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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

I'm picturing Apple employees writing an open letter criticizing Steve Jobs and saying they don't want him to be the face of the company, or Amazon employees saying they don't want Jeff Bezos to be the image of the company, or GE employees saying they don't want Jack Welch to be tarnishing the brand of the company, or...just about any other big corporation. The CEO's job involves, among other things, being the public face of the company. If you don't think the CEO is doing their job well, you leave the company, or hunker down and shut up about it.

There are people who can fire the CEO if they think he's damaging the company's reputation. They called the "board of directors". If you're not on the board of directors, the way you register displeasure with your CEO is to leave the company.

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> If you're not on the board of directors, the way you register displeasure with your CEO is to leave the company.

Or you write a letter to the board, those responsible for the situation.

Yeah, the idea that employees can't criticize a CEO is patently ridiculous. There are plenty of companies with compelling products and talent, but poor leadership. Those companies would be lucky to have employees willing to speak up.

Maybe interesting: Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic (i.e. continental Europe), I haven't found a single comment on one of the bigger newspaper sites (usually filled by fans) that would defend SpaceX's position in this matter. The reputation is pretty much gone.

Update: In the largest newspaper forum of my country, there are now 2 posts out of 96, agreeing with SpaceX (but more on the basis that the employees' action was ill-advised).

> There are people who can fire the CEO if they think he's damaging the company's reputation. They called the "board of directors".

Sounds like getting enough employees to write a letter criticizing the CEO and damaging his reputation is a pretty good way to get the board's attention then?

Barring some sort of Carl Icahn "activist investor" forcing themselves on to the board, I don't see SpaceX changing anything. Bad PR doesn't affect a company which makes its money mostly through long-term government contracts, and common sentiment is that Tesla/SpaceX long had the boards purged of dissenters and populated with "loyal soliders" to Musk's cause.

> If you don't think the CEO is doing their job well, you leave the company, or hunker down and shut up about it.

If nobody ever speaks up, then how does change happen? Say you dislike the CEO or other executives but like the company. Then you can vocalize this and change happens and you stay, or no change happens and you leave.

There are proper channels for speaking up within a company. Posting an open letter publically after trying to bully people to sign it is not a proper channel.

Not a proper channel, but it can be effective. Sometimes getting publicly fired is the point.

Proper channels are there in a healthy company but often do not work.

The idea that you cannot criticize your CEO is ridiculous. How is the board supposed to know how employees feel if they keep quiet out of fear?

Or you write a public open letter, accepting the risk it might cost you your job but deciding that it is your highest leverage option to enact the change you want to see. What’s your point, exactly..?

> If you're not on the board of directors, the way you register displeasure with your CEO is to leave the company.

What? No!? That is a sure way for your displeasure to never even reach the same hemisphere as the CEO. Even this letter is better, at least he’s aware, and the end result is exactly the same (not at the company any more).

> If you're not on the board of directors, the way you register displeasure with your CEO is to leave the company.

We can easily do that. Most people can't. This disdainful attitude reeks of privilege.

This seems right to me, though I will observe that if you joined an Elon Musk company 5 years ago, then you were joining a company whose head presented a very different public persona than he does now. It's an understandable situation that some folks ended up loving a company but finding the CEO's 2022 public persona objectionable and diminishing of the company.

Given the choice between "just leave" or "state my concerns about the company I believed in", I might do the latter. What does one have to lose in that case?

You are wrong about his public persona. He seems to have always been this way. The first time I heard about Elon Musk was when he responded publicly to his ex wife's tell-all essay about their marriage. This was in 2010!

a reference

Finally a post I can agree with.

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