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If the owner of the company I worked for, who invested well over 40 hour weeks so he could become insanely rich, wrote an email that referred to 40 hours minimu

If the owner of the company I worked for, who invested well over 40 hour weeks so he could become insanely rich, wrote an email that referred to 40 hours minimum in such a flippant way, I would 100% find a new company to work for. This idea that Musk famously risked it all to make Tesla so he could come out as a billionaire does not scale down to an individual level for employees. Musk slept on the floor so he could become insanely wealthy, not to get a $10k/year raise. This type of manipulation is constantly abused by rich oligarchs. They start these endeavors usually with huge parachutes, and then expect their hourly employees to risk nearly as much as they did, with no parachutes, and without the world changing profits that come with it. Citing hard work the entire way, knowing full well that it is the hard work of their employees that they depend on to keep the gears moving, but that those hard workers will not become the next Musk or Gates, regardless of how many hours they put in. If I'm wrong, I want a list of millionaires that Musk has created. Bonus points if they still work at Tesla and didn't have to spin their experience off into another project, so the work-to-profit transfer can be 1:1.

exo762 4y ago
> oligarchs Can Musk be considered such, considering his antagonistic relationship with current establishment? His acquisition of Twitter could be seen as his first move into politics realm.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  The "current establishment" of the US comprises two major political parties that switch control back and forth (and sometimes control different parts of the US government simultaneously, as seems likely will occur in 2023.) I see no evidence that Musk is picking a fight with both parties, just the one that is currently disfavored to retain control in the next Congressional elections.
- turtledove 4y ago
  His first move into politics? His platform (even when he wasn't an antagonistic asshole) was political - climate change, species survival, deregulation.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  The fact that he doesn't like the current administration does not exempt him from being an oligarch.
- gkoberger 4y ago
  Tesla/SpaceX/etc have gotten a good number of tax breaks and government contracts.
- dagmx 4y ago
  Oligarchs don't need to work with the establishment. I'd argue in many cases they exist by subverting the establishment.
  - walkhour 4y ago
    Who do you have in mind? I can't think of a techno oligarch that hasn't pledged to the current establishment. However you feel about the Biden laptop stories, how many of these oligarchs allowed its spread? I think you're kidding yourself if you think oligarchs work against the establishment, but for some reason it's a pretty common view; that of fighting the more powerful, when really that's you.
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  He'd be bankrupt many times over without his ability to work massive $ from the US Gov - I'd argue it's one of his biggest strengths, trailing somewhere after his stock market influence abilities, both of which seem key to how he bankrolls massive capex+opex infra projects.
  - ryandvm 4y ago
    This so much. Every single Musk adventure seems to requires massive federal subsidies and/or investment to stay afloat. Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company - it's questionable whether any of them would exist if they were competing in a completely free market. Some think he's saving the world, but from what I can see, he might just be the world's most effective leech.
    - camjohnson26 4y ago
      “Subsidy truffle hound” is how I’ve heard it described.
- notafraudster 4y ago
  I agree oligarch doesn't characterize Musk (tycoon or magnate might be more appropriate), but there are a great many oligarchs that end up on the losing end of the tides of politics -- surely this is true of Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine or countless now semi-exiled oligarchs in Russia. But I also wouldn't want to exaggerate the temperature of the hot water Musk is in; he's under fairly minor securities scrutiny thanks to a series of unprecedentedly stupid foot-in-mouth decisions he had 100% control over and could have immediately and trivially avoided at no real cost, he picked a fight with the government over reasonable COVID restrictions and they more or less declined to fight back, and lately he's posted a bunch of tweets of the form "DeMoCrAtS mOrE lIkE dImOcRaTs pwnt!!!!" while a joke video game site slaps him around with a trout. Besides that the most credible claim there's political antagonism is a bizarre to make the White House press secretary say the word "Tesla" which seems at best to be a re-run of the "Why Won't Obama Wear A Flag Pin" controversy, only somehow stupider. I'm just saying I wouldn't describe myself as having an antagonistic relationship with the government because I get parking tickets sometimes and I have tweets calling elected officials clowns.
  - monksy 4y ago
    Lets not forget about how he was hobnobbing with Trump during the pandemic to get his factories back open.
rscho 4y ago
