[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?

[CodeSgt]

Okay but at the highest level, who directs that work? Who decides what needs doing and how to allocate that human capital? Who's mind is directly responsible for the creation and orchestration of SpaceX?

Labor means nothing if not done for an intelligent purpose. For S0aceX employees, Elon Musk is the source of that intelligent purpose. Of course labor beyond what one man can supply will be necessary for any worthwhile pursuit. What matters is not the labor, but the source of the intelligent purpose that gives the labor a common goal and guides it towards it.

[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.

[trs8080]

> 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.

I never said anything like this. I said it's not arrogant to want to work on something you're passionate about without worrying about that work being devalued.

Yes, I dislike Elon Musk's behavior. Because I take personal issue with his actions does not preclude my ability to discuss SpaceX - in the same way that I discuss politicians whose views I don't agree with.

The letter in question is an exhortation from employees who are concerned that his behavior is undermining the business. Somehow, you've managed to twist this completely around into employees wanting to harm the business.

[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

[lifeisstillgood]

Oh man - catnip! Thank you

[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.