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It's a pretty simple universal rule that you don't try to make your boss look bad. And doing so is a great way to end your employment.

I'm not sure why anyone is surprised by this. Whether what they said is right or wrong it was still damaging to the owner of the company and the company's reputation as well.

Its like the Tesla guy who was fired a few months back. Yeah it was his own car. Yeah it was on his own time. But he, a tesla employee was making the company look bad by uploading videos of the car failing to self drive to Youtube.

You don't get to not be a representative of your company just because you are off the clock. If people know that you work for X company then anything you say or do may be seen through the lens of "An X company employee"



> You don't get to not be a representative of your company just because you are off the clock. If people know that you work for X company then anything you say or do may be seen through the lens of "An X company employee"

But that’s exactly the point that the letter’s authors are making about Musk himself, and his tweets. Either the same rule applies equally to both Musk and his employees, or there’s an unfair double standard which should be remedied.


It doesn't work that way when one of them owns the company. If Musk were CEO then maybe they would have a point. But Musk isn't CEO. In fact I don't think he's an employee of SpaceX at all. He is the majority owner of the company. The most important of the investors. And legally speaking the company has a duty to him, not the other way around. CEO's can and do get fired for making companies look bad. Happens all the time. You can't fire an owner.

Now we can discuss how we think it ought to work all day long. But that is how it does work today. It's not an even relationship and never has been. The guy signing the checks gets to decide if he wants to employee you. If people decide that he's a dick and don't want to work for him then he will find it hard to hire good talent.


He is in fact CEO, according to CNBC:

> SpaceX has fired at least five employees who were involved with circulating a letter around the company that was critical of CEO Elon Musk…[1]

Further, if this link is to be believed, he is no longer a majority owner of SpaceX:

> According to filings that SpaceX has made with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Musk currently owns 43.61% of SpaceX's outstanding stock as of August 2021.[2]

1. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/06/17/spacex-fires-employees-a...

2. https://wccftech.com/elon-musk-now-owns-less-than-half-of-sp...


CNBC should do better fact checking. The CEO of SpaceX is and has been Gwynne Shotwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell


The link you’re pointing to says that Shotwell is COO, not CEO.




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