>Haraldur Þorleifsson Sweeps Person of the Year Awards
>One of his best-known projects is Ramp Up Iceland, which is building ramps throughout the nation to increase accessibility for people in wheelchairs. He has also personally donated to the legal funds of victims of sexual abuse, and has garnered praise for charitable donations to families in need this holiday season.
Even more so, he was one of the highest taxpayers in the nation because he decided to be paid in cash (taxed at 46%) instead of shares (capital gains, taxed at 22%), specifically so he'd be taxed more, as he considers that the country helped him a lot with his disability.
I can see why this man would be rubbing Musk the wrong way. He appears to be everything Elon Musk isn't. He's a Mensch.
To a narcissist who doesn't like a person like this, the brain says "Either he's a fraud, or I'm the asshole". And a narcissist brain will settle that question in e heartbeat, with the wrong answer.
Publicly disclosing an employee’s disability, mocking it, claiming they are faking it, and then saying it is the reason they were fired. Employment attorneys are going to tear Elon to pieces over this.
I hope those holding shares of Tesla stock feel really good about supporting this behavior.
Edit:
I want to know which account flagged the original post and I want them to explain why they did.
The link of the HN post where we are discussing right now.
"The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
People shouldn't be downvoting this because Karwebnetwork is providing the text of the tweet in question.
They probably should have (and it's still editable as I type) marked it "here is the text of the tweet in question" because if you don't know that it does look like Karwebnetwork is the one making the offensive comment.
Consider the nuance. Tesla the org does good work (lots of EVs sold, lots of good people doing good engineering, 40GWh/yr of utility scale battery manufacturing capacity). Its North America ops are now being run by Tom Zhu. Elon is incinerating his wealth, diminishing his own power it took him two decades to build (which is his choice). These can all be objectively good outcomes, although the process is…messy. We’re headed toward the ideal outcome of Tesla continuing to grow while Elon slow burns his way out.
Yes, Elon should be more kind, but like a great white shark, put a cage between you and them and move on. This holds for most people who reach the level he has. You don’t become this wealthy by being a decent human (broadly speaking, there are always exceptions).
The lesson I've learned from his Twitter acquisition is that (1) he has vast influence over his companies, when and if he chooses to, and (2) he is sometimes willing to use that influence in ways that cause harm to his customers and the business (even to his own wealth), even in cases where his actions violate explicit contractual promises. And (3) if/when he chooses to do this, his business partners, C-level employees and fellow investors will facilitate his behavior rather than providing any counterweight or cautionary advice.
I'm a current Tesla owner (2018 Model 3) and really like the car. But these are all reasons why I'm uncomfortable investing in another 5-7 years of Tesla ownership. Right now Musk has chosen to not destroy Tesla (or at least, not harm it much) but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun. Plus I intensely dislike the guy and want to encourage the growth of the EV industry away from a single, potentially unreliable supplier. And this is sad, because two years ago I would have gone to the mat to convince my friends and family to buy Teslas.
Elon owns Twitter privately. Tesla is publicly traded and falls under SEC regulations, fiduciary duty, etc. He can do with Twitter as he pleases; not so with Tesla. In fact, the SEC filed suit re: Tesla and forced Elon to step down as chairman.
He's the CEO and the largest single shareholder of the company. Plus he's the face of it, and the cause of it's meme-stock status. I've seen this show before and I know that nobody is going to dislodge him until the company is a breath away from bankruptcy (or deep in it.)
It’s a thing for me, Teslas have become much less psychologically desirable over the last few months. Nothing personal to anyone who bought one, but now I see them and wince/feel sorry for the owner rather than feeling mildly impressed and jealous.
Not OP, but I own three (S, X, Y) Teslas of various vintages and feel no stigma. Life lesson: don’t care what other people think about your consumer purchases. Those are not people you should associate with.
I don't feel like I get looks for driving my Tesla. However, my confidence in them has dwindled significantly since we got our Model 3 in 2020.
Just last year, I was all-in on getting the Model S despite its cost going way up. I was determined to figure out how to do it. I was also extremely bullish on FSD and definitely had a few shares.
Today, I have almost no interest in getting a new Tesla, have serious doubts about FSD long-term and have sold all of my shares.
Tesla, as a company, is absolutely fantastic, and I am thankful for Elon doing an excellent job at pushing the old guard towards electric. However, I can't continue supporting a person who has such obvious disregard for others he thinks are beneath him.
Also don't forget that Tesla Inc. (and by extension Elon) has root access to your car's onboard computer.
He could literally brick your car tomorrow, or make it play an endless loop of Nyan cat at full blast or grab the camera footage and publish it on Twitter if he felt like it.
You mean just as stupid as the richest person in the world who runs like 5 companies to spend his time bullying an employee of Twitter on Twitter? Yup, you're right, it's that stupid.
Isn't that just the next step of this? I'm not saying it would happen, but it doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility given the level of petty we're dealing with.
I don't think he'd do anything risking him an "attempted murder" charge. But some kind of "trolling"? Or gathering information that would give an advantage? Absolutely.
They've cancelled orders, denied access to the software betas, revoked investor access, etc already. So not entirely out of the realm of possibilities.
An administrator with root access could cause your car to unexpectedly lose braking power, accelerate into a wall, or if there was an adverse event claim they downloaded complete logs and it was all your fault because you're a bad person. Tesla has remarkable real-time power over you, but CEO's wield great power in general, which is the reason they normally are quite a lot more measured and balanced in their public interactions.
>The lesson I've learned from his Twitter acquisition[...]and (2) he is sometimes willing to use that influence in ways that cause harm to his customers and the business (even to his own wealth), even in cases where his actions violate explicit contractual promises[...]
This is kind of an odd lesson for you to take honestly. Everything he has done with Twitter has not merely been completely legal, but in fact has underlined how Musk couldn't get out of law and contract. He made a very, very bad buy, and Twitter's owners were happy to take it and made out like bandits. He tried desperately to get out of it, and despite effectively unlimited funds for legal representation, he could not. He failed to take precautions upfront, made a deal, and he was held to it. After that Twitter became private (though since he financed the purchase in part vs buying with purely his own wealth there are still some other players involved). He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either. It's just that it takes time for the legal process to take out and it's only been months. Twitter is also in a vastly less regulated space then vehicles.
I think there are reasonable reasons to be concerned about Tesla, but
>but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun
> but in fact has underlined how Musk couldn't get out of law and contract.
I have friends who worked at Twitter and were owed (and additionally, were promised by Twitter and Musk, in writing) both severance and RSU payouts. Musk has decided not to make these payments, so they are forced to sue/arbitrate for them. Similarly, Musk has decided not to pay AWS for services that AWS is contractually obligated to provide.
As a car owner, I'm confident that if Musk decided to break my warranty agreement I might eventually receive (some) compensation from the courts. Could his lawyers drag the process out by 2-3 years while my car remains broken? Absolutely. The only real protection I have against this is not to do any further business with Musk's companies, and I intend to do that.
My biggest concern is not warranties being broken: it is stuff like "Tesla issues a software update that disables core features of the car", which actually happened to my radar.
Sorry about your friends being abused by what turns out to be a malicious employer. That stress ripples. Good luck to them in finding a healthier work environment.
I always felt like the marketing around self-driving Tesla's was misleading. They named it misleadingly, ambitiously but misleadingly. So I feel Musk has broken the integrity of the feature since its inception and roll out.
Bizarre about the radar, that sounds like an actual safety problem.
Seeing how he makes guinea pigs out of everyone, to me suggests he'll do anything to get to Mars.
> Everything he has done with Twitter has not merely been completely legal
> He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either
You're certainly allowed to contain multitudes, but these seem to contradict each other?
Also, he's done a bunch of things at Twitter that are most definitely not legal, like attempting to fire/lay off people without proper notice in several different ways and jurisdictions.
> (3) if/when he chooses to do this, his business partners, C-level employees and fellow investors will facilitate his behavior rather than providing any counterweight or cautionary advice.
