Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/19/spacex-has-a-draconian-stock-options-policy.html
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He was always that guy. There was a time he cared enough about public perception to use PR professionals to create an image of a thoughtful tech visionary, but they were replaced with an auto-reply poop emoji.
Also, he started neither SpaceX nor Tesla. That’s a hangover from the PR days.
Finally, yes, closely held companies will do whatever they can get away with if not subject to strict regulation. Especially if they tell their employees “we’re like a family”.
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AksHuaLLy…
AksHuaLLy…
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I agree he was always that guy. Many (myself included) were willing to cut him a lot of slack because of the cool things he was associated with, but I think it started turning sour about 6 years ago with the Pedo guy comments. That backlash only accelerated since then as he has made himself a very public person sharing every shitty thought that pops into his head.
Many here saw him for what he was all along though.
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He’s a Nazi apologist at the most generous interpretation.
Did that just slip by you?
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Just to echo what @gracchus and @NukeML have said, Musk hasn’t started anything successful. He didn’t start PayPal. He started a competitor and then merged with PayPal. He didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. He did found SpaceX, I guess, but he didn’t design their craft. And of course we’re all aware that he didn’t start Xitter. Musk likes to portray himself as an engineer and an inventor. He is neither. He has a BS in Economics, and a BA in Physics (which seems backwards to me, but whatever). He’s a Nazi nepo baby with more money than sense.
ETA: People used to compare him to Tony Stark. The man isn’t even in Justin Hammer’s league, much less Tony Stark’s.
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The “Pedo guy” comment was the “aha” moment for me. That was when I realized that this guy is not what he seemed to be.
Of course, Elmo now spews nastiness like “Pedo guy” every day of the week.
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You can tell he founded SpaceX and only bought Tesla because one has an X in the company name, and the other just in a product name. So far as I can tell that is his only real contribution besides telling investors about what he saw in Total Recall.
But if you want to ask who else could make both cars and rockets, well…
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Some eight or nine years ago I got an email from an engineer with whom I had worked with before (in a business completely unrelated to space travel). He asked me if wanted to join him at SpaceX, offered to arrange meetings, etc. He did tell me that the schedule was grueling:
"I won’t lie to you, it’s a very long day, 16 hours. I leave home at 5:00AM, get here in an hour, go the gym (off site) for an hour and roll into work by 8:00AM. I can’t really consider leaving here much earlier than 7:30~8:00PM because the 405 is a parking lot. I get on the road at 8 and get home by 9. "
I said thanks for the offer but I’m good. Just a few months later I sent him an email to give him a virtual high five after SpaceX had successfully landed a booster back on earth or something. I got an automated email stating that he no longer worked there. I guess I missed that bullet.
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Subaru, Honda & Tata come to mind as started in the last 100 years.
Studabaker?
Let’s look:
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And a BS in BS.
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sorry,…what?!?
yes.
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That’s a funny way to spell fascist? 
Except for all the racism, misogyny, and “we’re a family” bullshit designed to crack down on unionization…
Maybe NASA? Anywhere that people are treated well and get to do interesting work? That’s not SpaceX, even if some of the work has the possibility of being fascinating. At the end of the day, it’s not about actual space exploration, it’s about fluffing the ego of a fascist. I’m guessing your tour was probably carefully managed…
This is who he always was… he just wasn’t a high-profile, didn’t have as many yes men, and he hid that shit better. Dude came from a family who made their wealth based on apartheid emerald mining…
Anyways… cokes all around (@gracchus, @NukeML, @KathyPartdeux, @danimagoo, anyone else I missed)…
He’s bringing back early industrial revolution hours… to be fair, so is all of silicon valley…
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This is nothing new. My father-in-law was, back in the RenderMan days of Pixar, its CFO. He was one of a long line of people who Steve Jobs made sure to screw out of his options which he intended to exercise. By one back-of-the-envelop calculation, if he had held on to that stock through the Disney purchase* it would have been worth something like $50M. But, you know, fuck you – Steve Jobs probably didn’t like that my FIL called him often to remind him that they still needed to make payroll.
- This is an enormous if, my FIL was very conservative fellow, he’d have sold it off long before that – but that’s some sense of the scale of what Jobs took from him for, you know, reasons.
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… and questionably casual regard to workplace safety.
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Something too many people figure out too late is that no matter how inspiring the work itself might seem, there is no good job without good working conditions. 
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Many years ago I got contacted about an opportunity at SpaceX and it actually sounded interesting. Around that same time the “pedo guy” comments happened, and I thought there was no way anyone would good sense - or even me! - would associate with such a public jerk.
I’ve known a lot of people with a lot of money over the years, and what it brings with it is total lack of accountability, so you get to be exactly who you are with no filter. And no one can really tell you no - or if they do you cut them off. Firings for no reason, business grudges that don’t make any kind of financial sense, divorces, cutting off your kids, whatever (Elon of course famously has done all of this multiple times). I’ve also known very rich people who were exceptionally kind, interesting, and charitable - but these folks are in the minority.
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It was also around that time when EM claimed to be an anarchist like the ones from the Culture novels, and was stripped of that illusion by actual anarchist and anarchist-adjacent people.
I now think he was shopping around for an ideology where he could be God-king. I don’t know how he came to the conclusion that anarchists would accept that, seeing that No Gods, No Kings is a big thing for them.
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