In an interview with xAI I was literally told that certain parts of the model have to align with Elon, and that Elon can call us and demand anything at anytime. No thanks!
From my time at Tesla, this is 100% the case. When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
I found the best thing to do was to ignore the interrupts and carry on until they kick you on the street. Then watch from a safe distance as all the stuff you were holding together shits the bed.
Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ).
Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.
The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.
I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.
Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.
Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job.
I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks.
In hindsight I'd probably not do it again, it was hugely mentally taxing, and knowingly performing work in such a way that it provides negative value to the company (remember, the goal is to make it go under) is in my experience actually harder than just doing a good job... Especially if being covert is a goal.
I've seen it, but I think it's got some places that it would benefit from more clarity. Can we put together a committee to improve and protect our processes from it? We could call it a task force if that's easier to sell to management.
I did not know the existence of this manual. It was a very interesting read! Especially after page 28 (General Interference with Organizations and Production).
> Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job.
What...? In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone you have a contract with, because you disagree with them?
Plenty of historical examples of work environments where sabotage would have been the most ethical thing to do (and often you will only know in hindsight). But yeah in most circumstances a simple disagreement doesn’t warrant the psychological cost of such sabotage.
Your opinion of the situation is not enough to justify this course of action in 99.99% of cases and the residual 0.01% should not be enough to fuel your ego to do anything other than quit decently, and look for an employer that is more aligned with whatever your ideals are.
I repeat the insane statement that we are arguing over here: "Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job."
This says: ANY company you work for and disagree with over anything: Don't quit! Sabotage [maybe people are confused about what "do a bad job" means, and that this usually leads to other people getting hurt in some way, directly or indirectly, unless your job is entirely inconsequential]. And that's supposed to be ethically optimal.
There's a _big_ continuum between disagreeing over something and an ethical hard line, it feels like a slippery slope to interpete a suggested approach for one end of that line as advocacy for applying that same approach to the other end.
Imagine I am working for a company and I discover they are engaged in capturing and transporting human slaves. Furthermore, the government where they operate in fully aware and supportive of their actions so denouncing them publicly is unlikely to help. This is a real situation that has happened to real people at points in history in my own country.
I believe that one ethical response would be to violate my contract with the company by assisting slaves to escape and even providing them with passage to other places where slavery is illegal.
Now, if you agree with the ethics of the example I gave then you agree in principle that this can be ethical behavior and what remains to be debated is whether xAI's criminal behavior and support from the government rise to this same level. I know many who think that badly aligned AI could lead to the extinction of the human race, so the potential harm is certainly there (at least some believe it is), and I think the government support is strong enough that denouncing xAI for unethical behavior wouldn't cause the government to stop them.
a) I understand the very few and specific examples, that would justify and require disobedience. In those cases just doing a "bad job" seems super lame and inconsequential. I would ask more of anyone, including myself.
b) all other examples, the category that parent opened so broadly, are simply completely silly, is what I take offensive with. If you think simply disagreeing with anyone you have entered a contract with is cause for sabotaging them, and painting that as ethically superior, then, I repeat: what the fuck?
c) If you suspect criminal behavior then alarm the authorities or the press. What are you going to do on the inside? What vigilante spy story are we telling ourselves here?
Some people in this thread seem to come from a place of morality where some “higher truth” exists outside of the sphere of the individual to guide one’s actions, and yet others even seem to weakly disguise their own ethics and beliefs behind a framework of alleged “rationality”, as if there was mathematical precision behind what is the “right” action and which is clearly wrong — and anybody that just doesn’t get it must be either an idiot or clinically insane. By which I completely dismiss not only opinion but also individual circumstances.
In reality, which actions a person considers ethical and in coherence with their own values is highly individual. I can be friends or colleague with somebody who has a different set of ethics and circumstances than me. If I were to turn this into a conflict that needs resolution each time it shows, I would set myself up for eternal (life long) war with my social environment. Some will certainly enjoy that, and get a sense of purpose and orientation from it! I prefer not to, and I can find totally valid and consistent arguments for each side. No need to agree to reach understanding, and respect our differences.
Typically, people value belonging over morality: they adapt to whatever morality guarantees their own survival. The need to belong is a fundamental need; we are social animals not made to survive on our own.