This is a common thread from multiple people I've talked to who have worked for his companies. Everyone who works even close to his orbit are sycophants. You have to be or your career is... limited. I remember even applying for one of those companies some time ago. The phone screen went well and when I called the recruiter back a week later to ask how things were going, she said "[Hiring Manager's name] disagreed with Elon about something and no longer works here." Yow.
These are fair critiques offsetting the benefits of the org accelerating the electrification of some forms of transportation. Whether it’s worth it will come down to personal beliefs around climate change (imho) and what should be done to dent its impacts.
The labor abuses, personal attacks, and dishonest FSD marketing are downright distasteful (and illegal when found to be so by a court or regulator), but creative application of government subsidies is fine if the ends justify the means. There are no heroes, just people.
Big, meaningful shareholders of stock personally request CEOs to fire people for bigger profits. I'm not sure they care one bit because someone is being an asshole.
Edit: And I'm not suggesting this should be a normalized thing. Just that it's unfortunate how greed trumps any sort of regular decorum.
I'm saying that as a US-based HN reader, like most HN readers, it's a big assumption to guess what the HR law might be in this case. Does Twitter even have an office in Iceland (a country with the population of Sunnyvale)? If not, whatever the law may be might be unenforceable.
I can't even guess what the law in Iceland might be. On one hand, it seems generally a pretty reasonable place. On the other hand it's a small place and won't have the time, bandwidth or interest in passing as many laws as bigger places do.
Are you from Iceland? I wonder if they have a kind of default rule that says "in this area, if we don't have our own law we adopt the one of X (say DK or EU)"
I think you'll find this chap will benefit from the increased global attention in a variety of quantifiable and unquantifable ways that attorneys will have a hard time quantifying because they dont have access to big data, unless the legal system and judicary plan to demonstrate publically its lack of intelligence, I'd be surprised if anything legally takes place.
In the meantime Toferson is cleared to pursue the latest medical theory for muscular dystrophy.
Unfortunately attempts at holding Elon accountability via the legal system have all failed so I don't place any hope of justice being served. I think the only hope is his ego collapses on itself.
He asked if he was still employed by the means left to him since he couldn't get into his work accounts.
Nearly everything Elon disclosed didn't need to be disclosed publicly.
Just because someone asks you a question publicly, it doesn't give you carte blanche to unload every single detail you know about the person asking the question.
You can have a picture of yourself in a wheelchair and have any of a wide variety of permanent disabilities—or none! You could have just broken your leg. Or, and this may come as a shock, you can actually be fully healthy and abled and still sit in a wheelchair for a picture.
There is not one single thing case in there that makes it OK for an employer to disclose medical information about you, however vague or detailed.
It can be argued both ways and yeah he fired a person who is disabled well discussing their disability and disparaging there condition so a reasonable person could conclude that he's being discriminated against by Musk.
I genuinely do not understand this. If you hired a guy to do landscaping, and then it turned out that the guy had a disability that prevented him from doing landscaping, are you obligated to keep paying that guy for doing nothing?
Or howabout if a truck driver gets blinded somehow. Do you still have to keep employing him as a truck driver, and going through the motions as if he is still employed?
That seems ridiculous. "Job at twitter" is not a resource to which people all have a right of some kind.
I think the point is that the person in question was in fact doing work. You've taken Elon Musk's words at face value and as gospel, which does say something about you if not the gentleman who lost his job.
Reading quickly over the many tweets looks like it was the employee and not Elon who's disclosed the disability. The details on the disability were not given by Elon but the employee. It's literally the trademark on their Twitter profile.
Ianal, but ...
To the point: just saying that "some employee has a disability" does not mean they are disclosing the disability. On the contrary, in order for the company to accommodate, it's needs to be said.
Like if you or CEO you might not be able to confirm or debate and employee or (in the process of being fired) ex-employees health information. It just might be part of HIPAA that says you don't have the right to speak about that anymore.
To be clear, I haven't found this restriction in the regulations of that link I just shared but that's what I suspect given what I've seen of employer restrictions from my work history.
Update:
No I think I'm coming around to your perspective because it looks like HIPA is only applicable to health insurance providers. Not employers. Unless of course the employer is a self-funded health insurance provider, I don't know the details of twitter's health plan.
This link suggests that it might be an ADA violation. However Elon Musk could claim that he is revealing that the employee has a disability through Elon's reading of the employees Twitter feed which has public information about his muscular dystrophy. That's a way to weasel out of this ADA violation, potentially.
Update 2:
Ah but it looks like it's a civil rights violation:
> releasing an employee’s medical information in retaliation to that attorney opposing unlawful discrimination or harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that will give rise to a very good claim for damages as well.
It felt wrong, reading what Elon wrote, and it looks like, if this blog post is to be trusted, the law also agrees with that sentiment.
Yeah I'm not US based so I'm talking out of my vacuum, but from what I understand, it makes sense.
A couple of days ago there was someone asking about not using Windows laptop for religious purposes and the answer was that if that was a large hassle for the business, it was okay to say no.
Edit:
> releasing an employee’s medical information
Does saying that X has a disability is a release of medical information, when that's public information in their Twitter profile and runs a business to help others with that disability?
You know ... it could be that since Haraldur is Iceland based, he doesn't have the same US civil rights. This could amount to No legal action. I haven't researched whether employment rights translate to employees in other countries.
Re: releasing otherwise public information:
That is a fantastic question. I don't know. I suspect there is a legal case to be made:
I think about this as a hypothetical "reasonable person", which is what appears in the courtroom TV shows that I personally have watched. Perhaps obviously, I am not a lawyer, But I do watch TV shows about lawyers <3.
1) A reasonable person might conclude that Musk did not research Harald's Twitter feed but instead merely read his name, after receiving the direct tweet from Harald, and then asked Twitter human resources' database to confirm he was in fact His Twitter employee.
2) Alternatively a reasonable person might conclude that Musk did research Harald's Twitter feed before replying. And so it was okay for Musk to disclose. Again I'm being very approximate.
So I think it's possible to make a case and it might be worth the potential legal victory and monetary payout for damages.
To reiterate something tangential to your question, I think it is clear that regardless of the disclosure, Musk's thinking around the termination does include Haraldur's disability. That's not right, legally, from what I've read.
Companies accommodate employees disabilities in order to allow the employee to do their jobs. Elon's argument is that they're not working, even after accomodations. It has nothing to do with the disability. Will it hold in a court of law? Ianal
I'm pretty sure that if you allow the release of HIPAA covered information from a provider to your employer that the information stored by your employer is not protected by HIPAA anymore.
HIPAA restricts what covered entities can do (basically healthcare providers and insurance), not what can be done with medical information in general.
Of course most decent employers will handle even mildly sensitive information in a confidential way.
Yes that's exactly the tweet I'm referring to. It's not a secret that the employee has a disability. It's literally on their Twitter profile and runs a business to help others with that same issue. There's no release of confidential information.
No idea if this was illegal but it definitely changed my opinion of Musk. With many of the other things he did at Twitter, you could say that they were not nice but they had a business purpose. This is not that, it just seems to be cruel for no reason. The guy just wanted to know whether or not he was fired. Didn’t even dispute whether or not it was warranted.
This is so far below the bare minimum of reasonable business behavior I think it will cause big problems for Elon hiring or acquiring companies.
Yes and I agree. We're used to CEOs covering all possible angles, including the court of public opinion. Elon doesn't care about that. However morality and legality are two different things.
We need to accept that CEOs care about morals because of their bottom line (money), not because of legals or that they're nice. It's not the job of a CEO to be nice.
People that hate your product will never buy it. That's why diet soda or fast food care about trees and the sea: paying customers. Money.
Musk said Haraldur claimed he could not type. Haraldur disclosed more details after to correct Musk. Maybe he disclosed more details before too. Not where you said though. His profile says Building 1500 wheelchair ramps in Iceland and shows a drawing of a man in a wheelchair.
The difference between internal communication to accommodate and public communication to discredit should be obvious.
