I'm not sure it's clear that the people who are being fired are directly responsible for the letter being made available to the media. From what I can tell, the letter was circulated internally by the authors and leaked by an unknown number of individuals. If by "defect on the company" you mean "leak the letter", then the company appears to be punishing the wrong people.

One could argue that those writing the letter should have known it would be leaked. But you could also say that about any kind of internal criticism. I'd counter that this argument has the 2nd-order effect of preventing any kind of internal criticism, constructive or otherwise, lest it be leaked at some point in the future.

Not to mention, the "demoralizing" label could also be applied to Musk's public behavior, which is the bulk of the point that the letter and its authors are making.

> you defect on the company by making anything public which should be an internal matter.

I assume they tried making it an internal matter before going public. Pushing your employees to have the feeling they need to go public instead of being able to solve this internally is a failure of the company.

Yeah a lot of people have a very authoritarian bent without realizing it. For many people it is hard to find any example of protest or dissent from the less powerful about the more powerful, ever being acceptable unless it is the type of protest that is easily ignored.

"This should have been kept internal, where we could have fired you without publicity"

I wouldn’t assume that - this was well publicized. That publicity had only one purpose — to put pressure on management to act. But I doubt the authors anticipated this particular action.