They have a culture of overwork and moving fast. I was looking at job postings for SpaceX & Tesla a couple years ago, and every single one of them explicitly mentioned that you will be expected to work more than standard work hours and put in time on weekends, which is very different from all the other companies that stress work life balance. I'm sure it works for a lot of people, but you should be sure of what you are getting into. And I don't expect employees will stay happy if/when the Musk stock rally stops.
As long as it's honestly communicated beforehand, and employees are not deceived about compensation and workload as they voluntary sign the contract, is it bad or immoral in any meaningful way?
I'd say no. But given the trend of people calling 20 hours a week "slavery", demanding debt forgiveness; and such. It seems like it's becoming a minority opinion to let consenting adults make their own informed decisions (and deal with the consequences of them)..
Oh, bullishit. Corporations will take every inch you give them, right up to the red line. Then that becomes "normal". And then you'll cheer them on for it, probably.
I was responding to someone asking how they're different than any other tech company. They're known for underpaying and overworking people. That's how they're different than most others.
The implication being that if Twitter switched to that culture, then it'd generally be a really bad thing for most of those who currently work there, since they did not sign up for that.
How is this different from M&A or company going bankrupt or getting laid off? Are you saying the software engineers and fully functioning adults that work at Twitter are unaware of this and would be betrayed? They totally signed up for it and has been compensated well for the risks they take and the services they provide.
Anyone can buy the stock though, while working at a company that pays better and has better work/life balance. Is the stock grant particularly generous or is there a better-than-average employee discount on stock purchases?
He's known for running his employees into the ground, generally treating people poorly. Pay is sub-par compared both to big tech for tech workers (although not really when the stock does well) and to skilled labor for laborers. You can compare ratings of the company on sites like Indeed to other big tech, and I'm sure you can find some articles about the working conditions (I recall some being published over the years).
My former boss went there, his whole team quit shortly after, he got promoted twice and made a boatload of money from stock grants, and now he's one of the higher ranked engineers and a few of his family members went to work there as well. But these guys are workaholics, brilliant but not humans of normal working capacity. I think it a lot depends on your expectations.
I don't care either way. Nor about Tesla, nor about Musk. Calling yourself a founder when you aren't, regardless of the merits of him funding Tesla, is still very odd.
I don't think the OP was referring to Tesla since technically they are a car company, not a "tech" company, but still you can find interviews with real founders of Tesla who stated on record they don't understand why Elon calls himself a "Tesla founder", but since they took his money, he is their boss (or was).
I think he was referring to PayPal, a tech company. Even now all over the net you can see articles claiming Musk founded Paypal. Nothing further from the truth. Musk started X.com and designed a very simple page where you put two peoples email addresses and you "could" send them money. It was happening at the same time as PayPal had the same idea and similar website. Problem for PP was that back then no sane bank or financial institution would touch any company that is hooked up to the internet. Musk had a tremendous leverage because of the only bank who would go ahead and plug their gateway into the net (I believe it was Stanford Federal Credit Union, but I don't remember) was okay for doing it because personal leverage of Musk father, who owns multiple diamond mines in ZA, and put a huge collateral "just in case" something goes wrong. Musk didn't have to have a working website to have a $300,000,000 leverage over PayPal and PP knew it will be years before they get any bank to agree to work with them. It was smart for Thiel to offer large stake of PP for Musk just for ability to change which site will be using the bank's gateway. This story was somewhat easy to find and popular back in the old days of the internet, but - putting my conspiracy hat on - these days you find nothing about it at least not by Googling. So I don't really know - to me it doesn't sound he founded PayPal, they would eventually got their permission from some bank but at that point we would be X'ing each other money, not "Paypalling" it.
> record they don't understand why Elon calls himself a "Tesla founder"
And I explained why it is really not that insane. It was basically him throwing them a bone, they should be grateful. And of course they were horrible and ran Tesla into the ground and hid facts from Elon.
> I think he was referring to PayPal
I don't think so.
> X.com and designed a very simple page where you put two peoples email addresses and you "could" send them money. It was happening at the same time as PayPal had the same idea and similar website
This is not true. X.com from the beginning was payment company. Confinity was originally a security company for Palm platform. From there they switched to payments.
From Wikipedia:
> In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk.
The two companies merged so all the people of both companies are rightly called founders. And non of the others disagree with that.
> because personal leverage of Musk father, who owns multiple diamond mines in ZA
Please provide evdience. This 'dimond mine' nonsense has mostly been discredited. The best researched story about that basically showed that it was like a 30k investment sometime in the 80s. Certainty not enough to convince a bank to do anything.
Musk father was wealthy because he was an engineer.
> This story was somewhat easy to find and popular back in the old days of the internet
I don't care about all that.. I just think he is a liar for claiming he founded Tesla and for spreading bullshit that he founded PayPal... I literally thought he founded both..
