You can find some expert to say anything. I have literally no idea whether it was legal or not. But finding an expert to quote for your narrative is not exactly breaking news.
> When was the last time we saw a post in HN talking about how Elon Musk is helping combat climate change?
Is he? - Sure, Tesla pushed the EV market forward but EVs aren't really a solution. We need efficient transport with less infrastructure than roads, but in Musks view public transport is bad as there "might be a killer" next to you. SolarCity also lost relevance in the space since integration with Tesla. With SpaceX his goal also doesn't seem to be to enable scientific advance in researching climate from space or building technologies which can help here but to abandon the planet and building a colony on Mars, where he and his friends can build a new world, just for them.
The impact Tesla has on climate change is so small as to be complete negligible. Electric cars are entirely insufficient, and we need to move past this rhetoric to actually get anything done.
Maybe you're right, but EV is definitely the direction USA is going [0]:
> The president is restoring and strengthening tailpipe emissions regulations from the Obama era and has set a target that half of all vehicles sold in the United States be electric by 2030.
So you would think the press has a favorable opinion of him, at least when it comes to climate change.
Why would they have a favorable opinion of him? They mostly live for sensation and Musk as villain gets a lot of clicks. Defending his labor practices on the notion that he's a climate savior when even cursory research disproves that seems ridiculous to me.
I agree, it seems ridiculous to me as well, who has defended his labor practices on the notion he's a climate savior? Can you quote or provide an article link?
Everyone's going in that direction and scheduling the end of ICE sales. Tesla started first and they got lots of good press at the time. Now they aren't doing many new things in that area beyond fighting over the autopilot-that-isn't. They get noticed when they actually do something newsworthy https://thedriven.io/2022/05/11/musk-says-tesla-supercharger... but otherwise... what do you expect news outlets to care about? "Musk is still doing X after N years" is not great material.
> The impact Tesla has on climate change is so small as to be complete negligible.
How are you defining impact? I think it's reasonable to conclude that Tesla caused the global move away from IC cars to EVs. According to the EPA, 27% of carbon emissions are from transportation [1]. I realize that there's other types of transportation than cars included in that number, that we still need to generate the electricity in a carbon neutral way (Tesla is contributing here as well), and that we also need to address the other 73%.
The only way I can see your comment to be true is if you narrowly look at the number of Tesla cars that are exclusively powered by solar today. But that's a very narrow view that misses the broader picture entirely.
> I think it's reasonable to conclude that Tesla caused the global move away from IC cars to EVs.
I agree—but that's "caused", past tense. The shift has begun and is continuing, and Tesla no longer has much influence on it. If every one of Musk's companies went belly-up tomorrow, the fight against climate change would not be harmed.
> The impact Tesla has on climate change is so small as to be complete negligible
Agree, but before Tesla electric cars were quite niche, now they're mainstream. One could probably argue that this is unrelated but there seems to be some correlation at least,
That the cars themselves are negligible is a bit unfair, Electric cars allow you to use renewable energies instead of fossil fuels- its a huge amount of energy consumed by transportation. Demand for EV car infrastructure is higher now and once built benefits everyone.
Is public transport better- undoubtedly, but Americans have infrastructured their way into a corner- they seem to fundamentally require cars for day-to-day operations and continue to make choices that force car dependence.
Space travel (in a similar way) is still needed, not just to get off this planet when we kill it (which I don't agree is a goal based in reality) but because there's absurd amounts of resources in the universe and some of it wizzes by us constantly.
A point that I made in a much longer comment is that Elon Musk seems to be applying pressure to maintain our society's car dependence. So it's not just him making the best of a bad infrastructure situation, he is contributing to keeping the infrastructure terrible.
Switching to electric vehicles is a very significant part of combating climate change, without which there is no hope of achieving zero carbon, and no company has done more to make that happen than Tesla.
Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution to reducing CO2 emissions has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, relative to any other single company, is not an honest way of evaluating its impact on the world, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.