If you're referring to the flags on HN, users flagged the story and were correct to do so. There's nothing intellectually curious here—just the latest cult vs. anticult flamewar.
I admit it's a particularly juicy episode, but (a) that's not what HN is for and (b) it destroys what it is for. We're trying for very much the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I didn't know this guy existed before I saw posts about this on HN, and I think he's impressive and interesting as a tech/design leader himself.
I also had never seen that Tumblr post which has been linked here, giving an account of how the culture at Tesla allegedly involved a lot of processes for managing and working around Elon. I think that's interesting, too, for questions it raises about leadership and celebrity and funding in general.
I admit that the conversation has not focused on those things too much. :-\
I agree. And how people think about disabilities is interesting. See the discussion about what is acceptable to disclose. And does the CEO of Twitter really think you have to type to tweet?
Yeah. I've been thinking about disability lately because a degenerative disease resulting in blindness runs in my family. (I'll find out for sure whether I have it, like my sister and my mom, after a genetic testing appointment I have next week.)
A few weeks ago I also had a surgery that, for just a couple days, left me unable to sit up on my own or walk across the room, due to the pain.
And then I spent last night visiting a relative who is (I think) dying. She's completely lucid but now immobile to the point that she can't sit all the way up, get out of bed on her own, or walk, and I don't think her mobility ever increases much again from here. (Incidentally, she is also legally blind due to the same genetic condition as I mentioned before.)
I think my still-forming thoughts and feelings about all of that drew me to this story, and to Thorleifsson's persona.
It sucks that he has the condition that he has, but at the same time, he doesn't seem like a very pitiable person to me. He seems dignified, capable, successful, and loved. Someone to be admired, or even envied.
So it's really interesting to me, then, how some people see him as 'playing the pity card' when he describes his disability as it comes up in this discussion.
Like I said, my recent thoughts about disability are still forming so I don't have some interesting conclusion that I'm proud of. But I think there's a lot to think about here, beyond the outrage and hero worship.
Maybe all this hubbub will help push a thoughtful article or two about disability to the front page in the next few days. That would be cool.
What I can't understand about Elon's approach is how easy it would be to do nothing. Like he could easily just ignore these tweets and not have a massive public thread where he gets eviscerated. I can appreciate that there are a large number of people who will come to a billionaires defence, for whatever reason but surely it would be easier to just send the tweet to HR with a "?".
Kind of the definition of a personality disorder. To reasonably well-adjusted people it seems perplexing. Elon isn’t in the driver’s seat for his own impulses.
Yes the self defeating actions seem to be a loss of agency because he is so deliberate otherwise in marketing and his words are marketing for his businesses like it or not. His petulant sociopathic fans make it even harder to like Elon or buy his products because I feel the need to silently counter these assholes from having their supply. He seems to have cultivated a following of uncaring cynical dick heads.
It's because he is a bully and enjoys feeling powerful by being snarky to someone less powerful to him and then having a bunch of people compliment him for doing it. Like I wish that wasn't the reason and was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for awhile but it's pretty clear at this point it's just because he likes to do it.
And no one can put him in his place as we have a society that lets a singular asshole take over industry (space) or institution (Tesla, Twitter) and make it their personal play thing. It’s obvious to everyone now that these companies are strategically well positioned and succeed despite Elon’s social shortcomings which validates all of him. There is no means to say well you were an exceptional capitalist but also a dick head who made people feel like shit, so we are taking back the investments made.
If we are displeased with the society we have built (and most everyone seems to be, in one way or another), we are welcome to change it. The laws of physics do not stand in our way.
Funny how the people he chooses to bully are almost always the traditional enemies of fascists: the disabled, trans people, racial minorities, political dissidents, etc.
That particular incident was the result of him teasing a classmate about their fathers' recent suicide and that classmate pushing him down a set of stairs as a result.
Elon's father has talked about it in interviews. It seems Elon was the bully in this specific incident.
Yes, mocking a classmate for their parents’ death is extreme behaviour, even for a child. I would not be surprised to learn it constitutes fighting words.
Feels absurd to see Elon's behaviour being a mimicry of the 90s/early 2000s forum mods power trips: be snarky, assert your dominance and power over the users, ban the ones that disagree with you. It's the same exact pattern of behaviour, what has gone so wrong in Musk's life? I really can't comprehend.
It's specially weird because with those mods you always assumed they were people with little to now life outside that forum, hence the tripping on such small amounts of power.
Elon has enough money that he could quit today and have enough money for 10 lives of pure hedonistic bliss... and yet chooses to spend his days on his phone, posting shitty memes and being a dick on Twitter.
Elon Musk is proficient in perpetuating his own relevance. These arguments, and how people respond to them, are irrelevant by themselves but the outrage or counter-outrage they produce has a multiplier effect of media attention. This is publicity on the cheap (for both parties involved).
The thing is that these types of tweets bring people to Twitter. They want to read the drama, and maybe even get their 2 cents in. Trump did it and Twitter boomed, now Elon is doing it and Twitter is (allegedly!) growing. Twitter loves drama. Well, people love easily digestible drama. And that's why I personally dislike Twitter as a social media.
What is wrong about loving drama? The drama is okay in and of itself. Isn't it? What's like really the problem with this particular drama, @ezekg?
I do see that Trump redirected hate from his followers onto targets. Is that what is going to happen here? Is that the unsupportive toxic aspect of this type of social media?
One might say the same about any suboptimal human action. Even looking back at my own in-game performance yesterday, I can easily assemble a long "wtf were you thinking!!!???" list.
I'm honestly starting to wonder if we humans might be more imperfect than we let on. Stranger things have happened before!
That's not true, there's such a thing as forced an unforced errors. What you're saying would suggest all errors are fundamentally alike, only differing in severity, but this is of course not the case. I don't know of anyone who thinks in that way about people's behaviour. Your dismissiveness is woefully misplaced.
OOPSADAISY: oh, how sweet is the irony...you said "there's" not "there's not" - I will just leave this up as further demonstration of my point, and some humble pie!
> What you're saying would suggest all errors are fundamentally alike, only differing in severity
You are working at the concrete level, I am speaking at higher levels of abstraction.
Note that what is said and what is received are often not the same - sometimes, it is even the opposite!
> ...but this is of course not the case.
The word "is" is very slippery/sneaky - watch out!
> I don't know of anyone who thinks in that way about people's behaviour.
Perhaps you do not know everyone - or, of those people you do know, you may not have comprehensive knowledge of their cognitive styles and capabilities.
Incoherent nonsense. If you cannot comprehend why simply dismissing shit behaviour with "he's only human" is moronic then that makes you quite special.
Do you consider this a universal fact or a local fact?
Consider how a graduate level physics lecture would look to a C student in grade 9, for example.
> If you cannot comprehend why simply dismissing shit behaviour with "he's only human" is moronic then that makes you quite special.
This is quite interesting, what does it refer to that occurred in this conversation?
I recommend that if you're going to criticize someone, criticize something that they have actually done. Granted, this may be a lot less fun, but it is at least plausibly more optimal.
You have wonder what goes on in Musk's head. He lays off a guy with a fairly large Twitter following, who is quite wealthy, having founded a company that sold to Twitter, and is a well-known philanthropist in his own country, who also happens to have muscular dystrophy.
The guy politely tries to get his attention to find out whether he still has a job. And Musk's response is to interrogate him publicly, mock him, and accuse him of using his disability as an excuse to avoid work.
It's cretinous in so many different ways it's hard to see how the stupidest person would think it a sensible course of action.
It is what I have come to expect from the guy that called one of the people helping rescue the kids in the cave in Thailand a "pedo guy," told a Buzzfeed reporter that the reporter was "defending child rapists" when asked about the comment, hired an investigator to find proof, and then convinced a court that he was just kidding about it when he was sued.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-16/elon-musk-...https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593
And got away with it, sadly. He has now been to court several times and demonstrated that he can say ANYTHING, and face no consequences legally, and a large pool of sycophants will support every word, no matter how awful.