Musk risked everything? That's new. If I am not mistaken, daddy wasn't exactly poor...
- bradneuberg 4y ago
  As a kid he was estranged from his dad, his dad ultimately only gave him around 20k. Elon Musk has been successful based on his own background, not his dads who was a remote, not positive influence in his life.
  - rscho 4y ago
    You'll excuse me if I'm a bit skeptical of the romanticized lifestory version.
    - nouveaux 4y ago
      It's healthy to be skeptical. At the same time, Musk wouldn't be the first successful person who came from a crappy background.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  He could have retired after Zip2. Almost tenfold so after X/PayPal.
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  - rscho 4y ago
    How is that 'risking everything'??
    - TrackerFF 4y ago
      I didn't say that - just pointed out that he was loaded way before Tesla.
pb7 4y ago
> If I'm wrong, I want a list of millionaires that Musk has created. I was with you until this. There are definitely many millionaires minted from their original equity grants several years ago that have gone up 1,000%+.
- jklinger410 4y ago
  I knew when I wrote this that someone was going to conflate early venture capitalists with employee shares. There are probably some very early employees who became rich from their stock, sure. To amend what I said a bit, we're talking about employees with shares (or any other comp) that they get from their "hard work" that turn them into millionaires.
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  - rrss 4y ago
    consider an engineer hired at Tesla in 2019. They probably have a 4 year RSU schedule determined based on the TSLA share price in 2019, so $50. If their equity compensation target was $30k per year, then they would get stock grants in 2021 and 2022 worth $400-600k. That works out to a lot of millionaires.
    - jklinger410 4y ago
      If working 40+ hours at Tesla makes you into a millionaire in the same way using other people's money to start a company does, then I will stand corrected. Elon is a smart man, many of these executives are smart people, they know working for a company does not pay off in the same way that entrepreneurship does. They admit as much when they describe why they deserve so much money. I'm not even saying employees should expect that type of return, what I'm saying is that executives should not use their hard work to become massively wealthy to try and influence their employees to work just as hard, when they know the payout is not there. It's manipulative. Everyone knows Musk "slept on the factory floor" to get Tesla working. That type of investment has paid out well for him. It won't pay out well for the workers on the factory floor.
kylecordes 4y ago
There are valid complaints about Elon Musk (either a few or a lot, depending on your point of view), but categorizing him as an oligarch would remove the specificity of the former meaning of the word. Perhaps people are bored with the word billionaire and want to use an edgier sounding synonym. That is how languages work - they evolve. (i.e. the word literally is now mostly a synonym for figuratively.)
- jklinger410 4y ago
  Considering the unchecked influence money has on politics in the United States, every billionaire is an oligarch as soon as they start donating money to political parties.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    "Oligarchy" is not subject to metaphor or "well kind of but don't you see" It only becomes an -archy when the actual literal power is openly and legally held Otherwise, neckbeards would argue that literally every society in history has been a kleptocracy, which is a far more apt description of the sarcastic viewpoint on this society than "oligarchy," which is when rich people are put into office which matches the thing they are good at, would be Oligarchy does not mean "rich people hold power because they're powerful," or anything even slightly like that Think about the society that you see in comic book alternate universes every so often, where they make Thomas Edison the chief of industry, et cetera. The nonsense one where we somehow have the ability to divine who's good at what by looking at the history of their wallet, and on that basis make meritocratic elections. In such a society, a lottery winner even who exceeded the wealth of others would wield nonetheless no power, because it wasn't earned. Practically speaking, there's no way such a thing could plausibly exist. But that's what the word actually means. It's one of those things where people trying to use it to sound deep and wise end up undercutting themselves (like "utopia.")
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cupofpython 4y ago
I cant name them directly but some quick math suggests Elon has indeed made many millionaires. Tesla IPO'd in 2010 with 13.3 million shares Tesla had a bit under 1000 employees in 2010 Tesla stock price was $17 in 2010 Tesla had a 5-for-1 stock split in August 2020 Tesla Stock price is $748 a share today 1 share of Tesla in 2010 is equal to $3,740 today It would take 268 shares of Tesla from 2010 to be a millionaire today. that's $4,556. Elon's success with Tesla should have produced at least 1,000 millionaires if his early employees believed in the product. I cant say that still translates to today's workers, but if his vision is that there is still just as much room to grow - then he would be making a lot more millionaires if he is correct. Even amongst todays newer employees. Idk if I would bet on that growth at this point since it is already a household name now and it wasnt before, but I have no actual reason to think one way or the other