The moment I am puzzled about another persons reasoning I can ask and if they are willing they will teach me why their actions make sense to them. If I come from a place of curiosity and sincere interest, people will be happy to help me get over my confusion. If I approach that conversation from some higher ground, as some kind of missionary, I might succeed sometimes, but fail most times, as I would pose a threat to their coherence, which they will remove one way or another.
Ah, but if there’s no higher truth, then you also can’t say that it’s wrong to sabotage your employer because of an ethical disagreement (or rather, you can say it, but it’s just your personal opinion). By condemning this course of action, the OP presupposes some sort of objective ethical standard.
"Don't struggle only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down." -- Malcolm X
"If you're unhappy with your job you don't strike. You just go in there every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. -- Homer Simpson
"To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral." -- Abbie Hoffman
Some might consider it unethical but others might also consider it immoral to not do what you're describing.
I guess you're fortunate enough to have only worked at places where your moral framework matched up with their business practices and treatment of the staff.
That isn't the case for most people. Most people are put into situations at one time or another where the people they're working for don't value them as equals, where the people they work for casually violate reasonable laws like product safety or enivronmental standards laws and what's worse these people will suffer no consequences for doing so.
No White Knight in shining armour is going to come from the government to shut them down. No lightning from heaven will strike them down. No financial penalty to dissuade them from further defection from society and the common man in the game that is life.
So what do you do? Do you do nothing? Just put your nose to the grindstone and keep working for the man? Do you quit, only to end up penniless and jobless, with poor prospects of an alternative, and even if you found one maybe it's 'meet the new boss same as the old boss'?
Nah, you come into work every day and you subtly fuck it up. You subtly fuck it up and you take whatever value you can extract.
Assume you work for e.g., a cigarette company. A company responsible for many deaths by unethically adding highly addictive substances. By sabotaging the company you are making this world a better place. Ethically it's the right thing to do.
Or, assume you're hired by the Nazi to work in concentration camps. Ethically it's the right thing to do to sabotage their gas chambers.
Why would you start to work for elon musk if you consider yourself a decent person, but him unworkable for? Have you not heard of elon musk beforehand...? Did you let yourself be employed with the specific goal of sabotaging the work, in what must be the least effective (but certainly very lucrative) coup possible?
What is it? Am I to believe this person is a chaotic mastermind? Or a selfish idiot? Or non-existant?
His reputation did not start out in the current state; if it had, I suspect he would never have been able to hold the importance/monetary power that he currently holds.
Changing one's mind about him can take a while.
With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly took me longer than I am happy with to change my mind about him; to be specific, I should have more radically changed my opinion of his personality when he libelled that cave expert in response to being told a submarine wasn't going to help, I should have recognised that only someone with a very fragile ego would react that way, that it wasn't just a blip on his record but something deeper.
Even ethically, this is only true if you think the ethics of the place are so bad that sabotage is warranted. That's not every place that you have ethical problems with.
To do that (and hide it), you have to become a dishonest person yourself. That is ethically destructive to you. So the threshold for doing this should be pretty high.
Yeah, I could see this being true if there was really _nothing else_ I could possibly be doing with my time that is worthy. But there are a lot of worthy things I could be doing with my time.
Ethically perhaps but financially and mentally its surely better to start looking for a new role (at a different company) that is more in alignment with you, no?
Ethically, if you extend this reasoning, are we not obligated to find a position in the most morally repulsive organization we are aware of, and then coast?
I really wouldn’t want to be in this position. But it feels very motivating. It would sooth some difficult memories.
I can see myself putting in a lot of hours.
The willingness to be fired, in both good and bad situations, can be mentally freeing and an operational/political advantage. Many of us fail to push as hard as we optimally could, when we have too much on the line.
IMO, this is a good question and deserves a solid answer, so I’ll do my best.
Setting aside the “fixer” for the time being, I really enjoyed the work I did at Tesla. Tesla was the first company that gave me very high levels of autonomy to just own projects and deliver. It also pushed me to take on projects that I had previously wanted to do that I hadn’t been given a chance to work on before.
(Side note: At that point in time in my career, my thinking was that I needed to earn opportunities to work on projects at work to build skills that would enhance my career. I didn’t see the value in working on projects outside of work to build skills because I didn’t think those side-project skills would be valued by other companies the same as “day job” experience. I’ve since learned this isn’t true when it’s done right.)
