> The message, sent on Thursday and titled “pause all hiring worldwide”, came two days after the billionaire told staff to return to the workplace or leave
So people who claimed less than 24h ago it was at lest partially a way of creating cheap layoffs, were proven right pretty swiftly.
This is par for the course. Every time there is big news expected, Elon’s antics are elevated and a coordinated distraction by way of a tweet is posted. See the “political attacks on me” tweet as an example, which coincidentally was posted the day prior to his sexual assault allegations.
The man has bought Twitter for the purposes of distracting and manipulating the public.
> To be fair, twitter ownership is not required to use twitter for this purpose.
I understood that remark as a reference to the way Musk's bid to buy Twitter with no intention to follow-through, in light of other shameless PR ploys like the absurd political persecution claim, looks like a shameless attempt to distract people from other problems affecting Musk, such as Tesla's tanking stock price.
He did the same thing with stock sales last fall. The sale was already in motion when he created a Twitter poll and made a bunch of noise about voluntarily paying taxes. It's bizarre how many people still take his manipulative actions at face value.
I am still amazed the DoD will work with this guy. Yes, there are thousands of people at Space X, many of them former government employees that are well (and still) respected by their colleagues on civil/military side, but the latitude this guy gets...
You would tell by checking whether he had been asked for comment on the story before making the claims that there would be political attacks on him, which would reveal that he tweeted a few hours after he learned of the story.
Of course, it's not really so easy to tell. A lot of people select a certain narrative beforehand, and then adapt their interpretation of the facts to match it in retrospect. Or maybe they just made an honest attempt at figuring out the truth. And they're wrong. Or they're right.
The world is really complicated, and figuring out the truth from subtle signals is really hard. At best it's a game of probabilities, and I don't think we're often seeing the best in short-form comments on the internet.
A lot of commentary I see regarding the most successful entrepeneurs really triggers my suspicion for fallacious thinking, most often confirmation bias for a worldview where "the rich" are out to get everyone else and therefore are expected to lie all the time. I think that generally, the most correct explanations for the comments and behavior or entrepeneurs like Elon Musk are much more complex than that.
One thing though; I've become quite jaded towards this after seeing the firehose of lies and distortions regarding the Model 3 production ramp-up in 2017-18. It's hard to take any direct skeptical claim at face value after seeing that; the best I can do it noting that someone said this and concluding "not enough information yet to be certain".
Occasionally, there really is a conspiracy, in the sense that a lot of people have a vested interest in having things perceived a certain way. Don't dismiss the idea just because it has the word "conspiracy" in it.
Is there a situation where you would not expect the dirt of the rich and famous to be reported on? Where journalists collectively, ALL OF THEM, right-wing nutjobs and useless centrists alike, would say let's not?
This whole attitude of expect political attacks on me is disingenuous at best. Anybody with power should always expect their personal faults to be reported, whatever their political colour.
We're talking about professional journalists working for mainstream publications publishing unflattering facts about the richest man in the world; I err on the side of caution, but I do not fall in the trap of believing journalists should be treated by the sole measure that everything they do is bad.
Generally, the fact of a settlement would preclude him from winning a defamation suit, since introducing the existence of the settlement would satisfy the defendant's bar of establishing affirmatively that there was some sort of actionable sexual harassment at the "more likely than not" threshold for civil cases.
Additionally, the existence of the settlement would likely make any suit for defamation fun afoul of the anti-SLAPP laws.
No, but it's one of those decisions that most normal people could easily recognize as a bad decision. It clearly didn't have any positive impact on the company and most likely had a negative impact. Just a CEO doing pure nonsense, causing a huge impact to the company based on ego over data. As opposed to making actual positive decisions. There was no reason for yahoo to fail other than a huge series of poor leadership decisions.
Those producing cars in the factory have never worked from home. The discussion is only about R&D, legal, finance whatever. And most of those don't differ significantly between Yahoo or Tesla.
It's an incredibly unpopular view on HN, but I don't think we can categorically conclude yet that WFH is always equally good as working in-person for all white-collar jobs that have good prerequisites for WFH.
For me personally, the train has left the station and I would not expect to ever consider a non-WFH job again in my career.
But that's a completely different question than asking whether companies that require physical attendance can in some cases out-compete those that don't. I think we have a tendency to project our wishes onto this debate, and not make an honest attempt at figuring out the truth.
Actually, I would be surprised if anyone thinks, that WFH always beats working in an office. But that doesn't mean, that there are not a ton of jobs where it does, or just part time, even if the job requires a lot of on-site presence.
But a company shouldn't have to mandate in-office work permanentely and for all. It should be obvious from the job profile and the working conditions, when it is advantageous to be in the office rather than at home.
Working every single minute at the factory regardless of role also seems more like dogma than anything actually based in facts. It's the (cargo) cult of work rather than wanting productive employees.
Maybe a software company should have 1/5 days in office (for meetings/dicussions/onboarding/...) while a manufacturing company might need 4/5 days for desk workers to be on site. But to say 40h of 40h should be at a desk doesn't seem like a sensible treshold.
Right now my time is 6PM and I'm at my office desk. Because I'm home. Granted, I'm writing on HN waiting for some tests, but if I had been at my office, I would have taken a 2h lunch and left at 2 or 3 this afternoon ...
I don't think that's the case; they do an accounting thing where they store the money and don't register all of it as profits until they deliver a set of benchmark features.
So some of it is recognized as profits right away because the car drives into a tree autonomously in a parking lot, or grinds the wheels against a curb when asked to self park, or when it slams on the brakes randomly when going under an overpass while the lane keeping cruise control is enabled. Each new feature allows them to claim more of that $10k as profits, but they still haven't gotten their FSD delivered out of beta so they don't get all of it.
I really like my tesla, BTW. It doesn't quite live up to the promises but it is quite lovely for everything I use it for.
If you seriously believe this I have a bridge to sell you LOL. Elon has a history of shilling FSD and FSD payments at let’s say… opportune times in history when Tesla was at risk of running out of runway.
Is it really the case? Surely the development of this software package has its own very significant expenses, considering how much effort such a thing must take. What exactly are the annual revenue from selling this package and the expenses spent on working on it?
My point was, if the company is getting $10k extra per sale but actually for example spending a total of $12k per sale, then arguing with these sales seems pointless if they're actually worsening the company's situation. At this point it seems far from certain that this is a net benefit for the company, other than perhaps as an investment in its future (but long-term investments in your future don't prop up your current profits).
> but long-term investments in your future don't prop up your current profits
This is exactly why gross profit margin typically excludes R&D, because the measure is usually used to see “is this business profitable on a per-unit basis”. That is, would you make profit if you decided to stop the long term investment.
Wasn't it kind of the same thing in all the likelyhood? Their troubles became apparent shortly after, they were likely trying to get rid of employees people without making layoffs apparent.
I keep hearing references to this study that precipitated the famous “no more WFH Fridays” decision but I can’t actually seem to find it. Do you have a link?
It's hard to imagine that severance from a 10% layoff is a significant cost for a company of Tesla's size and revenue. It's not small by any means, but not necessarily worth a complicated scheme in relative terms
I think it's just a game for executives at this point to think of what dumb policy will people put up with to keep their jobs or to quit and reduce severance.
So people who claimed less than 24h ago it was at lest partially a way of creating cheap layoffs, were proven right pretty swiftly.