I hope those holding shares of Tesla stock feel really good about supporting this behavior.
Edit:
I want to know which account flagged the original post and I want them to explain why they did.
Hello. Is that you, Elon?
I admit it's a particularly juicy episode, but (a) that's not what HN is for and (b) it destroys what it is for. We're trying for very much the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935 if anyone wants it.
I also had never seen that Tumblr post which has been linked here, giving an account of how the culture at Tesla allegedly involved a lot of processes for managing and working around Elon. I think that's interesting, too, for questions it raises about leadership and celebrity and funding in general.
I admit that the conversation has not focused on those things too much. :-\
But I'm glad I saw the thread, at least.
A few weeks ago I also had a surgery that, for just a couple days, left me unable to sit up on my own or walk across the room, due to the pain.
And then I spent last night visiting a relative who is (I think) dying. She's completely lucid but now immobile to the point that she can't sit all the way up, get out of bed on her own, or walk, and I don't think her mobility ever increases much again from here. (Incidentally, she is also legally blind due to the same genetic condition as I mentioned before.)
I think my still-forming thoughts and feelings about all of that drew me to this story, and to Thorleifsson's persona.
It sucks that he has the condition that he has, but at the same time, he doesn't seem like a very pitiable person to me. He seems dignified, capable, successful, and loved. Someone to be admired, or even envied.
So it's really interesting to me, then, how some people see him as 'playing the pity card' when he describes his disability as it comes up in this discussion.
Like I said, my recent thoughts about disability are still forming so I don't have some interesting conclusion that I'm proud of. But I think there's a lot to think about here, beyond the outrage and hero worship.
Maybe all this hubbub will help push a thoughtful article or two about disability to the front page in the next few days. That would be cool.
Yes, Elon should be more kind, but like a great white shark, put a cage between you and them and move on. This holds for most people who reach the level he has. You don’t become this wealthy by being a decent human (broadly speaking, there are always exceptions).
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
(no current TSLA exposure, I intend to donate to Halli in some fashion)
I'm a current Tesla owner (2018 Model 3) and really like the car. But these are all reasons why I'm uncomfortable investing in another 5-7 years of Tesla ownership. Right now Musk has chosen to not destroy Tesla (or at least, not harm it much) but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun. Plus I intensely dislike the guy and want to encourage the growth of the EV industry away from a single, potentially unreliable supplier. And this is sad, because two years ago I would have gone to the mat to convince my friends and family to buy Teslas.
I see Teslas in town and admire them still. But wondered if this is a thing now for some.
"Elon Musk has made me embarrassed to drive my Tesla now" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34568470
Just last year, I was all-in on getting the Model S despite its cost going way up. I was determined to figure out how to do it. I was also extremely bullish on FSD and definitely had a few shares.
Today, I have almost no interest in getting a new Tesla, have serious doubts about FSD long-term and have sold all of my shares.
Tesla, as a company, is absolutely fantastic, and I am thankful for Elon doing an excellent job at pushing the old guard towards electric. However, I can't continue supporting a person who has such obvious disregard for others he thinks are beneath him.
He could literally brick your car tomorrow, or make it play an endless loop of Nyan cat at full blast or grab the camera footage and publish it on Twitter if he felt like it.
you're suggesting tsla is going to brick someone's car because of something they said on twitter just because elon told them to?
Bully a disabled employee about their disability being a sign of weak character.
Isn't that just the next step of this? I'm not saying it would happen, but it doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility given the level of petty we're dealing with.
This is kind of an odd lesson for you to take honestly. Everything he has done with Twitter has not merely been completely legal, but in fact has underlined how Musk couldn't get out of law and contract. He made a very, very bad buy, and Twitter's owners were happy to take it and made out like bandits. He tried desperately to get out of it, and despite effectively unlimited funds for legal representation, he could not. He failed to take precautions upfront, made a deal, and he was held to it. After that Twitter became private (though since he financed the purchase in part vs buying with purely his own wealth there are still some other players involved). He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either. It's just that it takes time for the legal process to take out and it's only been months. Twitter is also in a vastly less regulated space then vehicles.
I think there are reasonable reasons to be concerned about Tesla, but
>but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun
this isn't one of them in the slightest.
I have friends who worked at Twitter and were owed (and additionally, were promised by Twitter and Musk, in writing) both severance and RSU payouts. Musk has decided not to make these payments, so they are forced to sue/arbitrate for them. Similarly, Musk has decided not to pay AWS for services that AWS is contractually obligated to provide.
As a car owner, I'm confident that if Musk decided to break my warranty agreement I might eventually receive (some) compensation from the courts. Could his lawyers drag the process out by 2-3 years while my car remains broken? Absolutely. The only real protection I have against this is not to do any further business with Musk's companies, and I intend to do that.
My biggest concern is not warranties being broken: it is stuff like "Tesla issues a software update that disables core features of the car", which actually happened to my radar.
I always felt like the marketing around self-driving Tesla's was misleading. They named it misleadingly, ambitiously but misleadingly. So I feel Musk has broken the integrity of the feature since its inception and roll out.
Bizarre about the radar, that sounds like an actual safety problem.
Seeing how he makes guinea pigs out of everyone, to me suggests he'll do anything to get to Mars.
> He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either
You're certainly allowed to contain multitudes, but these seem to contradict each other?
Also, he's done a bunch of things at Twitter that are most definitely not legal, like attempting to fire/lay off people without proper notice in several different ways and jurisdictions.
This is a common thread from multiple people I've talked to who have worked for his companies. Everyone who works even close to his orbit are sycophants. You have to be or your career is... limited. I remember even applying for one of those companies some time ago. The phone screen went well and when I called the recruiter back a week later to ask how things were going, she said "[Hiring Manager's name] disagreed with Elon about something and no longer works here." Yow.