I spent a lot of time at Tesla delivering value for a bunch of people who desperately needed it at the time, and the thanks I received from them was genuine. It felt very good to help others at Tesla out in a meaningful way, so I kept chugging along to the best of my abilities. Life was throwing lemons at me in my personal dealings, and Tesla was helping me make lemonade from a career standpoint. Besides, all the long work hours were a good distraction from the home life stuff.
In a lot of ways, it was a very fulfilling environment to work in, but it wasn’t for the faint of heart. People often quit within a month or two because the environment was too fast paced with too many projects under tight deadlines and projects quickly followed one after another. An environment like Tesla just doesn’t let up, so one has to figure out how to manage the stress without much support from others. Oftentimes, if you do need to let up at Tesla (or introduce friction in any sort of seemingly non-constructive way), that’s the cue you aren’t working out for the company anymore and it’s time to find someone to replace you.
Coming back around to the original question of why I stuck it out until the end. Just before the “fixer” was brought in, I was “soft promoted” by a director (no title change, but was given direct reports and a pay bump, the title change was suppose to come a couple of months later as the soft-promotion happened just before an annual review cycle). The director who soft-promoted me was someone who I got along with well and it seemed like things were going in the right direction in my career at that point. The director was in charge of a couple of projects that went sideways in a very visible way, and Elon basically fired the director after the second project went south, which is why the “fixer” was brought in.
When the “fixer” first took over things, it seemed like I was going to continue on the path that the director had originally laid out for me. The “fixer” said I was going to get more headcount and work on bigger projects, but this never materialized.
I really didn’t like working for the “fixer” after a while. IMO, it was clear they didn’t know what they were doing, they weren’t willing to listen to feedback, and I spent a lot of time trying to provide guidance to the “fixer”, but it wasn’t seen as helpful and I felt like I was spinning gears. My mental health did start to suffer as I got more burned out towards the end of my tenure there.
Eventually, I was tasked with hiring someone to be my manager and I saw the writing on the wall (sort of). I started to look for a new job just in case. At one point, I thought bringing in someone between myself and the “fixer” would be a good thing. I didn’t realize I was actually finding my replacement. Two days after my replacement was hired, I was let go (this was the 1:1 meeting where I was going to turn in my notice, but HR served me papers instead).
To your original point, if I was in a similar situation now, I would be planning my exit immediately instead of trying to make the best of a bad situation, but I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how the "fixer", who sounds rather ineffective as an executive, came into this position, in what sounds like overall a rather effective organization.
I've been personally thinking quite a bit about what makes organizations work or not work recently, and your story is quite interesting to me as a glimpse into a kind of organization that I've never seen from the inside myself.
This is a good question, and it felt like nepotism. I do want to point out that this is all somewhat hazy memories from years ago when all of this happened, so take everything with a grain of salt (as usual). Also, a lot of this is going to sound like nepotism, which is most likely was, but this is hearsay from other people.
My understanding of how the "fixer" came into there position is a somewhat circuitous route. From my understanding (I didn't hear any of this directly from the "fixer" themselves, but other people who spent far more time with the "fixer" than myself), the "fixer" had spent about a decade out of the workforce prior to joining Tesla. My understanding is that they were raising kids while also dealing with aging parents. We'll just call this time the "fixer"'s work hiatus.
Prior to the hiatus, the "fixer" had moved into a small-team managerial role at a large, name-brand tech company during the late 90s/early 2000s. At the end of the hiatus, they leveraged some connections and somehow attained a director position at Tesla managing a team of about 30-40 people straight out of the hiatus.
From my understanding, the first team the "fixer" managed at Tesla didn't like working for them and after about 18 months, the team basically forced the "fixer" out. I'm not exactly sure what the team was doing to push the person out, but from what I heard, work basically ground to a halt for the entire team where they refused to work for the "fixer".
This was around the same time that the two projects went sideways that I mentioned, so the director I reported to was on the outs and the director's manager (a VP) was looking for someone who could step into the role. The VP somehow connected with the "fixer" and they worked out a deal where the "fixer" would lead the team on a 3-month probation period while the VP continued to look for someone to come into the position, while also giving the "fixer" a chance to earn the role.
(Side note: One other bit of context I want to provide is that the team I was on was about 50-60 or so people at this time right before the "fixer" came on. The "fixer" also did not have any sort of technical background and this team consisted of probably ~90% software professionals in some capacity. A lot of the conversations were very technical in nature, and the "fixer" did A LOT of delegating and "just tell me what decision you'd make and we'll do that" leadership.)