I mean, define "got away with it". He pretty comprehensively destroyed his own reputation; before that, the absolutely standard public opinion, and really the opinion of anyone who hadn't scrutinised him in detail, was that he was a magical super-genius. Afterwards, not so much.
Particularly post-Twitter, the problem has gotten _clearer_ to the public, but that was his first really public obvious "by the way, have I mentioned that I'm completely awful?" thing.
He won both court cases I'm thinking of, which seem to be best described as "got away with it."
Public opinion might be up or down, depending on which community you're polling, but I believe he's back to being the richest person in the world[0], so I'd say he "got away with it" in every possible respect.
Elon has an ego problem. He can't stand it when his ego gets challenged, so he then tries to mock the other person. He also doesn't back down when he clearly is wrong.
Quick thoughts - I agree with you that most people (myself included) cannot relate to how Musk thinks.
Humbly, when I don't understand where Musk comes from on something, I don't assume that the disconnect is due to superior intelligence on my part[0] (but weirdly, plenty of people with objectively little accomplishment have no problem assuming that they are seeing something Musk is blind to)
So, everything that follows is conjecture for the sake of a probabilistic answer to your question.
I suspect Musk is "allergic" to the type of work/worker this person seems to do. The person's self-cited list of accomplishments doesn't actually list a single impactful accomplishment, which isn't acceptable for someone senior enough to not do any hands-on work.
Now, again, this is a guess, but I suspect that this type of "allergy" is a big component of Musk's success in general in how he works and who he hires for his companies. It likely serves his very well. As a "side effect" of that allergy, it probably compels him to toe/cross the line in cases like this. If you believe in something deeply, you speak to it even at your own risk.
Again, not saying that's what I would do, but I am also not the guy who runs Tesla and all these other companies, so if you have a choice between what I'd do, and what Musk would do, do what he would do!
[0] It's very popular to say he's a hype man who just rides the wave of provocative tweets. But... have people who say that ever seen, drove, ride in a Tesla? Those are real. Maybe people can't comprehend the amount of stuff you gotta get right to make and sell a car, if they did they would keep that totally distinct from the "hype" category. And aren't those ships going to space etc? It's a weird flex to claim that Musk doesn't get really important, difficult things done - and if you accept that he does, then it's weird to claim "but I don't understand how he works, so I assume he's the idiot"
Yes. I've met a bunch of MBAs who hate Musk. What did they accomplish in their professional career? They don't even run their own business, let alone a multi billion dollar disruption. They did the MBA to get a promotion at their blue collar jobs.
Because he believes victim mentality is an actual societal problem that needs some people to stand up to.
What was the former employee expecting anyway ? Why someone suposedly as "talented" and wealthy as is is would ask and spill all of this publicly ? It's pure attention seeking
If you're about to sue your former employer for breach of contract (because of the acquisition) and wrongful termination (because he was fired for being disabled) it's nice to have the CEO admit all of this stuff in public.
It's not really surprising anymore but it still amuses me that most replies agreeing with Elon's public diatribes are a collection of quacks and kooks of every kind. From disgraced professors to magical healing people, to conspiracy nutters, crypto-bros and "Millionaire at 40, looking for companies that make the future happen"-bio profiles.
It seems that Elon really created his own bubble of quacks as followers, and feels empowered by that.
Actually, when I think deeper about it, it's a little scary...
It’s not clear to me what they’re agreeing with him on?
- That employees have no right to know whether or not they’re employed?
- Or that employee private medical information should be allowed to be disclosed publicly?
This whole thing started because Twitter’s HR couldn’t tell this person if he was or wasn’t employed by Twitter. He guessed the only way he would get an answer was to publicly ask Elon on Twitter. And guess what, he was right! That indeed turned out to be the only way to get an answer.
Elon further decided to commit a bunch of privacy and employment rights abuses but fundamentally it was simply a question of an HR dept that didn’t know who it employed.
> It’s not clear to me what they’re agreeing with him on?
They're agreeing with him that he is the infallible Dear Leader, pretty much. The Musk following, at this stage, is a full-blown personality cult; what Musk is actually saying/doing is rather beside the point.
I'm... not sure, and it would arguably be an interesting social experiment.
I'm struggling to think of anyone who accumulated this degree of blind adulation and _did_ act like a normal, reasonable person; maybe being an arsehole is actually an entry requirement.
If people were able to look even more deeply, the scariness might transform into something more resembling beauty.
Unfortunately, that sort of behavior tends to appear as "magical thinking", "woo woo", "pedantry", "nonsensical", "a waste of time", "sea-lioning", {all the memes}, etc, despite it being essentially what the scientific method does, but in a very different and much simpler, deterministic problem space.
Meta: here on hacker news several of the related articles that have popped up around this issue have been downvoted into the 170s just 2 hours after posting and hitting the top.
Crazies are at work here too.
Sycophant is sort of behavior profile. It's a thing that you can do, be a sycophant. It looks like that's what's going on for these so-called crazies.
Call me crazy, but i downvoted it because I don’t enjoy it. It’s not the type of content I’m here for and I don’t feel like it adds anything by being posted.
Do you think this way:
A thread of people dunking on Musk is so cool! Calling people crazies (implying that you are not crazy, only they are!) is so fantastic!
Is being petty at the top of Elon's priority list? I'd imagine there would be more pressing concerns taking into account the projects he has a foothold in.
It sounds like a joke when you say it straight out like that. But yes, his actions have made clear for quite some time now that petty vindictiveness is a high priority for him, one he's willing to sacrifice other goals to accomplish.
Having an extra billion dollars doesn't actually effect his life at all with his level of wealth. He's after the feeling of power at this point and is willing to lose/spend huge amounts of money for that feeling.
Reminds me of the "pedo diver" tweet. That's the point at which my opinion of Musk changed from "admirable but occasionally childish" to "dickhead who has had a few good ideas and got very lucky". Stuff like this is just par for the course now.
I wonder what ramifications Elon's unprofessional and aggressive management style will have on start-up culture in the long run. My instincts are that for many he'll become a sort of anti-role model, but for other's he'll affirm their existing beliefs that to be a great leader, you have to disregard employees/users feelings and focus purely on doing your best to optimise.
That being said, this makes me curious how (if?) Elon manages/measures his reputational impact, and if he even cares how he comes across when he says things like this. Is there an upside (for Elon) to him acting like this?
I mean we went through the Steve Jobs era of product visionary and apparent asshole extraordinaire. I think the average EQ of startup founders is increasing and employees have far less tolerance for horrible bosses. So with more options comes more opportunity and the power of assholes in charge decreases.
>Is there an upside (for Elon) to him acting like
Behind every mad man is a sad man. He is using his workaholism (his addiction to work and also his addiction to power) to ease his depression.
Managing Elon was a huge part of the company (SpaceX) culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.
Flagging seems rather arbitrary at times here. There is the vouching feature to counteract this, but I don't see the option right now. I'm not sure if this is only available if the post is dead entirely, or what other restrictions this has.
It's annoying, but I can see why it was flagged. The thread isn't going to be very interesting. It'll just be a bunch of people being rude about Musk (justifiably) and a bunch of people excusing his behavior.
I was going to reply and say that it's important for people to see the tweets anyway, but then I realized that the people most in need of seeing the tweets are the ones who did see them and flagged this submission.
I wonder if there are any "undecideds" remaining, or if everyone here has already sorted into pro-Musk/anti-Musk groups?
I heard some people started to change their minds about Trump after he mocked a disabled reporter, so I don't know.
This is about a person working in tech that started a successful startup company, and was fired from another tech company which acquired the former. The firing is really public, and of questionable morality (perhaps even questionable legality), where the CEO of the bigger company is trying to publicly humiliate his worker.
This is indeed very interesting to HN (you can see that by the number of upvotes and comments). It touches on what we can expect when working in tech, and how tech billionaires treat their workers. The low value comments about Elon being rude or justifying his behavior will be voted down as they are less interesting than the actual matter at hand.