Why should the press spend its time fawning over the world’s richest man? Isn’t it better to hold him accountable? Isn’t that literally the point of a free and independent press?
If Musk does not want news stories that accurately report the things he does, he should… stop doing those things.
I think you partly agree with me then, you accept there's a publishing bias, the difference is you think it's good.
I don't think the press should fawn over him. Maybe you're fine with the publishing bias because that helps keep him in check. I can understand that, but in that case you must be aware of the publishing bias, otherwise you'll be being deceived and will have a distorted view of reality.
Large financial firms that have a vested interest in the Twitter deal failing, or Teslas stock going down or other financial plays on this could be spending money on PR campaigns that create sentiment in their favor. Then other news agencies do their copy/paste “journalism” and you see a bunch of similar articles.
In my opinion for Elon/Tesla to get more credit for climate change they should be lowering prices and cutting into margins to win market share. They would be crushing it if they had more of a mass market car, no silly frills, just a good commuter car with 200-300mi range that wasn’t priced as a luxury car. I don’t know if they have manufacturing capacity to do that yet.
I don’t see Tesla actions that line up with having non-luxury segment products. The luxury segment in the US is 5% of automobile sales, putting a dent in climate change means sellable products in other car segments in mass volume. Nobody is doing that yet.
That may help. But I think that Elon headlines just generate great clickbait and that is the primary reason.
Everybody loves a story about either a superhero or supervillain who also happens to be the richest person in the world. Any story. And he is arguably both. The verge now even has a weekly summary of elons shenanigans…
That isn't exclusivity the realm of any side / ideology, the vast majority of them do it.
What would help is for Musk to stop being so dishonest when he tweets things, saying X is true then saying a month or so later X never happened doesn't look good nor do repeated promises that often do not come to pass.
He's the richest man in the world, are you really worried that he's being treated unfairly? If he wants people to say nice things about him, he could hire entire countries to act as sockpuppets. Or, like, he could work on becoming a better person.
I also think that, while it's possible he genuinely set out to combat climate change, with what we know about him and his projects today, I think his efforts in that department have been ineffective, or even counterproductive.
First of all, SpaceX is making climate change worse. Their rockets spend a great deal of energy, much of it in the form of fossil fuels, polluting parts of the atmosphere that airplanes can't reach. Airplanes are very bad for the environment and we need to drastically reduce their use to avoid climate disaster. Rockets are worse. Their only advantage over airplanes is that there are far fewer of them launching less often, but SpaceX is working to change that. Counterproductive. (For an alternative that could theoretically use renewable energy, I'm optimistic about Spinlaunch.)
In retrospect, it's clear that the Hyperloop is an impractical boondoggle intended to sabotage real world high speed rail projects that might reduce the need for Teslas. Increasing the use of public transit and reducing airplanes and cars is crucial to addressing the climate crisis. Counterproductive.
The Boring Company could be developing cool tech, but it's being used to move Teslas through tunnels instead of trains, which is ludicrously inefficient. Counterproductive.
Tesla itself sounded like a good idea at first, and certainly cars need to be electrified to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, simply replacing every fossil fuel car on the road with an electric car would be woefully insufficient to address the climate crisis. They just use too much energy, require too many batteries, and encourage sprawl at a time when we need density to create walkable neighborhoods friendly to transit. (An alternative I love is velomobiles, but most Americans have never even seen one. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobil... ) Like many incremental solutions at this late date where we need radical change, this could end up being counterproductive, especially if the world's richest man applies pressure to maintain our society's car dependency, which as I've suggested above, I believe he has.
I could go on about Elon's swing towards the right wing (which in the USA means supporting climate change deniers), etc., but this comment is already too long.
TL;DR: I think history may view Elon as sabotaging climate action more than he's helped it.
I was thinking of Tesla when mentioning climate change. You may be right EV aren't the solution, but then there are barely any (or simply any) mainstream politicians who aren't very confused [0].
