[thal3s]

We're not slaves anymore. You as a human being are allowed to express your thoughts and opinions. Would we know how awful it was at Activision/Blizzard if those employees had not said something? Elon and C-Suite execs own and control everything, no need to bootlick.

[Justin_K]

Any employee can change jobs at anytime... why are you comparing at will employment to slavery? Elon controls everything because he own's a majority of the shares of the company. His money, his decisions, his voice.

[canadaduane]

Both employment and slavery are by degrees. I think they can be compared, but "employment = slavery" is obviously wrong.

[meatsauce]

That's like comparing rocket motors to lettuce.

[tablespoon]

>> Both employment and slavery are by degrees. I think they can be compared, but "employment = slavery" is obviously wrong.

> That's like comparing rocket motors to lettuce.

No, they're clearly not that different. Both involve laboring for others (usually members of the ownership class), under some degree of compulsion. Though the nature of that compulsion can be different (e.g. using the threat of the whip vs. using the threat of starvation).

The benefit of "being able to change jobs" is often significantly overstated and highly contextual. It's not like anyone can just pick any job they like: they have to pick what they're offered. For some people, that can be highly restricted, to the point of being serf-like.

[oarabbus_]

Tens of millions people are in literal slavery today, whether sex slaves, child labor or other forced labor. Reading about what they endure, it seems disingenuous at best to claim slavery and employment are "clearly not that different" by reducing it to the nature of the compulsion behind it. It's like claiming a bullet and a tennis ball clearly aren't that different; they both involve projectile motion through the air under some degree of momentum, though the nature of that momentum can be different.

For things to be "not that different" implies they are interchangeable to an extent. I'd certainly be interested to know the result if you surveyed a random sample of 100 employed people and asked if they'd be willing to forego work to enter slavery.

[tablespoon]

Your entire comment is based on a misunderstanding. In this context "not that different" means not as different as "rocket motors" and "lettuce." I even explicitly quoted that context, so it was pretty hard to miss.

[thetinguy]

And yet even if he had all the money in the world he won’t get anywhere without his employees.

[lostlogin]

I think he would be ok.

[samhyde69]

He doesn't need, or want, the woke ones. No one does.

[techie1980]

If you want to bite the hand that feeds you, then you need to be cognizant of the potential consequences.

Some leaders, and following that some cultures are receptive of open criticism and disagreement. Others are absolutely not. It's up to each person to read the room.

[ericd]

I think it's important to note the top demand of the letter (in italics):

"As a starting point, we are putting forth the following categories of action items, the specifics of which we would like to discuss in person with the executive team within a month:

Publicly address and condemn Elon’s harmful Twitter behavior. SpaceX must swiftly and explicitly separate itself from Elon’s personal brand."

I don't know why anyone would think that that would go over well.

[trs8080]

> If you want to bite the hand that feeds you, then you need to be cognizant of the potential consequences.

SpaceX employees are the hand that's feeding Musk. Unless you think he can get to Mars by himself.

[megaman821]

We will see. It is not uncommon to see ex-employees of a company go on to create a competing company. Maybe the ex-employees will have a competitive advantage since Musk isn't an good leader of SpaceX according to them.

[Apocryphon]

Well, at the very least they might join a competitor and take with them the knowledge they had at SpaceX.

[mwint]

If this worked, Boeing would have dangled millions in front of SpaceX employees and taken the lead.

SpaceX’s success is at least in part due to a culture of actually doing stuff. It’s difficult to create that culture, and the work to maintain it is done at the top.

Perhaps wokeness is incompatible with a culture of solving hard technical problems to the exclusion of all other concerns?

[CodeSgt]

This take is so common and so bizarre. SpaceX employees are there because Musk pays them to be there. If they weren't there, Musk would pay someone else. The employees aren't irreplaceable or in a position of power over Musk and trying to spin it like they are is absurd.

[trs8080]

And if nobody else wanted to work for Musk, he would have no company. There is no SpaceX without labor. It exists and has succeeded because of the hard work of ordinary people, not because of Musk.

If SpaceX weren't there, they'd be working for someone else or themselves - he needs them more than they need him.

[CodeSgt]

Yes if somehow Musk couldn't find anyone to accept his money I guess most of those people would go back to making widgets and SpaceX would cease to be.