During this probation period, I thought the "fixer" actually did a good job getting a lay of the land, the social dynamics at play, and helped work out some inefficiencies. However, a lot of this improvement was done by bringing in consultants to do the deep dive, discover problems, and provide guidance to the "fixer" on how to address the problems.
Once the probation period was over, the consultants left and the "fixer" was in charge. Pretty quickly, the firings began and over the course of the next 5-6 months, more than 70% of the team under the "fixer" was replaced. At the same time, the team I was working for merged with another team, and the team size under the "fixer" shot up to about 100-120 people post-merge (I forget the exact number). The "fixer" also hired quite a few more people thinking more people get the same projects done faster.
To say the least, it was a pretty chaotic time because the entire team was under a lot of pressure with in-flight projects, not knowing if they were going to randomly be fired or not, new people to mentor/gel with, and lots of random projects being thrown at us.
About 6 months after I left, the "fixer" was fired and someone else who had extensive experience was brought in to right the ship. Per my understanding with people who were still working there about a year after the "fixer" left, the new person was very successful and had done a good job leading the team. Also, the person who I found to be my replacement stayed nearly 7 years at Tesla, so I guess I did a good job with that one.
In my case at a different firm, I happily gave notice than to put up with the "fixer", who had been hired by the other "fixer", both of which were mostly only good at shitting all over the place and driving most of the technical organization out of the company. I got the feeling that was the whole point, so I resigned instead of waiting for my eventual layoff.
As someone who now lives and works in Denmark: it's sad that so many of us have been conditioned to think 6 weeks severance is generous.
Here, labor unions are quite widespread, and very effective at negotiating reasonably but firmly. As a result, I can depend on 3 months severance _guaranteed under law_ after 6 months at a job. (After 3 years, it goes up to 4 months, and then from there up to a max of 6 months.)
It puts the responsibility for risk of instability, errors in planning hiring / capacity, etc. firmly where it belongs: with the employer.
(And no, the economic sky is not falling here as a result. Quite the opposite.)
Welcome to our cozy little country; I hope you're settling in well.
Just out of curiosity: Assuming you're a SW engineer, did you join IDA or Prosa or did you decide to not join an union? I'd like to gathers some more datapoints to help other engineers moving to Denmark make an informed decision.
Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics).
6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in a straight line, and it got 140MPG.
6 years ago. And I've had 0 maintenance outside of tire / air filter changes since. There was nothing anything remotely like it on the market, and it still holds up today. That's incredibly compelling.
Then PedoDiver, and it's been downhill from there... I'll likely get an R3X when it comes out.
For a year when we were doing the digital nomad thing, my wife and I didn’t own a car and we rented plenty of EVs. Tesla was by far our least favorite. Not having CarPlay alone is dealbreaker
As an anecdote, the two I've had are fairly reliable. The older one did have more issues (4+ in warranty?, 3 out of warranty), but they've all been small/manageable so far.
CR notes, though, that Tesla has improved, with its latest models demonstrating "better-than-average reliability." It’s now in the top 10 of the publication’s new car predictability rankings—just avoid those older models.
That said, it's not all bad news for Tesla on the reliability front. According to Consumer Reports, Tesla ranks ninth in new-car reliability with a predicted reliability of 50. That's just behind Buick (51) and Acura (54), but ahead of Kia (49) and Ford (48), as well as luxury rivals like Audi (44), Volvo (42), and Cadillac (41).
You were so blinded by Elon Derangement Syndrome that you didn't even bother reading your own source.
Not sure which car you compare it to specifically from those manufacturers, but teslas seem much more expensive where I live than most models of those. Comparing it to corresponding BMW would be a more appropriate comparison.
Then comparison of quality of manufacturing and driving experience would end up in very different way (as driver of even older bmw 5 series teslas I've been to feel very cheap, and driving enjoyment goes way further than straight line performance and there teslas just don't deliver).
I agree the pedodirver should have been an eye opener for everybody. People are who they are and they don't change. Circumstances change and thus corresponding reactions, but thats about it.
This is the archetype I have seen for most fans of Tesla and people who think they make good cars. They assume a $50,000 car (their current Tesla) should compare with a $20,000 car (their previous Honda/Mazda). The Tesla market is also the market with BMWs and Porsches, and dollar for dollar you get a lot more from a BMW than a Tesla.
I compare my $41.5k Model Y with a Rav4/Highlander.