Even if EV are not scalable, would you say replacing a single oil vehicle with an EV moves the needle in the right direction, however short sighted the strategy, and regardless of whether a more radical strategy will be needed in the future? Simply because that EV will pollute less than it's oil counterpart.
I confirm, there is a campaign against Elon Musk. It’s as if he declared candidacy for president of USA, we’re seeing the same discreditation tactics. Are there entrenched interests afraid that he could run for presidency, trying to ruin his reputation?
Unlikely, considering that he is not a natural born citizen and, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, is ineligible to be president.
This entire thing strikes me more as the media being fearful of losing the ability to put their thumbs on the scale of one of the best tools for the manipulation of the public, Twitter.
He looks perfectly rational to me; Maybe it’s rational under an angle that you don’t appreciate, but if, say, he was on your side, maybe you’d clap and say “What a great move! He’s excellent at strategy” to every turnaround he makes.
It isn't rational to say that FSD will be here in 12 months every year for 4+ years running nor is it rational to say that Starlink in Ukraine has never been jammed a few weeks after tweeting out that Starlink in Ukraine is being jammed but a software update fixed it.
It also wasn't rational when doing work covered by ITAR and other requirements to smoke something your most profitable client, the US Government, says you should not.
- the entire media is in a conspiracy against the world's richest man.
- he really is a jerk and when he initiated the Twitter deal it got the public focus on him and so when stories started churning out they couldn't help but be about what a jerk he is.
I think which of these cases you find most likely will say a lot about your personality and state of mind.
I don't see it as clearcut as this, I agree with your second point. But I think the press - that of course is not a single entity - can be unfair when they dislike someone and show a heavy publishing bias. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is simply a description of the current state of affairs.
What specifically have the verge reported on to make them lose credibility in your eyes? Personally I've got a bit tired of how often he comes up, but it's perfectly understandable considering he's a very public personality with a large following who leads some large tech companies and says/does some very divisive and controversial things
And one of Musks companies firing people for criticising him, when he's trying to buy Twitter claiming to want to change its policies because it isn't sufficiently pro-free-speech seems newsworthy to me
> What specifically have the verge reported on to make them lose credibility in your eyes?
This article, for one. It looks like they shopped around to find people with law degrees and opinions, even though those opinions may not be much on their own. But when put together in a montage of quotes, you can get a real spin effect. You don't notice it?
Motive (left-wing media)
Means (spin doctor on call)
Opportunity (Elon is public enemy number one with Trump all but out of the picture)
But let's ignore the fact that at least some of the employees that got fired were sending emails to most or all of the employees, more than once, during company time with company equipment, to solicit assistance with the letter. I'm sure there's more to the story that will be revealed, and it's certainly too early to be declaring that someone has a case, so putting these misleading headlines out (even if ambiguously worded) is a big red flag.
Shopping around for informed opinions is normal and should be expected. That said, I’ve been a legal commentator and the pressure to be aggressively sound-bitey is real. However, it’s often self-imposed by the expert and not always the reporter’s doing. I remember chatting with a Reuters reporter about the Uber/Lewandowski case and it was pretty clear that if I didn’t say something sexier, the article wouldn’t run. Yes, she was presumably under some pressure to find some sizzle, but I was also asking myself how badly I wanted to be quoted.
Do we know for sure that the behavior that SpaceX says those employees did actually happened? All we have is a few quotes from SpaceX, not actual evidence but I could be wrong.
You're suggesting that the official, public statement from the COO regarding the email activity was false? No chance. There are laws regarding email retention. The company stands to lose a lot while gaining little by releasing a false statement like that.
When things like the incident below happen it does make me wonder if the COO fully knows everything that is going on at SpaceX.
"In late March, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC, "I don't think the US has given us any money to give terminals to the Ukraine." She also said that most of the funding came from private sources, and acknowledged some help from France and possibly Poland, according to CNBC."
it really has less to do what they did than how it can be listed in their firing. if they sent an email to all spacex employees non work related during company hours they can mark that as 5 minutes wasted across whole company and grounds for firing. now it falls into the realm of cases that have been heard for union voting during company hours to the opposite end of spectrum of traveling to rallies and completely skipping out on work. so battle of who has the best lawyers/ if they choose easier to settle or make an example of them
This sounds like firing people for concerted action, which is one of two illegal reasons for termination in the US (the other being discrimination). I suspect the NLRB will reward them with an offer to get their jobs back or back wages.