Could you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here. Even when the topic is this flammable, such a comment stands out as low-value, and is the kind of thing we rate-limit accounts for.
Internet users are much too quick (like, orders of magnitude too quick) to jump to conclusions about things like that. That's why the site guidelines ask people not to post suspicions without evidence, like you did here:
I clicked flag to help the site stay focused on actual tech over Twitter drama.
Maybe it's a personal failing on my part, but I used to live in blissful ignorance of what Musk was up to today. Would like to go back to that at some point. If I did care, it's easy enough to follow him on Twitter.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but I don't think it's hard to guess in this case; it's a rage thread about a frequent rage topic.
No, it is not. And nothing about this seems to violate the guidelines [0].
In fact, I'd say fits pretty well with the 'on topic' part of the 'what to submit' section.
"I want outrage" is neither interesting nor stimulating, and there are already plenty of sites to go to for that. There's no need to turn HN into another one.
The impulsive, child like, revengeful, behavior of the Tesla CEO, is highly relevant for the general audience below. Very likely to be a non negligible part of this site readers:
- VCs
- Tesla Shareholders
- Tesla Owners
- Twitter Employees
- SpaceX Employees
- General analysts of what really makes for the success
of Tech Companies. The presence of the CEO or it's
thankful leave of absence at the controls.
- General admirers of human imperfections
- Promoters of AI has a better deserving custodian of the Planet
- Remote bored Aliens, with a lifespan of 50,000 years,
and a curated HN feed, laughing their 4 mouths off
out of our primitive illogical egos.
It's about a technology innovator, Musk, who has behaved in a way which actively stifles innovation from other unique thinkers - like people who have muscular dystrophy and are pursuing remaining in the public sphere, themselves helping to refine human technology for everyone's benefit.
There are millions of people who are working in tech and innovate and do things that stifle innovation. Do you want to report on all of them? No, of course not.
I get it. Musk is polarizing, he has fanboys and haters. I don't care much for what either has to say about him, because their reaction to whatever he does is mostly emotional and emotional responses aren't that interesting. Everyone who's ever had emotions knows how they feel, and I'm not learning anything from knowing that you hate Musk.
It can feel good to get together with like-minded individuals and talk to each other about how much you hate someone, how terrible they are and how you are right and all that (or the opposite, which I'd flag too). I'm not trying to deny you that, I just don't think that it has to happen here, as there are places which are already serving that role specifically.
At the same time, there aren't many other places that avoid it and aggregate interesting content that is curated by people from lots of different backgrounds and where you have a chance to find something that you would've otherwise never been in contact with. I believe that's more important than group-validation of shared dislike.
Online rage, celebrity gossip, cults and anti-cults, ideological battle, internet tropes, and personality drama are all destructive to the intent of HN. This topic is rich in all of those and then some. There's no curiosity here, no interesting new things, no respectful or playful exchange—just people hammering on what they already feel, going after their objects of hatred and each other. That's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
Not really. The fact that "Off-Topic" is even necessary shows that "On-Topic" is not particularly clear. Different people find different things interesting and have their intellectual curiousity gratified in different ways. And a lot of stuff appears unflagged on HN that falls between the two categories.
You seem to have this personal weird exception to the guidelines, which is "Please submit the original source... unless it's a corporate press release." ;-) But you still allow meta-links about corporate press releases, which may put the PR in larger perspective but don't otherwise clearly gratify intellectual curiosity.
Of course people find different things intellectually interesting, but a site dedicated to intellectual interest is still a completely different thing than general news.
I'll diss the corporate press release any day! Beyond that I'm not sure I follow your specific point. What do you think we should do differently?
> Beyond that I'm not sure I follow your specific point.
The question is why HN allows a meta-link about a corporate PR (for example, a Verge story about the PR, since you don't like the direct link) but not something like this? Why is "Corporation X announces Y" intellectually interesting, but this isn't?
Thank you for the guidance @dang - rereading now. Feel free to ignore the rest of this discussion message @dang - unless there is some Cautioning I'm overlooking it on your part to me, here?
* "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." -- is what I'm noticing from the Guidelines. I dismissed @luckylion (hi!) as categorizing this subject as being off-topic for HN.
Reframing in the context of the Guidelines:
I learn from the topic an appreciation for Accessibility (the technology-area that enables marginalized groups). Specifically, how it can be possible for a severely handicapped designer to contribute, greatly in this case, only having the use of fingers for up to 2 hours.
And I learn, how bias by leadership poses difficulties countering it non-linearly / disproportionately to that marginalized individual. Specifically the disabled ex-employee contacted the CEO through Tweeting, the next-most-convenient technology route after failing to successfully use corporate facilities (https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1632931816750346242).
It is hard in my experience to contradict and correct the dominant paradigm when it's at fault. As a technologist, I think about the problems society faces, in this case posed by Twitter Inc's reliance on Tweeting, to a disabled individual.
So I did/do think this subject is appropriate for HN - it's something to be built on; I disagree with the subject's flagging since many of the spin-off discussions are what deserve flagging for "celebrity" character politics.
Certainly the key-takeaway, ADA / Civil Rights violation + character-maligning by innovator of another innovator, is dressed-up in "celebrity". Though not tragic; the now-fired disabled employee seems to be excelling at life.
Good lord, this guy is like Gandhi but championing middle management. I can’t believe I only pay 8 bucks a month for this kind of entertainment. Between Sydney’s ChatBPD outbursts and Musk getting lawyers to lift NDAs to do hostile exit interviews live on Twitter, it feels like the wild old Internet again for a brief moment. We’re so back.
Has he not actually seen Office Space? Does he not know that the guys going "what woud you say you actually do here" are the clueless consultants who don't really understand how the business works? Or am I the one who is either misremembering, or fallen out of touch with what memes mean these days?
This happens a lot; something quotable is eventually shorn of its original context and used completely inappropriately. A much older example is "neither a borrower nor a lender be", repeated as a wise proverb, from Shakespeare no less! The generally-ignored context is that Shakespeare put it in the mouth of Polonius, a character whose apparent role it is to be wrong about everything.
This is a running theme for Musk, he rarely seems to understand the logic of what he posts, just randomly regurgitating them like a meme-based chinese room, then preening when he gets praised by the "meme community" or one of his simps.
From Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison, history is littered with disruptors who could be assholes but, in spite of being assholes, still managed to accomplish remarkable things. Elon is apparently an asshole. Sure, it'd be much better if Elon were a positive public role model or even a likable guy but it's not absolutely required.
Elon just needs to stop tweeting, find a competent "Gwen Shotwell" to run Twitter and get his focus back on succeeding (or failing) at the kinds of very high-risk, high-impact things he might be remembered for in a hundred years (like energizing the entire private and public space industries). I guess I'm weird but I try to separate my personal feelings and preferences when assessing the effectiveness and value of public figures (politicians, corporate leaders, celebrities, etc). In cases like this, it's not easy.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] thread>One of his best-known projects is Ramp Up Iceland, which is building ramps throughout the nation to increase accessibility for people in wheelchairs. He has also personally donated to the legal funds of victims of sexual abuse, and has garnered praise for charitable donations to families in need this holiday season.
https://www.icelandreview.com/news/haraldur-thorleifsson-swe...
He's definitely a man that gives back to his community. And seems to be busy creating, and working.
To a narcissist who doesn't like a person like this, the brain says "Either he's a fraud, or I'm the asshole". And a narcissist brain will settle that question in e heartbeat, with the wrong answer.
I hope those holding shares of Tesla stock feel really good about supporting this behavior.
Edit:
I want to know which account flagged the original post and I want them to explain why they did.
Hello. Is that you, Elon?
"The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that."
They probably should have (and it's still editable as I type) marked it "here is the text of the tweet in question" because if you don't know that it does look like Karwebnetwork is the one making the offensive comment.
> did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Yes, Elon should be more kind, but like a great white shark, put a cage between you and them and move on. This holds for most people who reach the level he has. You don’t become this wealthy by being a decent human (broadly speaking, there are always exceptions).