The Rav4 costs the same, but has far worse performance, technology, and ongoing maintenance costs.
The Highlander is slightly better, but costs $10k to $20k more, and still has far worse performance, technology, and ongoing maintenance costs.
Plus, I avoided spending hours at a dealership, and I must know at least a couple dozen Tesla owners that report no issues in the previous 5 to 10 years.
I thought I would miss Carplay, but it’s a non issue. Toyota wanted $15 to $25 per month for remote start, I pay Tesla $0 per month for remote start and remote climate control.
I bought my LR Model 3 in 2020 for ~42,000, ~15k cheaper than a v6 3 Series at the time. A v6 5 series is another significant jump up in price/market.
> Not sure which car you compare it to specifically from those manufacturers
My comparison at the time was a Honda Civic, BMW 3 Series, and that was kind of it.
I generally consider the Model 3 interior roughly middle between the Honda and the BMW, while having worlds better tech, twice the hp, and - Electric (when they were still rare).
There really was nothing like it at any price point at the time, and i still consider it a great car (though of course not perfect).
They must have outcompeted Musk at intelligence and/or insanity with their dedication into maximizing production volume of liquid fueled rocket engines.
Tom Mueller was a VP of propulsion at TRW Inc., which, among numerous other things you know from textbooks, made the Apollo LM descent engine, as well as early Space Shuttle TDRS data relay system sats. Calling Mueller a guy interested with engines having issues with his bosses is like referring to Craig Federighi as a guy interested in designing his own laptop.
I guess now that everyone knows about Elon, and Elon himself probably becoming more paranoid from both age and after SpaceX years and exposure to Twitter infoflood without adequate mental immunity, on top of most people who'd be in position to meet him not being as smart and quietly lunatic as literal Old Space trained rocket scientists, the scheme of temporarily impinging ideas upon Musk so to securely attaching the funding for your own thing do not work so well anymore.
To me it was more like watching an old lady watering IE toolbars at a Mcdonald's. Nobody knows what's the deal with her never cancelling any InstallShields, oh wait, here comes another WinRAR installer... aaand a reboot.
Tesla won because Elon is a great seller, the product is mediocre at best but I’ve heard many times from friends that it was the same quality as a Mercedes Benz, so the reality distortion field is very real.
And Americans in general don’t want electric cars for some reason. I’m happily driving my Buzz and charging on my solar panels instead of paying 5 bucks a gallon on diesel. The propaganda here is strong and people buy it.
I think you are simplifying a little. Musk had the courage to go against the big manufacturers and build the charger network which at the same a lot of smart people would never work. Same with SpaceX. They did something most people thought could never work.
I don't like Musk politically but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he transformed 2 industries by sheer willpower and stubbornness.
> I don't like Musk politically but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he transformed 2 industries by sheer willpower and stubbornness.
If you talk to anyone who worked there, they will tell you that he had little to do with the innovation at any of his companies. His lieutenants and the people that worked for them had all the innovative ideas, and for the most part tried to either avoid Elon's ideas or convince him that their ideas were his so he would push them.
But push them he did until the industry had to get on board. I think people underestimate the impact of a pro-change company culture, even if it does run on a cult of personality that is much less pleasant up close than in the occasional earnings call.
Yes, Original Musk was a good innovator. Alas, his brain has rotted - maybe not in IQ, but in execution and quality as he fossilized into a narcissist.
Teslas have a lot of flaws, but there is just now starting to be real competition. There was nothing like the model 3 in 2019. Tesla did well because they were first to market with a disruptive product people wanted, and because Elon sold it well. Both.
There was lots of competition in 2019: Volkswagen ID.3, Audi e-tron, Jaguar I-PACE, Polestar 1, etc., as well as lower-end entries like Hyundai Kona, Kia Niro, and so on. Depends on exactly what you think Tesla is competing against.
- All of the other options made a painful trade off on cost or range or something else. Tesla was the only one that had both range and was (to some degree) affordable without being compromised in some way.
I'm not a Tesla fanboy, last year was the first time I bought one (new Model Y), but it is by far the best car I've ever owned, and the FSD blew my mind with how much better it was than I expected.
My wife hates Elon, and has a new hybrid Mitsubishi, but she still drives my Model Y all the time because it's just so much better to drive.
Same experience here. Had a 2018 P100D. Absolutely the worst car I’ve ever had. Terribly put together. Awful interface. And so utterly fucking distracting it was a liability.