That's not the reality of the situation though. SpaceX's current staff isn't the last cohort of people who are willing to work for musk, and therefore are hugely responsible for the company and it's output. They're but cogs amongst the machine that Musk has built. Cogs are replaceable. Cogs don't function properly if not properly utilized by the engineer.

Musk is the engineer. He's the only person at SpaceX, or Tesla, who is actually irreplaceable. I know people rant and rave about "people aren't replaceable cogs" but they truly are, and that's good. If this wasn't the case for 99.9% of the world, society wouldn't function that well. I'm a cog, and I know that. It isn't shameful and shouldn't be viewed as such.

[trs8080]

I am aware that many people today would work at SpaceX, but that's not my point.

Elon Musk is not a god and his billion dollar ideas would be worthless were it not for thousands of people who have worked tirelessly because they believe in a common goal. SpaceX is nothing without the labor of others - they are the hand that feeds him, not the other way around.

I don't think people who are doing literal rocket science at SpaceX would "go back to designing widgets" if SpaceX folded tomorrow. This implies that they would somehow not be doing meaningful work without Musk's money?

[assttoasstmgr]

It goes beyond that. It's fair to say most SpaceX employees worship the guy as well as being super-motivated. They work there because they want to be there. The arrogance displayed in this thread is astounding. It would be like threatening 2007-era Steve Jobs with "f--k you, I'll just go to BlackBerry instead". Half a page down and already references to Karl Marx and slavery. I suspect lots of self-employed web developers here waxing poetic when they have never worked in a place led by a cult of personality. They have no frame of reference.

[trs8080]

You're mixing up SpaceX the company with Elon Musk the CEO. They are not the same thing, and just because someone wants to work on space travel doesn't mean they worship a billionaire. TFA is about the very employees who you claim "worship" Musk who are claiming that his behavior is harming the company.

It's not arrogance to want to work on something you're passionate about without a petulant billionaire figurehead actively devaluing your work.

[assttoasstmgr]

> just because someone wants to work on space travel doesn't mean they worship a billionaire

Then they are free to seek gainful employment at any number of other spaceship companies.

You seem to assume that if you just show up at SpaceX's door with a briefcase and say "I want to work on space travel" that you are somehow entitled to a job there. No.

> without a petulant billionaire

Just admit you hate the guy for personal reasons. That's OK; you're allowed to have an opinion. Most people wouldn't purposely go work at a place that's run by a guy they despise then try to undermine said business. A better grasp of the employer-employee relationship would be helpful.

[WalterBright]

If the employees feel they can get to Mars without Musk, they're free to do so.

[User23]

I seriously doubt any of the people let go are remotely near the critical path for the Mars mission.

In fact, certain kinds of persons are prone to stir up these kinds of issues to distract from their own poor performance in their actual job. Which evidently isn’t internal “activism.”

The level of entitlement it takes to expect to be paid to undermine the organization that’s paying one ought to be shocking, but it evidently isn’t.

[trs8080]

This is a lot of baseless conjecture tied up with a nice insult at the end.

> The level of entitlement it takes to expect to be paid to undermine the organization that’s paying one ought to be shocking, but it evidently isn’t.

The employees literally wrote a letter saying an individual's actions were undermining the organization. The letter is an exhortation to protect SpaceX (in terms of finance and reputation) from Musk's behavior.

[quartesixte]

To add to the “protecc SpaceX” line of thought, I think there is some level of disconnect as well — Elon, while a champion for SpaceX’s cause and its public figurehead, and still involved in the decisions the company makes, isn’t the main showrunner. Gywnne Shotwell is. So as much as Elon is publicly the King of SpaceX, Gywnne runs the kingdom and some subjects wanted some reform.

Also, SpaceX definitely has spun itself up as a “this is for the good of all humanity” type company and attracts employees who really are bought-in on the whole Grand Vision. To the writers of this letters, that Grand Vision > Elon the Person.

[evandale]

So did Shotwell terminate the employees or did Musk?

If Shotwell runs the company then why is Musk getting the heat?

[meatsauce]

For every engineer who got fired, there are 100 waiting to take their place.

Nice try, but no. Employees don't feed employers.

[trs8080]

Yeah that's not the point. The point is that your billion dollar idea is worthless without someone to implement it. Without 9,400 people working for SpaceX, SpaceX doesn't exist. It relies on labor, same as any company.