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
(no current TSLA exposure, I intend to donate to Halli in some fashion)
I'm a current Tesla owner (2018 Model 3) and really like the car. But these are all reasons why I'm uncomfortable investing in another 5-7 years of Tesla ownership. Right now Musk has chosen to not destroy Tesla (or at least, not harm it much) but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun. Plus I intensely dislike the guy and want to encourage the growth of the EV industry away from a single, potentially unreliable supplier. And this is sad, because two years ago I would have gone to the mat to convince my friends and family to buy Teslas.
I see Teslas in town and admire them still. But wondered if this is a thing now for some.
"Elon Musk has made me embarrassed to drive my Tesla now" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34568470
Just last year, I was all-in on getting the Model S despite its cost going way up. I was determined to figure out how to do it. I was also extremely bullish on FSD and definitely had a few shares.
Today, I have almost no interest in getting a new Tesla, have serious doubts about FSD long-term and have sold all of my shares.
Tesla, as a company, is absolutely fantastic, and I am thankful for Elon doing an excellent job at pushing the old guard towards electric. However, I can't continue supporting a person who has such obvious disregard for others he thinks are beneath him.
He could literally brick your car tomorrow, or make it play an endless loop of Nyan cat at full blast or grab the camera footage and publish it on Twitter if he felt like it.
you're suggesting tsla is going to brick someone's car because of something they said on twitter just because elon told them to?
Bully a disabled employee about their disability being a sign of weak character.
Isn't that just the next step of this? I'm not saying it would happen, but it doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility given the level of petty we're dealing with.
This is kind of an odd lesson for you to take honestly. Everything he has done with Twitter has not merely been completely legal, but in fact has underlined how Musk couldn't get out of law and contract. He made a very, very bad buy, and Twitter's owners were happy to take it and made out like bandits. He tried desperately to get out of it, and despite effectively unlimited funds for legal representation, he could not. He failed to take precautions upfront, made a deal, and he was held to it. After that Twitter became private (though since he financed the purchase in part vs buying with purely his own wealth there are still some other players involved). He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either. It's just that it takes time for the legal process to take out and it's only been months. Twitter is also in a vastly less regulated space then vehicles.
I think there are reasonable reasons to be concerned about Tesla, but
>but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun
this isn't one of them in the slightest.
I have friends who worked at Twitter and were owed (and additionally, were promised by Twitter and Musk, in writing) both severance and RSU payouts. Musk has decided not to make these payments, so they are forced to sue/arbitrate for them. Similarly, Musk has decided not to pay AWS for services that AWS is contractually obligated to provide.
As a car owner, I'm confident that if Musk decided to break my warranty agreement I might eventually receive (some) compensation from the courts. Could his lawyers drag the process out by 2-3 years while my car remains broken? Absolutely. The only real protection I have against this is not to do any further business with Musk's companies, and I intend to do that.
My biggest concern is not warranties being broken: it is stuff like "Tesla issues a software update that disables core features of the car", which actually happened to my radar.
I always felt like the marketing around self-driving Tesla's was misleading. They named it misleadingly, ambitiously but misleadingly. So I feel Musk has broken the integrity of the feature since its inception and roll out.
Bizarre about the radar, that sounds like an actual safety problem.
Seeing how he makes guinea pigs out of everyone, to me suggests he'll do anything to get to Mars.
> He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either
You're certainly allowed to contain multitudes, but these seem to contradict each other?
Also, he's done a bunch of things at Twitter that are most definitely not legal, like attempting to fire/lay off people without proper notice in several different ways and jurisdictions.
This is a common thread from multiple people I've talked to who have worked for his companies. Everyone who works even close to his orbit are sycophants. You have to be or your career is... limited. I remember even applying for one of those companies some time ago. The phone screen went well and when I called the recruiter back a week later to ask how things were going, she said "[Hiring Manager's name] disagreed with Elon about something and no longer works here." Yow.
Tesla has:
* falsified worker injury reports
* fired employees for raising security concerns
* fixed cars under goodwill service instead of warranty repairs to avoid lemon laws and various other accounting shenanigans
* blatantly lied about and marketed products named as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, both of which have led to several accidents and even deaths
* personally attacked regulators or former regulators
* tried to quiet sexual harassment happening at the company
* industry lows in quality and reliability
* abused government subsidies
The labor abuses, personal attacks, and dishonest FSD marketing are downright distasteful (and illegal when found to be so by a court or regulator), but creative application of government subsidies is fine if the ends justify the means. There are no heroes, just people.
Edit: And I'm not suggesting this should be a normalized thing. Just that it's unfortunate how greed trumps any sort of regular decorum.
Not clear as the employee appears to live in Iceand, not USA, much less California.
I can't even guess what the law in Iceland might be. On one hand, it seems generally a pretty reasonable place. On the other hand it's a small place and won't have the time, bandwidth or interest in passing as many laws as bigger places do.
Are you from Iceland? I wonder if they have a kind of default rule that says "in this area, if we don't have our own law we adopt the one of X (say DK or EU)"
In the meantime Toferson is cleared to pursue the latest medical theory for muscular dystrophy.
https://advances.massgeneral.org/neuro/journal.aspx?id=1699
Well, except for one recent notable exception involving a blue bird.
Nearly everything Elon disclosed didn't need to be disclosed publicly.
Just because someone asks you a question publicly, it doesn't give you carte blanche to unload every single detail you know about the person asking the question.
There is not one single thing case in there that makes it OK for an employer to disclose medical information about you, however vague or detailed.
It's not murder, but it's also wrong.
Or howabout if a truck driver gets blinded somehow. Do you still have to keep employing him as a truck driver, and going through the motions as if he is still employed?
That seems ridiculous. "Job at twitter" is not a resource to which people all have a right of some kind.
Ianal, but ...
To the point: just saying that "some employee has a disability" does not mean they are disclosing the disability. On the contrary, in order for the company to accommodate, it's needs to be said.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/index.ht...
Like if you or CEO you might not be able to confirm or debate and employee or (in the process of being fired) ex-employees health information. It just might be part of HIPAA that says you don't have the right to speak about that anymore.
To be clear, I haven't found this restriction in the regulations of that link I just shared but that's what I suspect given what I've seen of employer restrictions from my work history.
Update:
No I think I'm coming around to your perspective because it looks like HIPA is only applicable to health insurance providers. Not employers. Unless of course the employer is a self-funded health insurance provider, I don't know the details of twitter's health plan.
https://www.calltherightattorney.com/blog/2022/02/can-my-emp...
This link suggests that it might be an ADA violation. However Elon Musk could claim that he is revealing that the employee has a disability through Elon's reading of the employees Twitter feed which has public information about his muscular dystrophy. That's a way to weasel out of this ADA violation, potentially.
Update 2:
Ah but it looks like it's a civil rights violation:
> releasing an employee’s medical information in retaliation to that attorney opposing unlawful discrimination or harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that will give rise to a very good claim for damages as well.
It felt wrong, reading what Elon wrote, and it looks like, if this blog post is to be trusted, the law also agrees with that sentiment.
A couple of days ago there was someone asking about not using Windows laptop for religious purposes and the answer was that if that was a large hassle for the business, it was okay to say no.
Edit:
> releasing an employee’s medical information
Does saying that X has a disability is a release of medical information, when that's public information in their Twitter profile and runs a business to help others with that disability?
Re: releasing otherwise public information:
That is a fantastic question. I don't know. I suspect there is a legal case to be made:
I think about this as a hypothetical "reasonable person", which is what appears in the courtroom TV shows that I personally have watched. Perhaps obviously, I am not a lawyer, But I do watch TV shows about lawyers <3.
1) A reasonable person might conclude that Musk did not research Harald's Twitter feed but instead merely read his name, after receiving the direct tweet from Harald, and then asked Twitter human resources' database to confirm he was in fact His Twitter employee.
2) Alternatively a reasonable person might conclude that Musk did research Harald's Twitter feed before replying. And so it was okay for Musk to disclose. Again I'm being very approximate.
