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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Shareholders already know he’s part time and has multiple jobs. As for leveraging talent, I doubt it’s effecting their productivity in a significant way or deadlines are slipping due to this.

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Your doubts will not stand up in court, even if they are grounded in reality, which *I* doubt. These engineers took time off work during work hours to go somewhere and do things that are not in service of the publicly traded company they’re employed at. That’s not something you can just hand wave away.

Unless Tesla is interested in adding social networking / messaging features to the car interface.

It’s not hard to envision a potential business case

That’s not “unless” - it’s a translate post hoc rationalization. It’s a stretch that they’d be working on that feature - considering the distracted driving problem it’s something of a liability - but even if they were, that might mean that you send a couple of people from that specific team to talk APIs or something. Pulling random engineers over to review things outside of their specialty doesn’t make any sense.

Not to be used while driving. Tesla has a bunch of built in apps not to be used while driving. Ex: TikTok and Netflix.

Yes, and people use them while driving because the vehicle doesn’t prevent it. You can get away with that kind of legal attempt to dodge responsibility but at some point public awareness catches up with you, similar to how telling people to drive safely wasn’t enough to avoid generations of safety technology becoming legally required.

That's not true, the car does prevent it.

Maybe it’s easy to disable? The guys I see commuting to work with action movies on those giant dashboard TVs are all driving Teslas.

Great, next my car will be Tweeting all the real time telemetry (I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph, throttle at 61%, 4 hands-off-steering-wheel events detected in the last hour, and 2 eye tracking sync failures due to checking out the sports car in lane #2".

Musk, being Musk, will find this amusing and start auto-tweeting "Kill" videos of Tesla's racing with other cars on the freeway."104 Z06 kills on the West Coast Today!".

I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph, throttle at 61% - by the end of the year this car will be able to take drive using self driving

Self tweeting coming soon - self driving by the end of next year.

It doesn’t work that way. Period.

Musk’s job as CEO is to work in the best interests of the company. Using the company's resources to buy/build a completely unrelated entity for his personal gain is most definitely not ok.

If he wanted to do what you’re saying (enrich Tesla with those features), Tesla should be buying Twitter. The scenario you're presenting, by the way, is exactly how Facebook/Meta acquired Instagram. However Facebook acquired Instagram, not Zuckerberg personally.

Who is going to stop him? No one. Nothing matters anymore.

Apparently it's completely legal, though (IANAL). It's just like being a contractor on the side.

Elon Musk didn't commit a criminal offense here, no. No one is claiming he has.

But he almost certainly acted against the interests of the company he was hired to shepard and committed a civil offense against the shareholders.

For sure the tesla stock is going to plunge because a few guys took time off to come assess twitter...

Unless the Tesla engineers also can learn a thing or two from the internals of Twitter and bring back to benefit Tesla. Or they are planning to do things that will benefit both parties in the long run

I think the fact that he’s taking Twitter private allows him to do what he wants. It won’t be publicly traded soon.

But Tesla is public, that’s the interest here.

I don't see your "Period" here. Perhaps it is in best interest of both Tesla and Twitter to cooperate on some topics, but not to the degree of acquisition of one by another.

Remember that SpaceX and Tesla do have a common VP for material engineering, Charles Kuehmann? It makes sense for them to share knowledge on materials.

In the same way, there may be a cause for sharing software engineering resources/know-how between Tesla and Twitter without actually merging the entire companies into one behemoth.

Heaven forbid Tesla engineers decide to feed the homeless during their work hours at the CEOs directive. That's not servicing the publically traded company.

Except that’s not what they’re doing, so I’ve no idea why you think that a relevant argument. They’re working for a different public company while being paid by Telsa.

Twitter is no longer public.

Not public anymore, they were delisted this past Friday, but the rest of your point stands ofc.

> They’re working for a different public company while being paid by Telsa.

Actually, it's worse than that. They're working for a different, private company, one which happens to be owned by the CEO of TSLA, who has a legal and fiduciary duty to the TSLA shareholders.

Why would a TSLA shareholder make a fuss? It is likely that Tesla will bill Twitter for the use of staff resources. Other than that, being on good terms with the owner of Twitter is a possible advertising opportunity/tie-in in the future.

Your example generates company pr value, employee morale, etc. Meanwhile there is no value being generated to Tesla by moving these engineers to some side project for another company.

I used to work for a guy who was a shareholder in multiple companies, and I would do work for the other companies all the time. When I did the company I actually worked at would just bill the other company for my time. It’s hardly different from doing work for and billing it to a different department.

Same, for nearly 10 years, I got prostituted to nearly every company a major shareholder had a piece of, my fee was just billed to whoever I was doing work for at the time. No big deal. I really do not understand the surprise at this, this is pretty normal. I think it’s just media tossing shade trying to find something, anything.

He doesn’t own all of TSLA, so if there’s no contract, he’s appropriating TSLA to his private project. If it was done off the books, it’s syphoning money from something you don’t own to something you do.

You are taking as gospel a uncorroborated rumor from what is likely a single Twitter engineer who is salty that someone outside the org is reviewing their code.

You assume that money is not changing hands and that it’s off the books? Where is your evidence for that? You are making that assumption based off your own confirmation biases.

I literally say: ‘if there’s no contract’ in the first sentence of my response.

This point has already been made several times in this thread, but you typed “if” several times in that comment.

Nobody on here knows the details, this is just a rorschach test.

Same. I worked for a company owned by a group of friends that owned a few more businesses. We'd do work for all these companies and just log the hours in our human resource system - accountants figured out inter-company payments. Some employees were employed at multiple of these companies at the same time as well.

Stand up in court?

Sometimes I wonder if people genuinely stop and listen to themselves before they hit the reply button.

Yes, the whole pagelong discussion here about those little peanuts is one of the most disconnected and ridiculous one I have ever seen on HN, lol sorry. There must be many hearts broken or why all the fuss, I don't get it.

What law do you think is being broken?

Leaving aside the maximum potential upside of a lawsuit (Musk writes a check to Tesla for... $100k?), it's entirely possible that Musk asked them to take a personal day, or that they had already worked 40 hours that week, or similar. After all, I can see a trusted TSLA engineer seeing a way to get a promotion being transferred to TWTR treating it as an "interview" half-day and going unpaid.

If Musk did that, requesting a favor of TSLA engineers or even hinting at a promotion, that would be so unethical and immoral.

I said they would get promoted by moving to TWTR. It could be Musk inviting them to interview as managers as TWTR as much as he's using them to evaluate TWTR talent.

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