- jklinger410 4y ago
  > I cant say that still translates to today's workers, but if his vision is that there is still just as much room to grow - then he would be making a lot more millionaires if he is correct. Therein lies the rub, as they say. He may have spun off millionaires based on original investors, and maybe a few early employees forwent salary for stock options and became millionaires. But we're talking about hard workers who put in over 40 hours a week currently. Are they working for stock options that are going to make them millionaires?
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    > Are they working for stock options that are going to make them millionaires? Maybe, maybe not. But now they are working for a well known company that looks good on a resume, and I have no reason to believe they are not being paid fairly for their work. Seems comparable to the big law firms. those might be worse tbh. Do it for the experience and Resume, then get out.
- GoodJokes 4y ago
golemotron 4y ago
> If the owner of the company I worked for, who invested well over 40 hour weeks so he could become insanely rich He's doing it to save humanity from extinction level events. If he just wanted to be rich, well, that goal was met years ago. It just turns out you need a lot of capital for truly effective altruism.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  Elon musk has nothing to do with saving us from extinction level events. He's taking research money from nuclear and putting it towards solar factories, which make the problem worse. Elon Musk has not performed any altruism. Almost all of the other billionaires have. He's never given any money to charity at all. No, that word doesn't mean "he's working on stuff." You're just trying to make the man you're a fan of look good by pretending he does things he hasn't done Why did you think that he was something other than a car maker who lies for publicity a lot?
  - golemotron 4y ago
    > Why did you think that he was something other than a car maker who lies for publicity a lot? The principle of charity.
  - cookingrobot 4y ago
    Why is solar bad?
    - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
      Because the average nameplate capacity of solar is below 20% globally, and infill is natural gas. Solar is only zero carbon if you look at it out of context. This planet has nighttime. This planet has bad weather. Solar fans usually say "batteries," but that's absolute nonsense; there is nowhere near enough copper on this planet to wire them up, or lithium or lead to make them. When they're not grid backed, which is what we're discussing here, they'd have to be half the size of your house, they'd cost $600k, and you'd have to replace them every 25 years. You think the housing crisis is bad? Wait for the battery crisis that solar fans want. There's a reason that every time they build a solar plant, they build a natural gas plant right next door. After that, someone inevitably insists that we can just cover the planet in transmission wires. And I mean, if you even think that through for a tenth of a second On top of that, *solar plants don't work*. Ivanpah has wanted to shut down for 20 years straight because it's bleeding money, and produces less than 10% of the power it was expected to, but the state won't let it, because then their green laws aren't satisfied anymore (and they're only satisfied now because nobody counts the infill carbon.) Another thing nobody seems to understand is flywheel smoothing. The variability in power is being physically smoothed by (usually) a large spinning piece of rock, similar to the metal disc that smooths power demand in your car. You remember how the one at Level3 cut a notch through the highway when it spun out of the building? That was with a professional maintenance team. You want one of those in every house, or at every city block? Energiewende failed for a reason. Germany threw almost two trillion dollars at it for 14 years, and all they did was 6x their cost of power, drive their reliability down, and increase their carbon output (even with flywheels, start/stop cycles aren't free; turning those gas plants on and off is a disaster.) Solar only makes sense if you look at it on paper, driven by an amateur who's googling shit. As soon as you look at what actually happens at plants, start folding in all the topics you didn't know about, experience, look at whether there are materials to support the fantasy, look at what can be recycled instead of just saying "recycle it," etc? It just doesn't work. One of the world's largest and most industrialized nations tried for 14 years, and it was a disaster. Just look at the real world evidence.
hintymad 4y ago
> Musk famously risked it all to make Tesla so he could come out as a billionaire I really hope that we don't guess people's motives. Attacking motives is not just a logical fallacy but also leads to more serious problems as it prevents us from having civil discourse. Look at how angry the left and the right are just because they project what people think per their ideology.