Since absolutely nothing could go wrong with disgruntled employees making and launching rockets it has better be back wages, or something that limits the actual, physical damage they could cause. "Rocket science" has a reputation because it is not a forgiving domain.
> an action has to be concerted (certainly the case here)
From the article, quoting a law professor. I'd never heard the term "concerted action," so I looked up the relevant text of the National Labor Relations Act. It says that employees have the right to engage in concerted actions "for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection..."[0]
I am not familiar with this law; could someone explain why employees complaining in a circulated letter falls into this category? I'm (pleasantly!) surprised this was a legally protected action.
This is the cornerstone of union protections under the NLRA. The act defines a union as two or more workers who undertake action together in order to improve their working conditions. In theory, this protects them from retaliation.
In practice, labor law violations occur all the time and there is very little recourse. The NLRB awards can take a long time to act and has no power to levy punitive damages, so there's a very small penalty for criminal behavior on the company's part, compared to the cost savings of union busting.
There must be some sort of limits to what's protected though, right? SpaceX said they were fired for sending company-wide emails badgering people to sign stuff, and I'd have to imagine there's some line when it comes to using company time/resources to organize. If you grab a megaphone and start disrupting a whole factory floor by using it to try to get people to organize for better rights while you're supposed to be working, that seems like it ought to be a fireable offense, where organizing at someone's house outside of working hours clearly should not.
> If you grab a megaphone and start disrupting a whole factory floor by using it to try to get people to organize for better rights while you're supposed to be working, that seems like it ought to be a fireable offense, where organizing at someone's house outside of working hours clearly should not.
Can you organize on company time? It depends - can you discuss literally anything other than work while at work? Then yes. If not, then you'd have to organize off the clock but not necessarily off-site. There are exceptions for reasonability sake (a nurse can't interrupt an organ transplant to organize, for instance) but sending company-wide emails strikes me as sufficiently non-disruptive as to be protected.
If I was working at the place where my colleagues were trying to actively undermine CEO by character assassination, that would be disruptive for me. Those folks as my experience at workplace shows could be quite bullies. Working by their side would absolutely be disruptive.
when I work on something important and someone approaches me with her left-wing political activism, operations will most certainly be disrupted. I work in tech, and I know firsthand what sort of bullying is being preceded by such people approaching you. It is absolutely material
I've never heard of a company that let's you trash talk the CEO with no repercussions and as it goes, their firing was predicated on other employees discomfort with their activism.
Make your money somewhere else if you have a problem with the boss. NASA will give you a fair shake I'm sure.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadEDIT: though I don't know if there's better alternative
Musk combating climate change is not new.
Is he? - Sure, Tesla pushed the EV market forward but EVs aren't really a solution. We need efficient transport with less infrastructure than roads, but in Musks view public transport is bad as there "might be a killer" next to you. SolarCity also lost relevance in the space since integration with Tesla. With SpaceX his goal also doesn't seem to be to enable scientific advance in researching climate from space or building technologies which can help here but to abandon the planet and building a colony on Mars, where he and his friends can build a new world, just for them.
> The president is restoring and strengthening tailpipe emissions regulations from the Obama era and has set a target that half of all vehicles sold in the United States be electric by 2030.
So you would think the press has a favorable opinion of him, at least when it comes to climate change.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/climate/biden-tailpipe-em...
How are you defining impact? I think it's reasonable to conclude that Tesla caused the global move away from IC cars to EVs. According to the EPA, 27% of carbon emissions are from transportation [1]. I realize that there's other types of transportation than cars included in that number, that we still need to generate the electricity in a carbon neutral way (Tesla is contributing here as well), and that we also need to address the other 73%.