So I think it's possible to make a case and it might be worth the potential legal victory and monetary payout for damages.
To reiterate something tangential to your question, I think it is clear that regardless of the disclosure, Musk's thinking around the termination does include Haraldur's disability. That's not right, legally, from what I've read.
Companies accommodate employees disabilities in order to allow the employee to do their jobs. Elon's argument is that they're not working, even after accomodations. It has nothing to do with the disability. Will it hold in a court of law? Ianal
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/499/am-i-a-c...
I'm pretty sure that if you allow the release of HIPAA covered information from a provider to your employer that the information stored by your employer is not protected by HIPAA anymore.
HIPAA restricts what covered entities can do (basically healthcare providers and insurance), not what can be done with medical information in general.
Of course most decent employers will handle even mildly sensitive information in a confidential way.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417?s=46...
This is so far below the bare minimum of reasonable business behavior I think it will cause big problems for Elon hiring or acquiring companies.
We need to accept that CEOs care about morals because of their bottom line (money), not because of legals or that they're nice. It's not the job of a CEO to be nice.
People that hate your product will never buy it. That's why diet soda or fast food care about trees and the sea: paying customers. Money.
The difference between internal communication to accommodate and public communication to discredit should be obvious.
They won't, but I hope they do.
I admit it's a particularly juicy episode, but (a) that's not what HN is for and (b) it destroys what it is for. We're trying for very much the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935 if anyone wants it.
I also had never seen that Tumblr post which has been linked here, giving an account of how the culture at Tesla allegedly involved a lot of processes for managing and working around Elon. I think that's interesting, too, for questions it raises about leadership and celebrity and funding in general.
I admit that the conversation has not focused on those things too much. :-\
But I'm glad I saw the thread, at least.
A few weeks ago I also had a surgery that, for just a couple days, left me unable to sit up on my own or walk across the room, due to the pain.
And then I spent last night visiting a relative who is (I think) dying. She's completely lucid but now immobile to the point that she can't sit all the way up, get out of bed on her own, or walk, and I don't think her mobility ever increases much again from here. (Incidentally, she is also legally blind due to the same genetic condition as I mentioned before.)
I think my still-forming thoughts and feelings about all of that drew me to this story, and to Thorleifsson's persona.
It sucks that he has the condition that he has, but at the same time, he doesn't seem like a very pitiable person to me. He seems dignified, capable, successful, and loved. Someone to be admired, or even envied.
So it's really interesting to me, then, how some people see him as 'playing the pity card' when he describes his disability as it comes up in this discussion.
Like I said, my recent thoughts about disability are still forming so I don't have some interesting conclusion that I'm proud of. But I think there's a lot to think about here, beyond the outrage and hero worship.
Maybe all this hubbub will help push a thoughtful article or two about disability to the front page in the next few days. That would be cool.
How can you feel shame about your impulse towards being a horrible bigot when the President of the free world or a multi-billionaire is just like you!
He was massively bullied as a child, now it's his turn!
He was not.
He might be lying, but it's just as likely that he's 'having my turn!'
Elon's father has talked about it in interviews. It seems Elon was the bully in this specific incident.
Pretty sad existence, even with all of his toys.
Elon has enough money that he could quit today and have enough money for 10 lives of pure hedonistic bliss... and yet chooses to spend his days on his phone, posting shitty memes and being a dick on Twitter.
It's mind boggling, really.
I do see that Trump redirected hate from his followers onto targets. Is that what is going to happen here? Is that the unsupportive toxic aspect of this type of social media?
I'm honestly starting to wonder if we humans might be more imperfect than we let on. Stranger things have happened before!
Now...on to read some stories.
That's weird, because what's this?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unforced_error
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/unfor...
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=unforced%20e...
OOPSADAISY: oh, how sweet is the irony...you said "there's" not "there's not" - I will just leave this up as further demonstration of my point, and some humble pie!
> What you're saying would suggest all errors are fundamentally alike, only differing in severity
You are working at the concrete level, I am speaking at higher levels of abstraction.
Note that what is said and what is received are often not the same - sometimes, it is even the opposite!
> ...but this is of course not the case.
The word "is" is very slippery/sneaky - watch out!
> I don't know of anyone who thinks in that way about people's behaviour.
Perhaps you do not know everyone - or, of those people you do know, you may not have comprehensive knowledge of their cognitive styles and capabilities.
> Your dismissiveness is woefully misplaced.
Your attitude is being noted, Mr Rivers.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/bed10ee3-765d-4985-89e0-4fa4742...
Now, back to all of the interesting stories in this thread...
Do you consider this a universal fact or a local fact?
Consider how a graduate level physics lecture would look to a C student in grade 9, for example.
> If you cannot comprehend why simply dismissing shit behaviour with "he's only human" is moronic then that makes you quite special.
This is quite interesting, what does it refer to that occurred in this conversation?
I recommend that if you're going to criticize someone, criticize something that they have actually done. Granted, this may be a lot less fun, but it is at least plausibly more optimal.
The guy politely tries to get his attention to find out whether he still has a job. And Musk's response is to interrogate him publicly, mock him, and accuse him of using his disability as an excuse to avoid work.
It's cretinous in so many different ways it's hard to see how the stupidest person would think it a sensible course of action.
Particularly post-Twitter, the problem has gotten _clearer_ to the public, but that was his first really public obvious "by the way, have I mentioned that I'm completely awful?" thing.
Public opinion might be up or down, depending on which community you're polling, but I believe he's back to being the richest person in the world[0], so I'd say he "got away with it" in every possible respect.
0. https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-once-again-richest-21554083...
It's a sign of immaturity.
Humbly, when I don't understand where Musk comes from on something, I don't assume that the disconnect is due to superior intelligence on my part[0] (but weirdly, plenty of people with objectively little accomplishment have no problem assuming that they are seeing something Musk is blind to)
So, everything that follows is conjecture for the sake of a probabilistic answer to your question.
I suspect Musk is "allergic" to the type of work/worker this person seems to do. The person's self-cited list of accomplishments doesn't actually list a single impactful accomplishment, which isn't acceptable for someone senior enough to not do any hands-on work.
Now, again, this is a guess, but I suspect that this type of "allergy" is a big component of Musk's success in general in how he works and who he hires for his companies. It likely serves his very well. As a "side effect" of that allergy, it probably compels him to toe/cross the line in cases like this. If you believe in something deeply, you speak to it even at your own risk.
Again, not saying that's what I would do, but I am also not the guy who runs Tesla and all these other companies, so if you have a choice between what I'd do, and what Musk would do, do what he would do!
[0] It's very popular to say he's a hype man who just rides the wave of provocative tweets. But... have people who say that ever seen, drove, ride in a Tesla? Those are real. Maybe people can't comprehend the amount of stuff you gotta get right to make and sell a car, if they did they would keep that totally distinct from the "hype" category. And aren't those ships going to space etc? It's a weird flex to claim that Musk doesn't get really important, difficult things done - and if you accept that he does, then it's weird to claim "but I don't understand how he works, so I assume he's the idiot"
What was the former employee expecting anyway ? Why someone suposedly as "talented" and wealthy as is is would ask and spill all of this publicly ? It's pure attention seeking
People can downvote but im 100% sure thats what elons think^^
In this context, does it matter what his net worth is? Are you implying it’s not possible that people defend him for his positions alone?
Both him and Halli come off bad in this exchange, in my opinion. Not sure why money is a deciding factor to you.
It seems that Elon really created his own bubble of quacks as followers, and feels empowered by that.
Actually, when I think deeper about it, it's a little scary...
- That employees have no right to know whether or not they’re employed?
- Or that employee private medical information should be allowed to be disclosed publicly?
This whole thing started because Twitter’s HR couldn’t tell this person if he was or wasn’t employed by Twitter. He guessed the only way he would get an answer was to publicly ask Elon on Twitter. And guess what, he was right! That indeed turned out to be the only way to get an answer.