[arghnoname]

Going back to Marx at the latest, it's long been understood that wage-laborers _as a class_ are revolutionary, in the sense that they have collectively enough power to overturn the existing world order, let alone an individual capitalist enterprise.

As a class. Individually they're absolutely powerless and class solidarity is very difficult to achieve, perhaps impossible. There's a reason labor movements tend to involve elements that physically coerce other members of the class (i.e., 'scabs') from crossing picket lines. Capitalists don't need very many specific members of the proletariat, they just need enough. Musk can fire his critics at will for a very long time without any real threat to his business unless his employees and any potential employees were to coalesce and oppose him en masse.

I doubt that they will do this. If I were in Musk's position I'd fire these people and I'd fire similar critics at twitter. Capitalist led enterprises are essentially monarchical. I don't like this but it is reality and it's best if everyone understands it. I prefer mask off to the alternative.

[WalterBright]

> monarchical

It's a free country. Workers are free to quit, form their own collective and run it as they see fit. It's perfectly legal.

[anigbrowl]

Maybe if Marxists stopped obsessing over their personality cult and congratulating themselves on the scientific nature of dialectical materialism they'd have time to catch up on 150 years worth of knowledge on organizational and collective action problems. An awful lot of leftists prefer historical LARPing in intellectual costumes to operating under existing conditions.

[lifeisstillgood]

Genuinely asking - any reading on the (scientific) understanding of organisations / collective action? (actually writing a book on software literacy and this is cropping up)

[anigbrowl]

Here's a paper and a thesis, both fairly recent, that I found useful and relevant. There's a whole rich field of network and statistical theory as applied to human social behavior if you want to explore quantitative methods, but that tends to have a very top-down perspective and involve a lot of abstraction. Hope this is helpful.

Collaborative organizational forms: on communities, crowds, and new hybrids https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41469-018-0036-3

Self-organization in Communicating Groups: the emergence of coordination, shared references and collective intelligence http://pcp.vub.ac.be/Papers/Barcelona-LanguageSO.pdf

[arghnoname]

Yeah, the 'left' is an ideological mess. I don't see a lot there of more modern voices that hold sway and seem ideologically coherent to me. The irony is in their time at least up to 1917 the marxists examined and tried to update their theory to match their current conditions. It's like amongst some, everything has been frozen in amber from a certain point and among others, marxism has come to mean redefining class struggle as identitarian struggle. I imagine the historical adherents are really just objecting to the more modern more 'woke' invariants in a clumsy way.

There's never been much agreement on what marxism means. I believe Marx himself disliked the term and claimed to not be a marxist.

[anigbrowl]

The closest I've seen to having a modern take (in both theory and practice) are 'communalists'/'democratic federalists' into Murray Bookchin's ideas. There's also Kevin Carson, an anarchist theorist big on horizontalism and network economics, but I haven't read his work at length yet.

It saves a lot of stress to ask fired-up people what it is they're for (methodologically speaking) and not bothering to argue if they don't have a coherent or actionable answer.

[dchichkov]

I'm not sure about the obsession to go to Mars. What is the rational behind it?

The next right step in technology (that would allow real progress in space exploration while having good environmental impact) is fusion energy. Developing chemical rockets to send a human to Mars seems like a misguided endeavor.

Without focuswe may run out of runway to develop and deploy clean energy technology - https://xkcd.com/1732/

[meatsauce]

What is the rational behind it? Sagan said it best:

“For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”

Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.

[mavhc]

Going to Mars is easy compared to Fusion, just requires, say, $100 billion. It's been possible but too expensive for decades, the idea of Starship is to make it cheaper.

Then it's just a logistics problem.

Plus whoever founds the successful human civilisation on Mars gets into the history books, fusion is a massive team effort that won't have one specific person remembered.

[tsimionescu]

Going to Mars is easy. We've even done it twice in the last 5 years.

Making a self-sustaining city on Mars is impossible. And even if not impossible, certainly costs many tens of trillions of dollars, which is as good as.

[evandale]

Impossible is pretty strong. Who knows, maybe there's material that can be used for construction buried 100 feet under the surface. Or we figure out how to build stuff with Mars dirt. Humans are the most resourceful and adaptable beings in the universe (that we know of) and life, uh, always finds a way.

[mavhc]

How many tonnes of stuff will it take to be self sustaining?

