Don't forget the female engineer they fired for calling Elon "a little shit" on twitter. I don't know if it would be worse if it turned out to be because Elon complained or because he is their hero.
I'm beginning to think that we should extend Godwin's Law to include Elon. Just about every online conversation nowadays eventually deteriorates into a discussion about how terrible Elon is.
Firing doesn't seem like a proportional response... But representing herself as a Stripe employee after flaming on the internet isn't a good look for their business.
I am not going to stand up to Elon Musk or what he said. But, the response generated by Elon Musk was after the British rescue diver said this
> “He can stick his submarine where it hurts,” he told CNN. “It had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like.
Somehow, this part gets left out from this discussion.
Unlike Musk, they were asked to help by officials in charge because they were the best at what they do. What they had just achieved was an unbelievable feat rescuing those boys.
The place was already a media circus but Elon decided to involve himself anyway and complicate the situation because he read about it in the news?
So when the actual heroes of the story are asked questions about the annoying tech billionaire who wanted to try out one of his 'new toys' in such a high pressure situation, they didn't mince words. It was a stupid idea, and he said as much.
Apparently this hero (and I mean HERO, not some cliche) was supposed to be more diplomatic to the sensitive self serving tech billionaire who injected himself into the story, did nothing but promote his own image and then slandered the actual people who performed the rescue.
More acceptable than the absence of such a statement. It makes Elon’s pedo comment look like immature reactionary school yard banter. Somebody said something mean to me so I’m going to say something mean back.
I specifically wrote in my comment "I am not going to stand up to Elon Musk or what he said." How did you come to the conclusion that I found it acceptable?
That’s the world’s richest person demonstrating willingness to go to some lengths just to get the last word in against some random webcomic author. Yes, I can totally believe they’d be petty enough to complain about online snark to someone’s employer. Doesn’t mean it necessarily happened, but it wouldn’t be that far out of character if it did.
Huh? He does this type of thing all the time, it's a defining part of his personality. You only need to follow his Twitter so see how consistently and strongly he counters anything that makes him look bad. For the really nasty stuff he does behind the scenes you need to dig a little deeper.
A few examples off the top of my head:
- Called the employer of a lawyer in Wyoming to get him fired for criticizing him on Twitter.
- Tried to get the student who was exposing how the self-driving demos were faked expelled, then tried to sue him on false charges.
- Asked a reporter to investigate the cave diver on a baseless accusation of pedophilia because he made him look bad. When that didn't work, used his private security to try to plant the same stories in the UK.
Never mind the stuff he does to his own employees, especially whistleblowers.
In fact it would be contrary to his personality if he didn't send an e-mail to the founders with a message like "Does this person work at Stripe?" with the tweet attached, making it clear what he wants done without explicitly saying it so he can pretend to have plausible deniability.
