In the case of both Rivian and Musk’s companies, I’m willing to suspend judgment with the open-minded approach that the respective CEOs may simply have been unaware or insufficiently responsive to problems on the factory floor, rather than being actively malignant. AFAIK this remains plausible for Rivian, but there’s no doubt that in terms of sexual harassment, racial harassment, and the general syndrome of employee abuse and the creation of a toxic work environment, Musk is directly and personally responsible as a result of his personal ethical failures and active malignancy. Some of that was addressed here:
Like what? Having NASA as a customer? “Brand X would have died an early death if not for their best customer” doesn’t sound like a compelling argument.
Indeed. We have an excellent comparison between Blue Origin and SpaceX here:
- Both were started with similar high-level goals of improving access to space
- Both were founded at roughly the same time (BO was slightly earlier, but one could argue that they weren’t very serious at first)
- Bezos had far more resources than Musk at the time, and for most of its history
- Musk and Bezos are unarguably ruthless
- Both are hard on their employees. Though I’m not sure anyone at SpaceX has had to pee in a bottle.
- They both had access to the same talent pool
- They could both build factories and offices wherever they liked
- Bezos probably had a bit more lobbying power than Musk for most of their history, although neither one is comparable to traditional aerospace
And so on. It would be hard to find a closer comparison between two companies.
And yet here we are. BO has two products; an unreliable, suborbital joyride and an engine which they’ve shipped two units of. SpaceX in comparison has almost completely taken over the industry.
Why did SpaceX succeed but not BO? If you say “it’s the employees”, sure, but that just pushes the problem out: why did SpaceX get the good ones and not BO? It sure wasn’t pay. And luck just doesn’t last that long, especially in aerospace, which is totally unforgiving.
I have my own explanation but I’d like to hear yours.
On the fourth hand:
That may be a valid criticism of Scaringe. But then again, it may not. Objectively, all we have here is a one-sided blog post, not coincidentally one posted on the very same day that this disgruntled former employee filed a lawsuit against Rivian seeking big bucks for unjust dismissal. Rivian has chosen not to comment, preferring to let things play out in court. And even if Schwab prevails in the lawsuit, it’s not at all clear to what extent, if any at all, Scaringe was responsible for her grievances. I read somewhere that she claimed to have been cautioned by senior executives not to bring her concerns (about Rivian pricing and manufacturing deadlines) directly to Scaringe, which suggests that Scaringe was totally out of the loop on these events. Note how all of this stands in stark contrast to Musk, whose companies not only embrace a culture of misogyny, but of outright sexual harassment, in which Musk personally participated.
Seems like a double standard to me. Unsubstantiated claims from a friend of someone who allegedly was paid a settlement for unspecified reasons: must be true because Musk was involved. Unsubstantiated claims from a primary source about a toxic bro culture: must be a hit piece, and anyway, no proof that Scaringe was involved. #MeTooUnlessItsFromACompanyILike
The flight attendant settlement was by no means the only example. Are all these other people lying, too?
You were trying to make a point about Musk directly. Maybe it’s true, maybe there’s more to the story. I’m willing to accept it as plausible, though the details are a bit odd.
But the Rolling Stone article seems to be about a general culture of sexual harassment, which they pin on Musk for encouraging a frat boy environment. Fair enough. But if shit always rolls downhill, you should apply that logic to the author of the Rivian piece as well. It’s not like she was way down the food chain, either–she was interacting with C-suite executives. People who themselves interacted directly with Scaringe. Did Scaringe encourage that kind of culture or just ignore it? Hard to say.
In almost all these cases, Rivian included, it’s really hard to get a big-picture view from the articles written on it. Even without dismissing them as hit pieces, are they actually representative of the whole? How to they actually compare to other places? Unfortunately, articles rarely actually dive into the detail needed to get a real picture.
Fair enough, but I’m just saying that there is far more evidence of a toxic culture at Musk’s companies than at Rivian or almost anywhere else, that the culture appears to be particularly brutal in many different ways (as we’re seeing now at Twitter), and that there is ample evidence of Musk’s direct contribution to that toxicity (as we’re also seeing at Twitter).
Yes, but the brutal, toxic culture at Musk’s companies is a good thing, because spaceships and electric cars.
I certainly won’t deny that Musk’s companies have an intense culture, and that this almost certainly leads to toxicity in some cases. What might be low-level sexism at once place ends up being amplified at a place where everyone is worked to the point of burnout, and that’s doubly true when the leader is acting like a man-child. At the same time, you can’t deny that Musk has quite a few enemies, and even if their ire is well-deserved, it doesn’t mean that a constant barrage of negative articles gives an exactly accurate picture.
In a fairly minor way, my company was the target of some union propaganda. The union in question didn’t give a shit about our workers; their target was our food service provider, with whom they had a dispute. They wanted to apply pressure to the contractor, and so went to their customers–i.e, us. And so what they did was discover a sorta medium-sized scandal our company was involved in. It was a real thing that we didn’t handle as well as we should have. But the union set up web sites, put protesters out around our campus, and had people mill around downtown passing out flyers (I picked one up, and if you dug through the links, yuo could find the union connection). They didn’t give a shit about our customers, either–it was just a purely cynical ploy to juice up an event beyond its “natural” level of controversy. The idea being that we’d say to the contractor “hey, get your shit together, the union is making us look bad”.
