Something similar happened to me with SpaceX. I went through all the technical interviews and had a chat with Elon. He convinced me in about three minutes that he and SpaceX were the real deal (this was in 2007). Later, HR said I'd have to take a substantial pay cut (didn't say how much), would I be interested? It became a second behavioral interview where I was being tested on whether I would be a loyal employee for low pay because space is awesome.

Or because lots of people want to work on space, so you were facing competition from others who would take a salary cut.

Not much different from other 'desirable' industries.

e.g. entertainment

Lots of people may want to "work on space", but many (most) can't. This isn't unskilled labor we are talking about here.

Honest question: of the folks who have the necessary skills, aren't many of them working in low-paying academic jobs?

From the outside, it seems like moving to SpaceX would give them an opportunity to put ideas into practice while making more money than the average post-doc.

Not many people want to work on legacy insurace company backend systems, but those who do aren't necessarily unskilled labor. Many of them would rather work on space and would accept a pay cut to do so.

Would've loved the opportunity to turn the question around on Musk and ask if he'd be willing to part with a small pittance to compensate fairly and get a good employee at the same time.

I faced the same decision and decided to go with SpaceX. Going from a job I didn't enjoy to one I love was worth the lower salary. I think 'compensate fairly' is exactly what SpaceX did. They were getting great employees for $X. It didn't matter that I was getting paid $1.2X at my last job or that Google was paying $1.3X. I wasn't drafted, I didn't have to take the SpaceX offer. If SpaceX couldn't get good candidates at $X they would make bigger offers. It doesn't make sense for a business to pay more for an employee than it needs to. I don't pay my pool cleaner extra just because I can afford it.

In my mind, Google is $X and SpaceX would be $.76X. Why is passion a trade-off for compensation? Why did you allow yourself to be taken advantage of, and thus drive down the cost of labor? People like you are the reason wages have flatlined over the past 2 decades.

Please don't transfer your sense of victimization on to me. I wasn't forced to do anything and I surely wasn't taken advantage of. I left a good job to come to this one because my career is more to me than just the money.

<rant> This is simple supply and demand. It really isn't that hard. There are more people wanting to work at SpaceX than SpaceX needs, so that drives the price down. It would be as stupid for SpaceX to pay $X for an engineer that will take $.76X as it would for them to pay $100 for a box of pens that Staples sells for $20. Google can get away with it because they are so profitable. Overspending on employees helps them keep employees and attract new candidates. Really, who has a passion to optimize YouTube load times? Google overcompensates to generate passion for working at Google. SpaceX doesn't need to generate that kind of company passion because working in spaceflight is the passion. Not that company passion doesn't exist, it just doesn't require overcompensation.

Forget about companies and employees. Let's say you have a house and want to add a pool. If you think it will cost about $20k and the first quote is for $18k, do you tell the guy you want to pay him extra? Do you tell him he's letting himself be taken advantage of and that he's why the local pool builders can't raise their prices? What if your favorite builder wants $22k? Are you are horrible person if you negotiate him down to $20k?

And since this is Hacker News, let's not forget about all those suckers working for FREE on Open Source. How responsible are they for programmer wages not being higher? How many of us didn't get jobs writing commercial Unix, web servers, browsers, etc.

If YOU don't want to work for less than $X, then that is your decision. Don't apply to SpaceX. They aren't promising one salary and then shorting you on your paycheck. You get an offer and you take it or leave it.

It's funny that in the show House of Cards, Space X was shown to be a company where someone got such a high salary he couldn't turn it down.

House of Cards does not fact check, and plays fast and loose appropriating real world names and applying fictional attributes to them. It is obnoxious and frankly it is harmful.

How is it harmful?

The claimed harm is probably that viewers will be inclined to take it as fact (and then public opinion, voting habits, etc. form according to that distortion).

Did it at least come with stock options?

Working on electric cars and clean energy is generally more satisfying than working on Facebook ads that add paid-for visibility to friends' likes to trick you into thinking there are product trends etc.

Same applies to SpaceX.

Just because it's more satisfying does that mean that those in control of the company should get an even more disproportionately large amount of the profits/wealth?

Surely this argument should then count for Elon Musk too and he should be happy to disperse the profits amongst the workers without making such a large amount for the [other] shareholders and himself. Sorry I should probably have generalised this para. as I don't really know enough about the earnings of Musk's businesses to know if he only took a regular wage and dispersed profits evenly or not (I'm guessing it would have been big news if he had though).

He could pay the same rates as deceptive web advertising companies and use a lottery system to give out the jobs (which have heavy demand at that salary and job-satisfaction level).

Or he could hire 1.5X as many people at the lower rates that they will gladly accept and get to space faster.

I really love how you phrased that. You didn't take anything from obvious talents of Elon Musk, yet, as someone inspired by him, you can't do yourself wrong as well.

I mostly sympathize with your statement. But, I also don't think it is a moral offense to offer an offer that can and may be rejected (I assume it was).

I didn't see any mention of moral offense in his statement, but nonetheless there is nothing wrong with making a lowball offer if someone is willing to accept it.

Some people do consider it morally wrong to exploit the weak or uninformed.

My question is - was stock part of the compensation offer? In retrospect, getting paid in TSLA stock a while back versus cash would have been a big winner.

The necessary caveat being that all of his money is leveraged in his various companies.

If I was trying to colonize mars, I'd do the same to optimize costs and build money reserves

Those TSLA options would have been pretty nice right about now though...