exo762 4y ago

> oligarchs Can Musk be considered such, considering his antagonistic relationship with current establishment? His acquisition of Twitter could be seen as his first move into politics realm.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
The "current establishment" of the US comprises two major political parties that switch control back and forth (and sometimes control different parts of the US government simultaneously, as seems likely will occur in 2023.) I see no evidence that Musk is picking a fight with both parties, just the one that is currently disfavored to retain control in the next Congressional elections.
turtledove 4y ago
His first move into politics? His platform (even when he wasn't an antagonistic asshole) was political - climate change, species survival, deregulation.
greenthrow 4y ago
The fact that he doesn't like the current administration does not exempt him from being an oligarch.
gkoberger 4y ago
Tesla/SpaceX/etc have gotten a good number of tax breaks and government contracts.
dagmx 4y ago
Oligarchs don't need to work with the establishment. I'd argue in many cases they exist by subverting the establishment.
- walkhour 4y ago
  Who do you have in mind? I can't think of a techno oligarch that hasn't pledged to the current establishment. However you feel about the Biden laptop stories, how many of these oligarchs allowed its spread? I think you're kidding yourself if you think oligarchs work against the establishment, but for some reason it's a pretty common view; that of fighting the more powerful, when really that's you.
lmeyerov 4y ago
He'd be bankrupt many times over without his ability to work massive $ from the US Gov - I'd argue it's one of his biggest strengths, trailing somewhere after his stock market influence abilities, both of which seem key to how he bankrolls massive capex+opex infra projects.
- ryandvm 4y ago
  This so much. Every single Musk adventure seems to requires massive federal subsidies and/or investment to stay afloat. Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company - it's questionable whether any of them would exist if they were competing in a completely free market. Some think he's saving the world, but from what I can see, he might just be the world's most effective leech.
  - camjohnson26 4y ago
    “Subsidy truffle hound” is how I’ve heard it described.
notafraudster 4y ago
I agree oligarch doesn't characterize Musk (tycoon or magnate might be more appropriate), but there are a great many oligarchs that end up on the losing end of the tides of politics -- surely this is true of Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine or countless now semi-exiled oligarchs in Russia. But I also wouldn't want to exaggerate the temperature of the hot water Musk is in; he's under fairly minor securities scrutiny thanks to a series of unprecedentedly stupid foot-in-mouth decisions he had 100% control over and could have immediately and trivially avoided at no real cost, he picked a fight with the government over reasonable COVID restrictions and they more or less declined to fight back, and lately he's posted a bunch of tweets of the form "DeMoCrAtS mOrE lIkE dImOcRaTs pwnt!!!!" while a joke video game site slaps him around with a trout. Besides that the most credible claim there's political antagonism is a bizarre to make the White House press secretary say the word "Tesla" which seems at best to be a re-run of the "Why Won't Obama Wear A Flag Pin" controversy, only somehow stupider. I'm just saying I wouldn't describe myself as having an antagonistic relationship with the government because I get parking tickets sometimes and I have tweets calling elected officials clowns.
- monksy 4y ago
  Lets not forget about how he was hobnobbing with Trump during the pandemic to get his factories back open.

rscho 4y ago

Musk risked everything? That's new. If I am not mistaken, daddy wasn't exactly poor...