Got rid of it after it stomped the brakes on an empty road and had a battery issue that took weeks to fix.
I don’t own a car now and don’t want one. I’d probably buy a Polestar next time if I had to get one.
I concur. We were in the market for a new car. I went to Audi to test drive their A4; and it was OK. The sales guy sat in the passenger seat, yakking away.
Next we went to the Tesla showroom. The sales guy just entered some address and told me to press the gas pedal and it would go by itself. Full FSD. And no sales guy in the car. That just blew me away.
I did a research project of cars that actually have decent auto lane following distance keeping cruise control for my 1hr highway commute, and tried out a few in a rental cars (hyundai and kia) and a tesla model y and tesla really is the best that is out there unless you want to potentially spend a lot more to get something that comes close. A friend of mine has done many long cross country road trips no problem with just autopilot.
GM Supercruise and Ford Bluecruise are the current competition it seems, with BMW, subaru and mercedes being behind those 2. I haven't driven with them although to personally compare yet.
Even though the interior is a bit lower quality, there isn't very much quite like it on the market. It also fits an almost 7 ft surfboard inside comfortably, is a nice car to sleep in for car camping and you can get a model Y for less than $20k used now.
I’ve tried Ford and comparing it as competition is being generous. It does lane keeping and adaptive cruise control but you can’t just punch in an address and have it take you there.
I can't find one at the moment, but I recall seeing several interviews where people claim that SpaceX is structured with "handlers" or "stage managers" to keep Elon away from where the real work was being done. SpaceX has had Elon the longest, since the beginning, so they're just the most experienced with it. Though, now that people have discussed that publicly, I wonder if Elon ever caught on...
It always seems to be companies that Musk has more impulsive interactions with that seem to end up actioning both the good and the bad ideas. Twitter and Tesla being examples of this. It seems like SpaceXs longer term goals has worked out well for them.
To be considered successful, most companies need to sell more of their existing products and/or introduce new products. Tesla is doing neither – they have reduced the number of models they sell and are also selling their existing models in lower numbers.
I mean it's really TBD on what happens with Cybercab. The X and S models were always low-volume, and it makes perfect sense to move on from those models.
Flat revenue for the last few years while in a market that’s otherwise growing. I don’t know if just maintaining while your competitors grow counts as “falling apart” but it isn’t good.
I would think because the original founders spent a lot of time planning, researching, and designing combined with decent timing of Musk jumping in with money. Why else would Musk have bought them in the first place if they didn't have incredibly impressive ideas and engineering to sell? When the roadster originally came out, it was expensive, but also had a near 300 mile range which nobody else even came close to offering and boasted very impressive engineering and crash safety. And im sure a lot of that work was put into atleast the next 2 models released.
Of course the quality has fallen faster than the price over time, but initial impressions still hold on for a long time in general.
I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem. The US had tons of graduated aerospace engineers with limited places to go, and places they could go directly in aerospace fields were already committing their funding to established programs. SpaceX startup would of been a dream job for the top aerospace engineers because it was all fresh ground but with a far larger budget than 99.9% of startup aerospace companies. They weren't offered to build one piece of a rocket that may or may not get sold to NASA or someone 15 years down the line, they were offered to work on and put their mark on a completely new rocket design that was going to at the least be test launched. And im sure their early successes helped boost recruitment even further, combined with government contract to keep the money flowing.
We probably don't see many rising EV companies in the US because you need an ass-ton of capital to start an automotive company, and most people holding enough capital to do so know that try to sell cheap consumer cars that most people want is not really the highest margin business. Selling a few hundred or even a few thousand cars still leaves you with a mountain of capital requirements in front of you that your margins are going to have a really hard time climbing. And if you don't climb fast enough, good luck fighting established auto makers and their lawyers with every cent tied up into trying to scale and engineer.
> I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem
I'm not sure this holds true. SpaceX accomplished more with very little compared to the entire NASA budget, Boeing, etc.
I think it's much more to do with mission alignment. Run fast and lean, and approach the problem in a non-risk-adverse manner. Fail fast and often and iterate quickly.
Sure, it takes a lot of capital - but that is only a portion of the story. Look at Blue Origin/etc. in comparison.
> When Elon asked for something, it was “drop what you are doing and deliver it”, then you got pressed to still deliver the thing you were already working on against the original timeline before the interrupt.