The only way I can see your comment to be true is if you narrowly look at the number of Tesla cars that are exclusively powered by solar today. But that's a very narrow view that misses the broader picture entirely.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I agree—but that's "caused", past tense. The shift has begun and is continuing, and Tesla no longer has much influence on it. If every one of Musk's companies went belly-up tomorrow, the fight against climate change would not be harmed.
No it's not. EU regulations are arguably more responsible.
They forced all car manufacturers to transition to EVs.
That happened after Tesla had proven the model though, primarily that you can build an EV that has sufficient range and that people find desirable.
Agree, but before Tesla electric cars were quite niche, now they're mainstream. One could probably argue that this is unrelated but there seems to be some correlation at least,
That the cars themselves are negligible is a bit unfair, Electric cars allow you to use renewable energies instead of fossil fuels- its a huge amount of energy consumed by transportation. Demand for EV car infrastructure is higher now and once built benefits everyone.
Is public transport better- undoubtedly, but Americans have infrastructured their way into a corner- they seem to fundamentally require cars for day-to-day operations and continue to make choices that force car dependence.
Space travel (in a similar way) is still needed, not just to get off this planet when we kill it (which I don't agree is a goal based in reality) but because there's absurd amounts of resources in the universe and some of it wizzes by us constantly.
Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution to reducing CO2 emissions has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, relative to any other single company, is not an honest way of evaluating its impact on the world, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.
I don't know, but what climate change related action of him is worth discussing?
If Musk does not want news stories that accurately report the things he does, he should… stop doing those things.
I don't think the press should fawn over him. Maybe you're fine with the publishing bias because that helps keep him in check. I can understand that, but in that case you must be aware of the publishing bias, otherwise you'll be being deceived and will have a distorted view of reality.
Positive stories on the companies he's associated with do reach the front page of HN on a semi-regular basis.
In my opinion for Elon/Tesla to get more credit for climate change they should be lowering prices and cutting into margins to win market share. They would be crushing it if they had more of a mass market car, no silly frills, just a good commuter car with 200-300mi range that wasn’t priced as a luxury car. I don’t know if they have manufacturing capacity to do that yet.
I don’t see Tesla actions that line up with having non-luxury segment products. The luxury segment in the US is 5% of automobile sales, putting a dent in climate change means sellable products in other car segments in mass volume. Nobody is doing that yet.
Everybody loves a story about either a superhero or supervillain who also happens to be the richest person in the world. Any story. And he is arguably both. The verge now even has a weekly summary of elons shenanigans…
What would help is for Musk to stop being so dishonest when he tweets things, saying X is true then saying a month or so later X never happened doesn't look good nor do repeated promises that often do not come to pass.
I also think that, while it's possible he genuinely set out to combat climate change, with what we know about him and his projects today, I think his efforts in that department have been ineffective, or even counterproductive.
First of all, SpaceX is making climate change worse. Their rockets spend a great deal of energy, much of it in the form of fossil fuels, polluting parts of the atmosphere that airplanes can't reach. Airplanes are very bad for the environment and we need to drastically reduce their use to avoid climate disaster. Rockets are worse. Their only advantage over airplanes is that there are far fewer of them launching less often, but SpaceX is working to change that. Counterproductive. (For an alternative that could theoretically use renewable energy, I'm optimistic about Spinlaunch.)
In retrospect, it's clear that the Hyperloop is an impractical boondoggle intended to sabotage real world high speed rail projects that might reduce the need for Teslas. Increasing the use of public transit and reducing airplanes and cars is crucial to addressing the climate crisis. Counterproductive.
The Boring Company could be developing cool tech, but it's being used to move Teslas through tunnels instead of trains, which is ludicrously inefficient. Counterproductive.