bradneuberg 4y ago
As a kid he was estranged from his dad, his dad ultimately only gave him around 20k. Elon Musk has been successful based on his own background, not his dads who was a remote, not positive influence in his life.
- rscho 4y ago
  You'll excuse me if I'm a bit skeptical of the romanticized lifestory version.
  - nouveaux 4y ago
    It's healthy to be skeptical. At the same time, Musk wouldn't be the first successful person who came from a crappy background.
TrackerFF 4y ago
He could have retired after Zip2. Almost tenfold so after X/PayPal.
- deleted 4y ago
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- rscho 4y ago
  How is that 'risking everything'??
  - TrackerFF 4y ago
    I didn't say that - just pointed out that he was loaded way before Tesla.

pb7 4y ago

> If I'm wrong, I want a list of millionaires that Musk has created. I was with you until this. There are definitely many millionaires minted from their original equity grants several years ago that have gone up 1,000%+.

jklinger410 4y ago
I knew when I wrote this that someone was going to conflate early venture capitalists with employee shares. There are probably some very early employees who became rich from their stock, sure. To amend what I said a bit, we're talking about employees with shares (or any other comp) that they get from their "hard work" that turn them into millionaires.
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- deleted 4y ago
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- rrss 4y ago
  consider an engineer hired at Tesla in 2019. They probably have a 4 year RSU schedule determined based on the TSLA share price in 2019, so $50. If their equity compensation target was $30k per year, then they would get stock grants in 2021 and 2022 worth $400-600k. That works out to a lot of millionaires.
  - jklinger410 4y ago
    If working 40+ hours at Tesla makes you into a millionaire in the same way using other people's money to start a company does, then I will stand corrected. Elon is a smart man, many of these executives are smart people, they know working for a company does not pay off in the same way that entrepreneurship does. They admit as much when they describe why they deserve so much money. I'm not even saying employees should expect that type of return, what I'm saying is that executives should not use their hard work to become massively wealthy to try and influence their employees to work just as hard, when they know the payout is not there. It's manipulative. Everyone knows Musk "slept on the factory floor" to get Tesla working. That type of investment has paid out well for him. It won't pay out well for the workers on the factory floor.

kylecordes 4y ago

There are valid complaints about Elon Musk (either a few or a lot, depending on your point of view), but categorizing him as an oligarch would remove the specificity of the former meaning of the word. Perhaps people are bored with the word billionaire and want to use an edgier sounding synonym. That is how languages work - they evolve. (i.e. the word literally is now mostly a synonym for figuratively.)

jklinger410 4y ago
Considering the unchecked influence money has on politics in the United States, every billionaire is an oligarch as soon as they start donating money to political parties.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  "Oligarchy" is not subject to metaphor or "well kind of but don't you see" It only becomes an -archy when the actual literal power is openly and legally held Otherwise, neckbeards would argue that literally every society in history has been a kleptocracy, which is a far more apt description of the sarcastic viewpoint on this society than "oligarchy," which is when rich people are put into office which matches the thing they are good at, would be Oligarchy does not mean "rich people hold power because they're powerful," or anything even slightly like that Think about the society that you see in comic book alternate universes every so often, where they make Thomas Edison the chief of industry, et cetera. The nonsense one where we somehow have the ability to divine who's good at what by looking at the history of their wallet, and on that basis make meritocratic elections. In such a society, a lottery winner even who exceeded the wealth of others would wield nonetheless no power, because it wasn't earned. Practically speaking, there's no way such a thing could plausibly exist. But that's what the word actually means. It's one of those things where people trying to use it to sound deep and wise end up undercutting themselves (like "utopia.")
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cupofpython 4y ago

I cant name them directly but some quick math suggests Elon has indeed made many millionaires. Tesla IPO'd in 2010 with 13.3 million shares Tesla had a bit under 1000 employees in 2010 Tesla stock price was $17 in 2010 Tesla had a 5-for-1 stock split in August 2020 Tesla Stock price is $748 a share today 1 share of Tesla in 2010 is equal to $3,740 today It would take 268 shares of Tesla from 2010 to be a millionaire today. that's $4,556. Elon's success with Tesla should have produced at least 1,000 millionaires if his early employees believed in the product. I cant say that still translates to today's workers, but if his vision is that there is still just as much room to grow - then he would be making a lot more millionaires if he is correct. Even amongst todays newer employees. Idk if I would bet on that growth at this point since it is already a household name now and it wasnt before, but I have no actual reason to think one way or the other

