyalty (fealty?) from their employees, effectively creating a religion. They shouldn't be surprised when their employees actually expect the company to be different. Now the whole world can see SpaceX is just like Every. Single. Other. Company.

So much for "changing the world." You're not changing the corporate world, that's for sure!

Not sure you can 'change the world', without a unified group of people with some shared faith or belief.

You missed the point. They're not changing the world and they have a cult. The old way also benefits from cults. They are the old way. No change. All they did was make things (in their microenvironment) worse by adding the cult aspect.

So If it's a shared belief / mission and it's not your perspective it's a cult? Are you saying people should just work for the money and not the company? That doesn't seem to make sense. If your goal, is more capital, you want the firm you're a part of to succeed to take part in that.

The reality of it is there are a lot of extremely well paid people across the US that wear the emotions on their sleeves and take everything as a slight these days. This is the course correction, you're going to see it more and more.

Just as extremists have been saying about social media if you don't like it, go build your own.

> So If it's a shared belief / mission and it's not your perspective it's a cult?

Nope, the word cult has a definition.

I think you may be surprised at how many regular everyday people would vote "no" if asked the question "are SpaceX employees members of a literal cult?" Either we're all in on the cult, or you're using hyperbole.

I think you may be surprised at how many regular everyday people believe in astrology. Yeah, people are morons and can't apply definitions or see blatant horseshit for what it is, moving on. Truth isn't a fucking democracy.

Who's truth? Yours or theirs?

The truth.

Not from what I understand, I understood as they wanted to sell this image of being different and tolerant but are just the usual corporation.

Yeah, populism is quite a constant throughout history. People love having a savior and a hero, as demagogue as they might be.

I find it interesting how this populism takes shape in the tech industry. It manifests as companies pretending to be all about mission, community, changing the world, billionaires pretending to be pro-freedom, capitalists pretending to be anti-establishment...

That's one neat trick of capitalism - it's really good at selling you a critique of it as a luxury good.

"Turning rebellion into money", as Joe Strummer sang.

Yeah, and what this letter told us is that those people actually bought the PR speech.

> There's no large company in the world where attacking top management won't lead to major consequences.

What's interesting to me is that capitalists and usually conservatives and libertarians who worship capitalism are all too vocal when it comes to socialist and communist economic policies supposedly leading to fascism, although they don't, but yet, they are fully behind corporations literally acting as fascist dictatorships. And by interesting, I mean it boggles my mind and frustrates me. It shows these peoples' true colors: greed at all costs.

My politics are probably more aligned with yours than theirs, but if you're open to being unboggled:

It's easy to draw a categorical divide between authorities who are (ostensibly) submitted to voluntarily or transactionally; and authorities whose power is asserted by sovereign monopoly of force.

Many social organizations from families, to churches, to corporations are essentially authoritarian, but (conceptually if not always practically) you're able to remove yourself from them straightforwardly.

I wouldn't phrase it the way you did but yes, it also surprises me, that most people are unable to see corporations as authoritarian dictatorships.

Perhaps too harsh? If you have a more eloquent way or a different angle, I would love to hear it. (Seriously. Comments like these can come off catty or sarcastic in text only, but I'm genuinely asking. Haha.)

It would be unexpected for a company run by a free speech absolutist.

I don't think anyone actually believes that a "free speech absolutist" would tolerate, say, an employee shouting racial slurs in the office through a megaphone. I guess this is supposed to be a "gotcha" about free speech absolutism, but if you're attacking a definition of the term that no one would actually endorse, then maybe it's not a good "gotcha"...

What? Criticizing your boss == "shouting racial slurs in the office through a megaphone"?

These employees aren't being fired for merely criticizing their boss.

Elon Musk told Twitter (TWTR) employees that racist tweets should be allowed

So does that mean you should be allowed to think your boss is an asshole too??

Yes, you should be allowed to think whatever you want. Doubt Musk disagrees with that.

I had to look up what a free speech absolutist was[0]. As far as the definition goes, which is about opposing any speech restrictions from the state, I don't see how the internal communications of a private company falls under that.

0. https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/free-speech-absolutist/4...

The point I assume GP was trying to make is that Musk only applies that difference when it suits him. That attitude shows hypocrisy and is evidence that he’s using it to further personal power instead of actually caring about the moral philosophy of the matter.

He seems to treat his own speech as if it is completely unfettered by any restraint, regardless of consequences for self or company (see the sheer number of times he’s upset the SEC via tweet compared to any other C-level in the world), while restraining the shit out of his subordinates’.

The SEC is a federal organization (government), so Musk thumbing his nose at them in the public sphere is not the same as Musk's employees thumbing their nose at him in a private setting using company resources. The former is clearly in the realm of free speech (gov vs citizen in public space), while the latter isn't (citizen vs citizen in private space)

Edit: To put it more succinctly, Musk isn’t interested in free speech, he’s interested in his speech.

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For what it’s worth, I agree with you, but I think that’s one of the least interesting parts of the issue.

From the context of the worker, there’s isn’t too much of a functional difference. Musk is acting as the arbiter of others’ speech. So he’s allowing anybody to say anything, unless it goes against the company line.

It’s not governmental control of the little people, but it’s still hella control of the little people, by a body that can’t be held responsible to the workers (the chances of Elon being voted out are nil).

Ultimately, I think we’re both agreeing that there can and should be social consequences for speech, it’s just that Elon has an army of well paid lawyers to help him avoid those consequences. In this case, the giant power imbalance seems like pretty fundamental framing to this issue. It’s not like both parties would suffer the same consequences for making the same statements.

(In short, if you don’t trust the government to regulate your speech, why on Earth would you trust a single unelected individual to do so?)

>To put it more succinctly, Musk isn’t interested in free speech, he’s interested in his speech.

Maybe. I think what he does with Twitter (if the deal goes through) will prove it one way or the other.

Remember the whole thing about Musk buying Twitter? One if his reasons for doing so was because he believes Twitter is "censoring" conservative speech. But Twitter is a private company, running a private service, so your strict government-focused interpretation of free speech clearly wouldn't apply.

Musk has stated in his own words that he is a "free speech absolutist", and given his complaints about Twitter it seems that his interpretation of that is not limited to government censorship, but all censorship.

But Musk has loudly stated that Twitter, a private company, should uphold equally strong standards towards freedom of speech as the state. Which in itself is a fair argument insofar as Twitter is so central to democratic discourse that its censorship will have destructive effects on democratic discourse comparable to what would happen if state censorship did.

But this leads to a pretty blatant double standard if he fires his employees for participating in public discussion and criticism of himself.

He believes it should apply to twitter...

Lol @ "Using company email/internal message boards" == "Hijacking internal systems."

Definitely not biased at all.

Never sending another "unsolicited" email or slack message at work ever again for fear of being accused of "Hijacking internal systems" to ask Johnson for an update on the sales report.

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