Tesla itself sounded like a good idea at first, and certainly cars need to be electrified to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, simply replacing every fossil fuel car on the road with an electric car would be woefully insufficient to address the climate crisis. They just use too much energy, require too many batteries, and encourage sprawl at a time when we need density to create walkable neighborhoods friendly to transit. (An alternative I love is velomobiles, but most Americans have never even seen one. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobil... ) Like many incremental solutions at this late date where we need radical change, this could end up being counterproductive, especially if the world's richest man applies pressure to maintain our society's car dependency, which as I've suggested above, I believe he has.
I could go on about Elon's swing towards the right wing (which in the USA means supporting climate change deniers), etc., but this comment is already too long.
TL;DR: I think history may view Elon as sabotaging climate action more than he's helped it.
Even if EV are not scalable, would you say replacing a single oil vehicle with an EV moves the needle in the right direction, however short sighted the strategy, and regardless of whether a more radical strategy will be needed in the future? Simply because that EV will pollute less than it's oil counterpart.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/10/scoop-dem...
This entire thing strikes me more as the media being fearful of losing the ability to put their thumbs on the scale of one of the best tools for the manipulation of the public, Twitter.
It also wasn't rational when doing work covered by ITAR and other requirements to smoke something your most profitable client, the US Government, says you should not.
- the entire media is in a conspiracy against the world's richest man.
- he really is a jerk and when he initiated the Twitter deal it got the public focus on him and so when stories started churning out they couldn't help but be about what a jerk he is.
I think which of these cases you find most likely will say a lot about your personality and state of mind.
A few People got fired. This is not news.
And one of Musks companies firing people for criticising him, when he's trying to buy Twitter claiming to want to change its policies because it isn't sufficiently pro-free-speech seems newsworthy to me
This article, for one. It looks like they shopped around to find people with law degrees and opinions, even though those opinions may not be much on their own. But when put together in a montage of quotes, you can get a real spin effect. You don't notice it?
Motive (left-wing media)
Means (spin doctor on call)
Opportunity (Elon is public enemy number one with Trump all but out of the picture)
But let's ignore the fact that at least some of the employees that got fired were sending emails to most or all of the employees, more than once, during company time with company equipment, to solicit assistance with the letter. I'm sure there's more to the story that will be revealed, and it's certainly too early to be declaring that someone has a case, so putting these misleading headlines out (even if ambiguously worded) is a big red flag.
"In late March, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC, "I don't think the US has given us any money to give terminals to the Ukraine." She also said that most of the funding came from private sources, and acknowledged some help from France and possibly Poland, according to CNBC."
https://www.cnet.com/news/politics/spacex-starlink-terminals...
> the NLRA is restricted to nonsupervisory employees, said Kate Bischoff,
And whether the statements themselves qualify.
According to WSJ , https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-fires-employees-involved....
From the article, quoting a law professor. I'd never heard the term "concerted action," so I looked up the relevant text of the National Labor Relations Act. It says that employees have the right to engage in concerted actions "for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection..."[0]
I am not familiar with this law; could someone explain why employees complaining in a circulated letter falls into this category? I'm (pleasantly!) surprised this was a legally protected action.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/157
In practice, labor law violations occur all the time and there is very little recourse. The NLRB awards can take a long time to act and has no power to levy punitive damages, so there's a very small penalty for criminal behavior on the company's part, compared to the cost savings of union busting.
Most people receive a bunch of emails every day and it's never considered as cost.
Can you organize on company time? It depends - can you discuss literally anything other than work while at work? Then yes. If not, then you'd have to organize off the clock but not necessarily off-site. There are exceptions for reasonability sake (a nurse can't interrupt an organ transplant to organize, for instance) but sending company-wide emails strikes me as sufficiently non-disruptive as to be protected.
The NLRB disagrees with you. Look up the James Damore case.
Why chime in at all if you don't understand the subject?
I've never heard of a company that let's you trash talk the CEO with no repercussions and as it goes, their firing was predicated on other employees discomfort with their activism.
Make your money somewhere else if you have a problem with the boss. NASA will give you a fair shake I'm sure.
I don’t see how bitching about your boss’s tweets constitutes discussing working conditions.