jklinger410 4y ago
> I cant say that still translates to today's workers, but if his vision is that there is still just as much room to grow - then he would be making a lot more millionaires if he is correct. Therein lies the rub, as they say. He may have spun off millionaires based on original investors, and maybe a few early employees forwent salary for stock options and became millionaires. But we're talking about hard workers who put in over 40 hours a week currently. Are they working for stock options that are going to make them millionaires?
- cupofpython 4y ago
  > Are they working for stock options that are going to make them millionaires? Maybe, maybe not. But now they are working for a well known company that looks good on a resume, and I have no reason to believe they are not being paid fairly for their work. Seems comparable to the big law firms. those might be worse tbh. Do it for the experience and Resume, then get out.
GoodJokes 4y ago

golemotron 4y ago

> If the owner of the company I worked for, who invested well over 40 hour weeks so he could become insanely rich He's doing it to save humanity from extinction level events. If he just wanted to be rich, well, that goal was met years ago. It just turns out you need a lot of capital for truly effective altruism.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago
Elon musk has nothing to do with saving us from extinction level events. He's taking research money from nuclear and putting it towards solar factories, which make the problem worse. Elon Musk has not performed any altruism. Almost all of the other billionaires have. He's never given any money to charity at all. No, that word doesn't mean "he's working on stuff." You're just trying to make the man you're a fan of look good by pretending he does things he hasn't done Why did you think that he was something other than a car maker who lies for publicity a lot?
- golemotron 4y ago
  > Why did you think that he was something other than a car maker who lies for publicity a lot? The principle of charity.
- cookingrobot 4y ago
  Why is solar bad?
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    Because the average nameplate capacity of solar is below 20% globally, and infill is natural gas. Solar is only zero carbon if you look at it out of context. This planet has nighttime. This planet has bad weather. Solar fans usually say "batteries," but that's absolute nonsense; there is nowhere near enough copper on this planet to wire them up, or lithium or lead to make them. When they're not grid backed, which is what we're discussing here, they'd have to be half the size of your house, they'd cost $600k, and you'd have to replace them every 25 years. You think the housing crisis is bad? Wait for the battery crisis that solar fans want. There's a reason that every time they build a solar plant, they build a natural gas plant right next door. After that, someone inevitably insists that we can just cover the planet in transmission wires. And I mean, if you even think that through for a tenth of a second On top of that, *solar plants don't work*. Ivanpah has wanted to shut down for 20 years straight because it's bleeding money, and produces less than 10% of the power it was expected to, but the state won't let it, because then their green laws aren't satisfied anymore (and they're only satisfied now because nobody counts the infill carbon.) Another thing nobody seems to understand is flywheel smoothing. The variability in power is being physically smoothed by (usually) a large spinning piece of rock, similar to the metal disc that smooths power demand in your car. You remember how the one at Level3 cut a notch through the highway when it spun out of the building? That was with a professional maintenance team. You want one of those in every house, or at every city block? Energiewende failed for a reason. Germany threw almost two trillion dollars at it for 14 years, and all they did was 6x their cost of power, drive their reliability down, and increase their carbon output (even with flywheels, start/stop cycles aren't free; turning those gas plants on and off is a disaster.) Solar only makes sense if you look at it on paper, driven by an amateur who's googling shit. As soon as you look at what actually happens at plants, start folding in all the topics you didn't know about, experience, look at whether there are materials to support the fantasy, look at what can be recycled instead of just saying "recycle it," etc? It just doesn't work. One of the world's largest and most industrialized nations tried for 14 years, and it was a disaster. Just look at the real world evidence.

hintymad 4y ago

> Musk famously risked it all to make Tesla so he could come out as a billionaire I really hope that we don't guess people's motives. Attacking motives is not just a logical fallacy but also leads to more serious problems as it prevents us from having civil discourse. Look at how angry the left and the right are just because they project what people think per their ideology.