1 million was estimated, which would cost $100 billion

[WalterBright]

There's no reason we cannot work on these in parallel.

[TameAntelope]

You are absolutely not allowed to express your thoughts and opinions free of consequence.

I think Elon's a tool, and this is a bad move, but to think someone should be protected from consequence of what they express is absurd.

It's his company, he makes the decisions. The market should respond if that's a big enough deal, and I'm 100% sure that's starting to happen (though it's exceedingly slow in the space domain).

[teawrecks]

I think you're arguing tangentially to the point being made, which is that: no insubordination happened. They were simply critical of how Musk represented them.

I have to assume they knew when they penned the letter that they would find out whether their leader could take criticism and help them make a better company and product together, or react immaturely and let them know that their time would be better spent elsewhere. Seems they got their answer.

In any case, yeah, Musk owns the company and has the right to fire people for criticizing his business decisions. Bold strategy, we'll see how it turns out for him.

[arghnoname]

I think you can reasonably argue that the company Musk leads are largely supported (at least historically) by his showmanship and personality cult. That may be shifting, but it's absolutely fair that diminishing the reputation of companies whose stock valuations are largely based on seemingly irrational faith in dear-leader is in fact weakening the company.

I think there's also this game that gets played now where internal dissent tries to whip up external dissenters to get their way within companies. Leaders need to decide if this is happening or not and act accordingly.

[biohacker85]

> find out whether their leader could take criticism and help them make a better company and product together

This is cringe worthy. They knew exactly what would happen and expected to rally support online. I can't say with certainty what the ultimate goal was.

[meatsauce]

Bold strategy, we'll see how it turns out for him

This is common and has been common for hundreds of years.

Burn the boss, lose your job.

It isn't rocket science.

[WalterBright]

> We're not slaves anymore.

True. And you're not entitled to the job, either. The employer/employee relationship is a voluntary one, for both parties.

[LambdaComplex]

For most people, their job is their primary (or only) source of income. Being fired decreases (or entirely removes) their ability to afford food and shelter--things which are both necessities.

A company of any significant size, on the other hand, will be able to handle the loss of a single employee just fine.

There is a power imbalance between the two parties here and I don't think you can construct a solid argument while ignoring it.

[WalterBright]

There's a reason that SpaceX and other companies pay far more than minimum wage. It's because otherwise the employees won't take the job.

I.e. the idea that employees is powerless is not true by inspection.

People also can always start their own companies, being an employee is hardly the only option. (People who start their own companies also quickly realize that their imagined power over other people is entirely nonexistent.)

[ghusbands]

It's all different people upthread - it's a conversation rather than an argument. Also, most jurisdictions have a safety net for those who lose their jobs, so people often get to maintain similar income until they find their next job.

(Most welfare systems have plenty of woeful traps, though, and I fall on the side of 'People should not lose their jobs over a disrespectful letter', but I haven't read it.)

[Tostino]

Keep in mind just how limited those protections are in a ton of states. FL might as well not have an unemployment program for how much that has been gutted and made almost impossible to access.

[meatsauce]

Get another job.

[tiahura]

Should hot girls be forced to date ugly guys?

[throwaway894345]

You are free to express your thoughts and opinions, and your employer is free to stop employing you.

[tankenmate]

Within the bounds of legality while also taking into account of "we'd rather just pay the fine" and get the unwanted employee out.

In the UK recently the CEO of a ferry firm sacked all its workers in contravention of the law (they were required to give a 90 day consultation before any job losses, required to offer them other roles in the organisation). The CEO was summoned to parliament to explain what happen and said that "we didn't think the employees would go along with it, so we just fired them".

The government and employment tribunals are looking into collecting evidence in order to convict the CEO (criminal vs the usual civil penalty).

[pfortuny]

Please: slaves could not even think of leaving their jobs.

We are not slaves, but our bosses are not our parents either.

[tomohawk]

If you want a guaranteed job where you can do whatever you want, including running down your boss, then get a job with the government.

Businesses that are trying to stay in business don't have time for you.

[meatsauce]

You can be certain that when someone implies that you are a "bootlicker" for holding an opposing viewpoint, that the accuser has reached the last line of their intellectual sub-routines and can no longer store any further instructions.

[saagarjha]

This you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31783510?

Seriously, Hacker News is not the site for you to engage in this kind of low-quality culture war. Stop doing it.