[aeturnum]

Imagine if Elon wasn't smoking pot, but mentioned he was just drinking a ton of coffee to work longer hours. Boss works 18 hours a day, which suggests that his workers might want to do the same. Employees also stop sleeping, make mistakes, suffer health problems leading to more mistakes, rockets crash.

The idea is that behavior at the top sets an informal company policy. There have been a lot of articles about how Enron can be understood as a culture problem [1]. I think it's less about pot per-se, and more about the cultural signals of the boss thinking it's a good idea to be recorded committing a federal crime[2]. Does that set a standard that breaking rules is ok if they're dumb rules? Does anyone at SpaceX think that safety requirements are dumb? It's worth saying that a lot of the reporting around Boeing's recent failures have been chocked up to culture change[3].

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=enr...

[2] Though I think it is very dumb, smoking pot is still a federal crime.

[3] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/26/773675393/boeings-cultural-sh...

[skissane]

> Imagine if Elon wasn't smoking pot, but mentioned he was just drinking a ton of coffee to work longer hours. Boss works 18 hours a day, which suggests that his workers might want to do the same

I doubt if Musk had said "I work 18 hour days and drink 18 cups of coffee every day", NASA would have cared. The bureaucracy has a list of things they care about. Marijuana is on that list. I don't believe overwork and excessive coffee consumption are.

[toomuchtodo]

I assume then that Boeing's corporate culture that ended up killing hundreds of people on the MAX will cause NASA to lean towards SpaceX for launch capabilities in the future? I at least know where Musk stands; one will never be able to be certain if Boeing's internal culture is fixed (back to prioritizing safety over profits).

But a little bit of weed on the Joe Rogan podcast, and that's the hill to die on.

[CharlesColeman]

> I assume then that Boeing's corporate culture that ended up killing hundreds of people on the MAX will cause NASA to lean towards SpaceX for launch capabilities in the future?

> ...

> But a little bit of weed on the Joe Rogan podcast, and that's the hill to die on.

The safety reviews were ordered in November 2018 [1]. The 737 MAX groundings started in March 2019 [2].

The 737 MAX fiasco is irrelevant to this series of safety reviews, but as the OP article states, Boeing may be subject to future reviews triggered by its own actions.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/elon-mus...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings#Grou...

[toomuchtodo]

That's why I said, "in the future". Apologies if my thesis wasn't clear.

[CharlesColeman]

Sorry, I missed that. My point stands though: I don't think the 737 MAX fiasco sheds much light on NASA's decision-making in this case.

[craftinator]

And how do we know he was smoking weed? It's an entertainment show; when we see people drinking or shooting heroin on TV, it is pretty unlikely that they are actually doing so. He burnt some unknown substance on an a popular interview and entertainment show and puffed it a couple of times... My bet is cloves.

[aeturnum]

I would hope so! If they don't I think it really would expose a lot of hypocrisy and favoritism, but I don't think we can say that for sure yet.