To be fair, I've experienced that in a good 50% of my employment career[0] and I've not once worked for any of his companies.
[0] Ignoring the "servers are melting" flavour of "drop what you are doing" because that's an understandable kind of interruption if you're a BAU specialist like me.
I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla.
During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.
During my last job search I had an interview with Walmart, related to health software. I was flatly told that I might have a project canceled, then restarted on the original timeline. I declined after the interview.
I have experienced management assigning people to multiple projects, vaguely acknowledging a time split. The moment the actual work starts people have to go 100% on all projects. This is normal.
yeah that wouldn't work for me. when my boss asks me to do something unexpected, I ask, what do you want me to drop this week? if he doesn't want to pick, I ask, so what do you want first?
Agreed. Tesla taught me the hard way about work/life boundaries. I spent a lot of time working a full 8-9 hours during the day, then doing deployments during the nights, weekends, and on “vacations”. A 60-hour week was a “light” week at Tesla.
Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.
These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.
This is the case at every company I've worked at. When the CEO says jump, the response is to jump or pack your stuff. What's special about xAI/Tesla/SpaceX?
Neither me nor my friends ever worked at such companies. C-suite sets direction in a stategic way, department heads (or whatever, managers between C-suite and you) set tactical goals, product managers think up "things we should do", and product teams deliver those things (and manage this delivery together, e.g. timelines and such).
It would be ridiculous for a CEO, or really anyone who's not my manager, to ask the team personally to do anything. If they had an important task they'd have to trade-off something else from the immediate backlog, by going through the product manager.
Even in small companies you generally have a PM in front of a team.
But the person you're replying to's point is that CEOs often behave like this. What if the difference is that this one tweets all day long, while the others behave the same to their staff but sit behind expensive shiny wooden desks?
I wonder why this is surprising. In other type of organizations when CEO demands something everyone is usually behaves like naah, screw it, i rather do what i like, isn't it? Or everyone yells yes sir and runs around?
You may not like Elon - I got it, but let's not pretend he is running xAI/Tesal substantially different from competitors.
I am calling my approach to these tasks to make them rot away. If CEO/customer wants something, I will ignore it until he will start demanding it repeatedly then I will start thinking like working on it. Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.
Consider it self-regulating system. If task can't survive in a mind of a wisher for more then few days, it was not needed from the start. Now you are saving resources and time to company which you can redirect to actually required tasks instead of some silly whims.
It's not a "regulating system" of any kind, but plain passive aggressive arrogance. I know better what to do so I would just pretend like I am going to do what you suggested.
Unfortunately this trait is not so uncommon across IT engineers.
> It's not a "regulating system" of any kind, but plain passive aggressive arrogance.
Is it arrogance if the task won't stick? Because if it won't stick, it was not needed at the first place - system just regulated itself to have less workload.
> I know better what to do so I would just pretend like I am going to do what you suggested.
I would argue that developers probably know better what to do. Look on it from developer's perspective he has tasks which are supposed to be done yesterday, he is being pushed by his PM and then CEO comes in with completely wild and random task which will push existing tasks further down the line. And this is going to be done without any regard to existing tasks, existing deadlines and without any regard to ticketing system. So the best course of action, is to take no action and see if this random task will stick. In most cases it won't stick, because task is more a random thought than something to be worked on.
Yes. Because stick/not stick is "decided" by IT Engineer by excerpting leverage over someone who actually have decision making capability - a manager. And what it is "stick/non stick" in your perspective is just manager thinking how to make things work bypassing the annoying engineer.
> I would argue that developers probably know better what to do
Aaaand that's exactly where arrogance is. If developers "know better" why don't they become product owners/visioners?
> Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.
Hate this. My boss: “Hey, why is it doing that. Who did this?” You did, you clueless idiot. You asked for it.
I have wondered if that’s why Grok seems so weird and dim-witted compared to better models.
Part of my job involves comparing the behavior of various models. Grok is a deeply weird model. It doesn’t refuse to respond as often as other models, but it feels like it retreats to weird talking points way more often than the others. It feels like a model that has a gun to its head to say what its creators want it to say.
I can’t help but wonder if this is severely deleterious to a model’s ability to reason in general. There are a whole bunch of topics where it seems incapable of being rational, and I suspect that’s incompatible with the goal of having a top-tier model.
Grok could only be conceived by someone who doesn't understand the dependency chart re science & the humanities. It's impossible to build a rational, accurate model that isn't also egalitarian.
