If you look at other companies that give the woke cry bullies and their subjective feelings precedent over the mission, you can see that it creates a toxic workplace, hostile environments, further segmentation of workers into cliques, and other unpleasantries that hurt the mission, and ultimately the bottom line for that company.
If you look at the nuances; they were fired for participating in actions that can not only be considered insubordination, but also abuse of company resources and harassment of employees who just want to do their job and not cater to the worthless feelings of people who have crippling self-esteem issues.
Dumping the woke cry babies is the right decision here. Engagement only serves to embolden work cry bullies who are used to getting their way.
By reacting emotionally and using terms like "work cry babies" you weaken your own ability to think critically and fairly about this. You are also more likely to derail the conversation and prevent debate with people who may disagree with your views but could be open to them. Save these sorts of insults and grandstanding for reddit and twitter and keep them off of hn.
> If you look at other companies that give the woke cry bullies and their subjective feelings precedent over the mission, you can see that it creates a toxic workplace, hostile environments, further segmentation of workers into cliques, and other unpleasantries that hurt the mission, and ultimately the bottom line for that company.
I am willing to explore your argument that engaging with members of a company that are overly critical of that company hurts the company in the long term. Can you cite some examples?
> If you look at the nuances; they were fired for participating in actions that can not only be considered insubordination
The question I have is not if the company did or did not have a legal right to fire them. I'll leave that to the legal professionals. Rather I wonder if engagement with dissenters in this case would be harmful or productive. I tend to favor the notion that systems which attempt to maintain unity by casting out those who offer dissenting public voices tend to become monocultures and echo chambers. I don't discount the value of monocultures and echo chambers, they can be extremely valuable, but I don't see how SpaceX benefits by building one.
Harmful.
First, Any dissent around company product choices is acceptable but comes with a risk depending on the level of expression. Smart companies learn to cultivate this kind of dissent and provided it doesn't detract from the mission itself, its probably the right decision.
Second, the company should fire on the spot any dissent that is not directly work related. It detracts from the mission.
The petition in question violated both precepts of allowable dissent.
For #1 let's say for the sake of argument that the dissent was honest, and strictly trained at the company's tactics in marketing (i fundamentally disagree, see #2) . If the marketing tactics are a failure, that is the board's prerogative to change CEO. However, the petition is violating the allowable levels of expression by usurping power from the Board itself. That is a level of expression many levels above the petitioner's role or level in the org, extremely noisy (affects all employees), and public. The petition literally violated all norms around tolerable dissent, and should be fireable on the spot.
For #2, the petition asked silence CEO speech which is not 100% product related. The hint of this is that the petition is loaded with complaints about "public behavior" and "embarrassment" which are clues into the intent is for this to be a political decision to intervene, not a product one. Words like embarrassment when targeting an individuals are meant to discuss individuals, not products. More importantly, when the petition targets speech which includes a number of opinions that are personal, and not product, this becomes political.
Let's take examples of each:
For #1, would people would get fired on the spot if employees circulated a petition saying they wanted the CPO to be "reined in" for refusing to carry Elise chassis in models subsequent to the Roadster ? The answer is yes.
For #2 This used to be very rare in the past, so it was never tested until recently.. I believe the most high-profile firing has been the firing of the Red Bull - US CEO and US Head of HR by the German board. They were engaged in activism not work related, and both got the boot.
A long time ago when I was a young engineer I worked at a few hundred person startup. Many of the employees of this startup were from cultures spoke bluntly and embraced cynicism and pessimism. Every two weeks the CEO would have an all hands meeting. For any hour he would answer any question from any employee. Many of these questions were, to my American ears, as disrespectful. The question might assume the CEO took a particular action for some sinister reason such as having stolen company funds and getting ready to fire everyone. Or just blunt say to the CEO "I think all the executives are incompetent and should be fired". The hardest questions were questions about "if market changes and we are fucked, here are indicator the market is changed and we are fucked."
The CEO would listen to the question and then respond. The responses were never defensive, never rude but honest and straight forward. As far as I could tell everyone felt better after those meetings and respected the CEO more for openly facing and addressing as best he could the fears that everyone at the company had.
> Second, the company should fire on the spot any dissent that is not directly work related. It detracts from the mission.
I do consider this dissent at SpaceX to be work related. Musk does significant harm the SpaceX's mission with his public actions. If he was an employee he would probably be fired, but the issue is that SpaceX can't really fire Musk. There is no good action the company can take. I assume they have privately asked Musk to take actions which harm the company less and I assume that worked as well as when the SEC had Musk agree to pass all tweets through is legal dept. before posting. How to you foster dissent when the major goal that dissent is something which is not actually achievable and would derail the company. I hope this serves as a wakeup call to Musk and he looks at the problems he is causing by his behavior and decides that making life multi-planetary is more important than say calling a rescue diver a pedo or smoking weed on the Joe Rogan show.
At its core we are discussing are situations that are dire enough that a decent fraction of the company feels their leadership is fucking around and hurting the company. Whatever angle we look at it, the company will already be segmented and toxic: it couldn’t stop its leadership from fucking up for whatever length of time, leadership doesn’t give a shit about employees reaction, and managers can’t properly gauge nor progressively address the internal repercussions.
“Focusing on the mission” is already compromised at that point, and you’ll need to chose between the leader that doesn’t give enough shit, or the employees that stepped up too prominently.
Vision maybe. Politics are irrelevant to work. It is impossible to achieve 100% alignment in an organization of more than one person. And even then I'm not sure it is possible.
He even went with him to Russia before SpaceX was founded,
Mike G also started the Space Development Agency, with a goal of funding govt LEO constellations with specifications matching Starlink.
Regardless, businesses don't care what you did in the past - for that, your reward is your compensation - you are hired for what you do tomorrow.
Irrelevant to being hired or kept on as the president of the company by the owners, of which Musk is only 17% (AFAICT). If more owners of the company do not want him as an employee (president, whatever), then they can fire him.
Whether that would be a good idea or not is something else. (Apple 'fired' Jobs in the 1980s.)