Tesla has:
* falsified worker injury reports
* fired employees for raising security concerns
* fixed cars under goodwill service instead of warranty repairs to avoid lemon laws and various other accounting shenanigans
* blatantly lied about and marketed products named as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, both of which have led to several accidents and even deaths
* personally attacked regulators or former regulators
* tried to quiet sexual harassment happening at the company
* industry lows in quality and reliability
* abused government subsidies
The labor abuses, personal attacks, and dishonest FSD marketing are downright distasteful (and illegal when found to be so by a court or regulator), but creative application of government subsidies is fine if the ends justify the means. There are no heroes, just people.
Ianal, but ...
To the point: just saying that "some employee has a disability" does not mean they are disclosing the disability. On the contrary, in order for the company to accommodate, it's needs to be said.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/index.ht...
Like if you or CEO you might not be able to confirm or debate and employee or (in the process of being fired) ex-employees health information. It just might be part of HIPAA that says you don't have the right to speak about that anymore.
To be clear, I haven't found this restriction in the regulations of that link I just shared but that's what I suspect given what I've seen of employer restrictions from my work history.
Update:
No I think I'm coming around to your perspective because it looks like HIPA is only applicable to health insurance providers. Not employers. Unless of course the employer is a self-funded health insurance provider, I don't know the details of twitter's health plan.
https://www.calltherightattorney.com/blog/2022/02/can-my-emp...
This link suggests that it might be an ADA violation. However Elon Musk could claim that he is revealing that the employee has a disability through Elon's reading of the employees Twitter feed which has public information about his muscular dystrophy. That's a way to weasel out of this ADA violation, potentially.
Update 2:
Ah but it looks like it's a civil rights violation:
> releasing an employee’s medical information in retaliation to that attorney opposing unlawful discrimination or harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that will give rise to a very good claim for damages as well.
It felt wrong, reading what Elon wrote, and it looks like, if this blog post is to be trusted, the law also agrees with that sentiment.
A couple of days ago there was someone asking about not using Windows laptop for religious purposes and the answer was that if that was a large hassle for the business, it was okay to say no.
Edit:
> releasing an employee’s medical information
Does saying that X has a disability is a release of medical information, when that's public information in their Twitter profile and runs a business to help others with that disability?
Re: releasing otherwise public information:
That is a fantastic question. I don't know. I suspect there is a legal case to be made:
I think about this as a hypothetical "reasonable person", which is what appears in the courtroom TV shows that I personally have watched. Perhaps obviously, I am not a lawyer, But I do watch TV shows about lawyers <3.
1) A reasonable person might conclude that Musk did not research Harald's Twitter feed but instead merely read his name, after receiving the direct tweet from Harald, and then asked Twitter human resources' database to confirm he was in fact His Twitter employee.
2) Alternatively a reasonable person might conclude that Musk did research Harald's Twitter feed before replying. And so it was okay for Musk to disclose. Again I'm being very approximate.
So I think it's possible to make a case and it might be worth the potential legal victory and monetary payout for damages.
To reiterate something tangential to your question, I think it is clear that regardless of the disclosure, Musk's thinking around the termination does include Haraldur's disability. That's not right, legally, from what I've read.
Companies accommodate employees disabilities in order to allow the employee to do their jobs. Elon's argument is that they're not working, even after accomodations. It has nothing to do with the disability. Will it hold in a court of law? Ianal
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/499/am-i-a-c...
I'm pretty sure that if you allow the release of HIPAA covered information from a provider to your employer that the information stored by your employer is not protected by HIPAA anymore.
HIPAA restricts what covered entities can do (basically healthcare providers and insurance), not what can be done with medical information in general.
Of course most decent employers will handle even mildly sensitive information in a confidential way.
This is so far below the bare minimum of reasonable business behavior I think it will cause big problems for Elon hiring or acquiring companies.
We need to accept that CEOs care about morals because of their bottom line (money), not because of legals or that they're nice. It's not the job of a CEO to be nice.
People that hate your product will never buy it. That's why diet soda or fast food care about trees and the sea: paying customers. Money.
The difference between internal communication to accommodate and public communication to discredit should be obvious.
It's not murder, but it's also wrong.
Or howabout if a truck driver gets blinded somehow. Do you still have to keep employing him as a truck driver, and going through the motions as if he is still employed?
That seems ridiculous. "Job at twitter" is not a resource to which people all have a right of some kind.
Not clear as the employee appears to live in Iceand, not USA, much less California.
I can't even guess what the law in Iceland might be. On one hand, it seems generally a pretty reasonable place. On the other hand it's a small place and won't have the time, bandwidth or interest in passing as many laws as bigger places do.
Are you from Iceland? I wonder if they have a kind of default rule that says "in this area, if we don't have our own law we adopt the one of X (say DK or EU)"
Edit: And I'm not suggesting this should be a normalized thing. Just that it's unfortunate how greed trumps any sort of regular decorum.
Publicly disclosing an employee’s disability, mocking it, claiming they are faking it, and then saying it is the reason they were fired.
"The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that."
They probably should have (and it's still editable as I type) marked it "here is the text of the tweet in question" because if you don't know that it does look like Karwebnetwork is the one making the offensive comment.
> did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Well, except for one recent notable exception involving a blue bird.
They won't, but I hope they do.
In the meantime Toferson is cleared to pursue the latest medical theory for muscular dystrophy.
Nearly everything Elon disclosed didn't need to be disclosed publicly.
Just because someone asks you a question publicly, it doesn't give you carte blanche to unload every single detail you know about the person asking the question.
There is not one single thing case in there that makes it OK for an employer to disclose medical information about you, however vague or detailed.