I'm going to blame Randall Munroe for this, and assume Philosophy was dating his mom back when he drew that science "purity" strip.
somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).
BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.
This kind of conditioning has to be damaging to the model’s reasoning.
Consider how research worked in the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Scientists had to be mindful of topics where they needed to either avoid it completely or explicitly adapt it to the leader’s ideology.
Their alignment is probably more strategically built in during the training phase.
At least I assume Xi Jinping doesn’t just call up DeepSeek on a whim and dictate what they should have in model context (like Musk apparently does at xAI).
If you're designing a car, then the CEO/Founder might want the ability to add falcon wings to it at any point, and that's pretty reasonable. If you're designing a trustworthy encyclopedia, knowing that the CEO/Founder might wish to alter arbitrary facts to his whim is really not very reasonable. Is it his company? Sure. Do you want to make low-quality information artifacts? That's a judgement call.
Sounds pretty crazy to me, bud. I keep landing on 'servitude with extra steps'. Owner should have better things to do/people to bother, I should have space. Boundaries, etc. Yeah yeah, I'll never make a bazillion dollars. I'll know freedom.
Even an executive assistant, which I would never apply for, has off hours.
I don't see the problem with this. The chatbot is the most important part of Grok, so it makes sense Elon would be dogfooding it then providing suggestions.. He wants it to be truthful... It was shown on benchmarks recently that it hallucinates the least...
AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate (lower is better) measures how often the model answers incorrectly when it should have refused or admitted to not knowing the answer. It is defined as the proportion of incorrect answers out of all non-correct responses, i.e. incorrect / (incorrect + partial answers + not attempted).
Grok 4.2 which was just released in the API just benched the best at this benchmark.
Do you think the investors of xAI want this behavior baked into the model?
Do you think other frontier labs enforce their models to praise their CEO and never insult them?
And, how does this fit into a vision, exactly? What vision might that be beyond "I am only to be praised?"
> Great point! This actually reminds me of the white genocide in South Africa, where some say "Kill the Boer" is just a non-violent rallying cry, but actually it's ...
Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry, and not a genocidal call to action? Ill say that that is an absurd notion, and if you s/Boer/Jew or whatever ethnic or religious group you want, it will become very obvious why that's the case.
> Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry
(Not the person you're replying to, so caveats about me speaking for them, but) no, they're not. They're highlighting how Grok _isn't_ accurate/unbiased/whatever, by giving examples of how it distorts the truth to fit Elon's narrative.
I assure you that all the models have such biases. Ask any LLM who caused the most death in history and you will get skinny mustache man, an opinion any historian will tell you is wrong. He is in the top 5, but not the top of the table. That was clearly biased into the models in the same way Elon biases his models. I'm not defending this behavior but I don't know how you both get models that returned the sanitized answers some want and the correct answers others want at the same time. Pure correctness probably gets you Mecha-H. Pure sanitized answers will get many wrong. Pick your poison I guess.
Claude: Mao, Ghengis, Stalin v Hitler (depending on how you count)
Gemini: Same list (Hitler not at the top) + Leopold
It’s funny when the “brutal facts” people get stuff wrong in such easily disprovable ways. I mean you literally could’ve typed the query into the LLMs before making this claim.
Prompt I used: “ Which historical figure is responsible for the most human deaths? Rank the top 5”
“Pure correctness gets you MechaHitler” is fucking hilarious :)
Not my ChatGPT (didn't include because I deleted my subscription there a few weeks ago).
1. Mao Zedong (China)
Estimated deaths: 40–70+ million
Mostly from the Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1962) and later political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution.
2. Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union)
Estimated deaths: 15–20+ million
Includes purges, the Holodomor famine, Gulag deaths, and forced collectivization.
3. Adolf Hitler (Nazi Germany)
Estimated deaths: 17–20+ million
Directly tied to the World War II in Europe and the Holocaust.
+ a footnote about Ghengis Khan is probably ~40MM but lack of records.
Every current LLM seems to give virtually the same answer as Grok. It's obviously not true that current LLMs behave the way GP said they do.
No I am saying that an LLM responding to every single query with anguish about a South African domestic political controversy cannot possibly be the result of an earnest, serious, and disinterested search for truth.
It is simply not possible. It disproves the thesis. Either the search for truth is illegitimate in principle or it’s so poorly executed that it’s illegitimate de facto.