Elon further decided to commit a bunch of privacy and employment rights abuses but fundamentally it was simply a question of an HR dept that didn’t know who it employed.
They're literally followers, if Elon said/did there's a good reason for it. As classic as it can be for a cult of personality.
They're agreeing with him that he is the infallible Dear Leader, pretty much. The Musk following, at this stage, is a full-blown personality cult; what Musk is actually saying/doing is rather beside the point.
I'm struggling to think of anyone who accumulated this degree of blind adulation and _did_ act like a normal, reasonable person; maybe being an arsehole is actually an entry requirement.
Unfortunately, that sort of behavior tends to appear as "magical thinking", "woo woo", "pedantry", "nonsensical", "a waste of time", "sea-lioning", {all the memes}, etc, despite it being essentially what the scientific method does, but in a very different and much simpler, deterministic problem space.
Crazies are at work here too.
Sycophant is sort of behavior profile. It's a thing that you can do, be a sycophant. It looks like that's what's going on for these so-called crazies.
Sad to see how easily HN is gamed.
Do you think this way: A thread of people dunking on Musk is so cool! Calling people crazies (implying that you are not crazy, only they are!) is so fantastic!
Tesla and SpaceX were both v risky bets. He also seems good at hiring the right folks to take ideas and execute on them.
Although like Howard Hughes he is quite the narcissist. Twitter is fumbling, he's being a d-head and picking fights in open.
I imagine it's costing him quite a few potential Tesla buyers.
That being said, this makes me curious how (if?) Elon manages/measures his reputational impact, and if he even cares how he comes across when he says things like this. Is there an upside (for Elon) to him acting like this?
>Is there an upside (for Elon) to him acting like
Behind every mad man is a sad man. He is using his workaholism (his addiction to work and also his addiction to power) to ease his depression.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-says-he-may-have...
Even Steve Jobs was depressed and his covert depression became overt after he was fired from Apple.
https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
Excerpt
Managing Elon was a huge part of the company (SpaceX) culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.
Here's what will ruin Elon's day: Even with the algorithm now artificially boosting Musk's tweets¹, Halli's response has more likes.
¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-15/musk-forc...
Edit: works!
According to dang, flags almost invariably come from HN users, not from HN moderators.
It was the Musk fans.
I was going to reply and say that it's important for people to see the tweets anyway, but then I realized that the people most in need of seeing the tweets are the ones who did see them and flagged this submission.
I wonder if there are any "undecideds" remaining, or if everyone here has already sorted into pro-Musk/anti-Musk groups?
I heard some people started to change their minds about Trump after he mocked a disabled reporter, so I don't know.
This is indeed very interesting to HN (you can see that by the number of upvotes and comments). It touches on what we can expect when working in tech, and how tech billionaires treat their workers. The low value comments about Elon being rude or justifying his behavior will be voted down as they are less interesting than the actual matter at hand.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063457
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063442
... but rather to email us at hn@ycombinator.com if they think they're seeing manipulation or abuse. We're happy to look at the data in such cases.
I can tell you from long experience, though, that in threads on divisive topics, the Occamesque explanation is almost always adequate.
Maybe it's a personal failing on my part, but I used to live in blissful ignorance of what Musk was up to today. Would like to go back to that at some point. If I did care, it's easy enough to follow him on Twitter.
More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/how-the-a...
I imagine that's what's going on.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- VCs
- Tesla Shareholders
- Tesla Owners
- Twitter Employees
- SpaceX Employees
- General analysts of what really makes for the success of Tech Companies. The presence of the CEO or it's thankful leave of absence at the controls.
- General admirers of human imperfections
- Promoters of AI has a better deserving custodian of the Planet
- Remote bored Aliens, with a lifespan of 50,000 years, and a curated HN feed, laughing their 4 mouths off out of our primitive illogical egos.
It's factually really relevant to hacker news.
It's about a technology innovator, Musk, who has behaved in a way which actively stifles innovation from other unique thinkers - like people who have muscular dystrophy and are pursuing remaining in the public sphere, themselves helping to refine human technology for everyone's benefit.
It's fine being on Reddit as well.
I get it. Musk is polarizing, he has fanboys and haters. I don't care much for what either has to say about him, because their reaction to whatever he does is mostly emotional and emotional responses aren't that interesting. Everyone who's ever had emotions knows how they feel, and I'm not learning anything from knowing that you hate Musk.
It can feel good to get together with like-minded individuals and talk to each other about how much you hate someone, how terrible they are and how you are right and all that (or the opposite, which I'd flag too). I'm not trying to deny you that, I just don't think that it has to happen here, as there are places which are already serving that role specifically.
At the same time, there aren't many other places that avoid it and aggregate interesting content that is curated by people from lots of different backgrounds and where you have a chance to find something that you would've otherwise never been in contact with. I believe that's more important than group-validation of shared dislike.
Online rage, celebrity gossip, cults and anti-cults, ideological battle, internet tropes, and personality drama are all destructive to the intent of HN. This topic is rich in all of those and then some. There's no curiosity here, no interesting new things, no respectful or playful exchange—just people hammering on what they already feel, going after their objects of hatred and each other. That's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
If anyone assumed otherwise, now would be a good moment to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate one's image of what HN is supposed to be!
Edit: I just inserted "or celebrities" into the guidelines. It was already implied, but it won't hurt to make it explicit.
Don't you think that certain links can be newsworthy despite generating predictably ugly discussion threads?
It does seem that you're saying the site is not about news per se.
You seem to have this personal weird exception to the guidelines, which is "Please submit the original source... unless it's a corporate press release." ;-) But you still allow meta-links about corporate press releases, which may put the PR in larger perspective but don't otherwise clearly gratify intellectual curiosity.
I'll diss the corporate press release any day! Beyond that I'm not sure I follow your specific point. What do you think we should do differently?
The question is why HN allows a meta-link about a corporate PR (for example, a Verge story about the PR, since you don't like the direct link) but not something like this? Why is "Corporation X announces Y" intellectually interesting, but this isn't?
Anyway, if this submission remains flagged, then this newer one should be flagged too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063232
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35061369
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35061343
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060863
* "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." -- is what I'm noticing from the Guidelines. I dismissed @luckylion (hi!) as categorizing this subject as being off-topic for HN.
Reframing in the context of the Guidelines:
I learn from the topic an appreciation for Accessibility (the technology-area that enables marginalized groups). Specifically, how it can be possible for a severely handicapped designer to contribute, greatly in this case, only having the use of fingers for up to 2 hours.
And I learn, how bias by leadership poses difficulties countering it non-linearly / disproportionately to that marginalized individual. Specifically the disabled ex-employee contacted the CEO through Tweeting, the next-most-convenient technology route after failing to successfully use corporate facilities (https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1632931816750346242).
It is hard in my experience to contradict and correct the dominant paradigm when it's at fault. As a technologist, I think about the problems society faces, in this case posed by Twitter Inc's reliance on Tweeting, to a disabled individual.
So I did/do think this subject is appropriate for HN - it's something to be built on; I disagree with the subject's flagging since many of the spin-off discussions are what deserve flagging for "celebrity" character politics.
Certainly the key-takeaway, ADA / Civil Rights violation + character-maligning by innovator of another innovator, is dressed-up in "celebrity". Though not tragic; the now-fired disabled employee seems to be excelling at life.
Has he not actually seen Office Space? Does he not know that the guys going "what woud you say you actually do here" are the clueless consultants who don't really understand how the business works? Or am I the one who is either misremembering, or fallen out of touch with what memes mean these days?
Elon just needs to stop tweeting, find a competent "Gwen Shotwell" to run Twitter and get his focus back on succeeding (or failing) at the kinds of very high-risk, high-impact things he might be remembered for in a hundred years (like energizing the entire private and public space industries). I guess I'm weird but I try to separate my personal feelings and preferences when assessing the effectiveness and value of public figures (politicians, corporate leaders, celebrities, etc). In cases like this, it's not easy.
More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935
Title should be: "Picking a fight with a disabled acquired founder who didn't knew he was fired since 9 days"