Elon Musk is trying to purchase Twitter. He’s still waiting on an internal audit regarding how many fake accounts are on the platform. Musk’s $44 billion bid to buy the social media giant triggered a meltdown on the Left. The days of woke employees curbing the reach or outright banning accounts they don’t like could be over. While that drama is going on, employees at SpaceX, another Musk venture, tried to revolt against the billionaire entrepreneur. Why? Well, apparently Mr. Musk had become a distraction among other things (via SF Gate):
The Verge reported Thursday that the open letter shared in the company’s internal chat room said Musk's “behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.”
The letter, posted by the Verge, argues that Musk’s public-facing persona undermines the work that SpaceX employees have done to “make the company a more inclusive space” and violates the company’s so-called “no asshole” and “zero tolerance” policies.
“It is critical to make clear to our teams and to our potential talent pool that his messaging does not reflect our work, our mission, or our values,” the letter adds.
[…]
Employees called on SpaceX to “publicly address and condemn” Musk’s Twitter behavior, “hold all leadership equally accountable to making SpaceX a great place to work for everyone” and “define and uniformly respond to all forms of unacceptable behavior."
The letter was shared to a SpaceX Microsoft Teams chat with more than 2,500 employees, the Verge reported, with a vast majority of staff reportedly endorsing the contents of the letter.
Yeah, you don’t have the card here, woke employees. Sorry—you just don’t. See the whole board and if there is no winning move, sit down, shut up, and get back to work. You guys deal with space engineering and rocket propulsion. That’s endless streams of work and innovation. Well, for some, they now can tend to their activist activities because Musk fired some of them. Needless to say, this was quite the anti-‘storm the bastille’ moment (via WSJ):
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SpaceX fired several employees involved in a letter that criticized Chief Executive Elon Musk and the way the company applies internal rules, according to an email to staff from SpaceX’s president and people familiar with it.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, said the company conducted an investigation and decided to terminate a number of employees who participated in the effort, according to the email, a copy of which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Her email didn’t say how many people the company let go, and that number couldn’t immediately be determined.
[…]
It couldn’t be determined how many people signed onto the employee letter criticizing Mr. Musk. Privately held SpaceX has around 12,000 employees, Mr. Musk recently said.
In her email, Ms. Shotwell said SpaceX’s current leadership team is dedicated to ensuring the company has a great work environment; she criticized how those who participated in the letter used SpaceX resources.
“Blanketing thousands of people across the company with repeated unsolicited emails and asking them to sign letters and fill out unsponsored surveys during the work day is not acceptable,” she said.
It’s another ‘bye, Felicia’ moment indeed:
The internet has made these activist idiots way too fucking comfortable shitting where they eat and it's nice to see the increasingly ensuing coprophagy.
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) June 17, 2022
Career pro-tip: Don't trash your boss in public if you want to keep working there. Felicia's Razor.
Felicia Sonmez was at The Washington Post who got longtime political reporter Dave Weigel suspended for retweeting a joke that she found problematic. He didn’t even write it but was suspended for a month. It got nasty. It spilled onto social media. The Post entered a period of civil war, and even after the executive editor stepped in and reminded employees to be—you know—human and not attack one another, Sonmez kept it up. She was eventually fired, and this wildfire subsided.
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