So whenever I see stories like this, or op-eds, or something else, I wonder how much they’re being juiced, whether by unions or some other adversary. Maybe the Rivian story is exactly the same thing; hard to say. Regardless, I don’t take the raw prevalence of these stories as any indication of where they lie on the spectrum of badness. Give me raw data to form a solid conclusion there.
We can do a lot worse, after all. Sexual harassment is bad, but it’s not goddamn child labor:
Not sure why, but the story seemed to drop from the public consciousness. Hyundai articles probably just don’t get the same number of clicks as ones about Tesla.
Not a good thing. An acceptable tradeoff, given that the alternative to electric cars is the end of technological civilization.
Maybe one day we can have an automaker of any kind with a spotless record, but until that point, I’ll take what I can get.
I was pretty much onside with you on your previous post, but not here. Here you sound like Bill Maher, a fine fellow whose show I watch religiously, but who occasionally pisses me off when he says something stupid. What Maher said recently that pissed me off was about how much he likes Elon Musk. Why? Because the only solution to climate change is technology, and Musk is The Man – maybe not the only one, but representative of the kind of genius that will save the world.
What I say to both of you is this: bullshit. Musk is not the Saviour of Mankind. He’s not the Second Coming of Jesus H. Christ. He’s just an entrepreneur – deeply flawed and somewhat insane – whose name has, rightly or wrongly, been associated with some important technological achievements. Among those is popularizing the first practical EV. The EV revolution would have happened anyway, but Musk arguably helped to make it happen a few years sooner that it otherwise might have. I myself will eventually get an EV, but it’s extremely unlikely that it will be a Tesla.
As for climate change, this is shaping up to be the biggest political and technological challenge that mankind has ever faced, and fixing it will require an unprecedented global effort involving every aspect of our capabilities and our will to achieve essential goals in both mitigation and adaptation. It will be a massive collective effort of unprecedented scale, and if history ultimately recognizes a few heroes in that endeavour, I doubt that Musk will be among them, just as I doubt that Musk will ever be credited with establishing cities on Mars.
…I couldn’t imagine thinking that a racist, misogynistic abusive working environment is an acceptable trade-off for a two-bit huckster and his massively overvalued car company.
Whether right or wrong, I doubt this will be the case. I think Musk will be among the Edisons and Fords and others in our cultural memory.
You are certainly right that EVs only reflect a small fraction of what is necessary to transition to a post-carbon future (though they are an absolute requirement). The unsung engineers working to lower the costs of solar panel production, or developing offshore wind, etc., are just as important as what Tesla is doing. But they’re nameless, and in the absence of an alternative, people will use what is available. And, frankly, people tend to forget the negatives over time (again, see Edison and Ford). Not to mention that he has many decades left to burnish his image, like Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Gates.
Whether the stock price reflects reality is irrelevant. What matters is that Tesla has by a wide margin the highest production rate of long-range EVs. In several markets they are the best-selling cars of any kind. And, importantly–they are among the most profitable car companies out there. Profitable means sustainable, which is what we need. In contrast, GM for example thinks they’ll break even in 2025. Until that time, it is in their interest to push ICE vehicles. Not good for anyone.
For years, we’ve been told that each new EV offering was to be a Tesla killer. Never happened. We’re finally seeing automakers say that Tesla is the undisputed leader. For instance:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclusive-toyota-scrambles-ev-reboot-with-eye-tesla-2022-10-24/
I want the competitors to catch up. But it doesn’t appear to be happening soon.
…yeah, but the fact that Elon Musk is a two-bit hustler and that a racist, misogynistic abusive working environment follows him everywhere that he goes is very relevant actually. This isn’t an acceptable trade-off.
The fact that Tesla is massively overvalued just goes to show how everything that Elon Musk does is a mirage.
Elon Musk isn’t going to save the world. The tech-bros are not going to be our salvation. The opposite is true. They are widening the income gap. They have decimated labour protections. They are not the good guys.
Climate change is the existential threat. Everything else is just noise, especially “labour” related nonsense. In fact, labor has done incredible damage to the EV transition. They have pushed back at every turn because their jobs will no longer exist. All of the expertise that went into ICE vehicles is completely irrelevant now.
As a controversial, larger-than-life figure and major entrepreneur, I have no doubt that Musk will be in the history books, but only as a business figure. What I’m skeptical of is that he’ll be lauded as any sort of major contributor to addressing the climate crisis, despite his cultivated self-image as the founder of Tesla (he wasn’t) for the sole purpose of contributing to the Good of Mankind (it isn’t). If there are any heroes in this unprecedented multinational endeavour to address climate change, it ought to be people like the climate scientist James Hansen, who first brought climate change to the world’s attention and became a climate activist, fighting decades of hostile denialism, or Michael E. Mann, who definitively quantified the alarming scale of post-industrial warming.
…yep. And we need to lobby the governments, people need to get out and protest, people need to force meaningful change.
The tech-bros aren’t going to do it. They don’t give a fuck. They just pretend that they do. It’s profitable for them. It’s literally worth billions of dollars to them. That’s the only thing they care about.
And none of this is an excuse to have a racist, misogynistic abusive working environment. That isn’t an acceptable trade-off. It should be entirely possible to run a business without allowing racism, sexism and abuse to proliferate.
Both legally and “morally”, he was. The legal documents say he is a co-founder. And while he was not there at the very first instant of creation, he was there for every important event in their history and provided their first real funding. Not to mention being CEO for every product release.