Even moreso it was Musk's personal brand that made his companies so desirable to work for. A brand that he has spent the last few years torching to the ground on Twitter. He'll still be able to pay senior folks enough to stick around for a while. But the new grad pipeline is most likely drying up at this point.
With that out of the way there is a difference between corporate PR greenwashing and literally changing battery chemistries to not contain as many rare earth minerals.
Sodium?
https://www.unige.ch/communication/communiques/en/2022/un-no...
Musk seems to be modeling his companies on the video gaming industry.
Instead of banning something, I think we need to make sure we're allowing people to seek employment options that work best for them with sensible safety practices of course. Being able to work overtime, for example, afforded my parents a great life and a reasonable "retirement" age. You might say, well they could get paid more and join a union, etc. and while I don't care too much about unions one way or another, Honda employees routinely reject unionization because they're really happy with their employment arrangement. I bet Tesla is similar.
Speaking for Honda, many people go straight from high school to work on the factory floor. They work overtime, and they have to do a good job, but if you go and ask the employees or the town of Marysville everyone is pretty happy with the arrangement. Again, I'm not sure why Tesla would be dissimilar except that it's popular so it makes the headlines.
In the case of office workers, software engineers, or others who are salaried, well they're professionals and they're paid a lot of money.
The first reaction to seeing something like "xyz is happening at Tesla" shouldn't be to ban something that you don't understand.
>My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime.
Yes that's normal, sometimes you have to do overtime, but 60 hours at a regular basis is something else.
Look at Asia and how many new companies they produced despite overworking themselves to death.
The problem with Europe is not mainly this but that we truly do not have a common market.
We cant pool resources and talents into one place and launch a pan-european project. Europe is still countries actively engaging in competition among themselves.
I think this is a better diversification than concentrating all GDP into a few big player.
Wait, isn't this a fictitious company from breaking bad?
Also, not really sure how state sponsored airlines and telecoms are a great counterargument to Europe's failure to innovate.
> Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers.
The office is a complete anachronism, entirely unnecessary for knowledge work.
It is born of industrialized times before modern networked knowledge management and communications software. It is kept in place by bad managers. It was long ago studied and shown that remote work makes good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams perform worse (likely because good managers manage for results while bad managers just micromanage for poor indicators of work like how much time you spend in your chair looking miserable).
The commute is an utter and complete waste of time and society's resources. Simply not commuting buys 1-4 HOURS EVERY DAY. Even if not a minute of this time is given to the employer as extra work, the employee will be significantly more productive having not spent 0.5-2 hours fighting traffic just to sit in the cheap office chair.
Smart employees have figured this out and properly demand to do better work. Smart managers also know that there are huge competitive advantages to remote work.
1) Employers can now tap a talent pool as large as the country or even globe, instead of only a 2-hour commute to one of their offices.
2) Remote work is a key competitive advantage, seen as a key benefit by the best employees, and will allow for lower salary costs.
3) Remote work can dramatically reduce real-estate costs. IBM figured this out decades ago when it started doing significant remote work and having check-in portable offices.
4) Remote work will force you to have better management, who manage for objectives instead of irrelevant manager-ego-boosting indicia of work.
5) Remote work has been proved to be at least as, and in some cases more productive than office work.
So, what is egregious about it is that it is now widely known as a bad practice.
Imagine the reverse - remote work has been the norm and now managers were proposing to the boards that they build multi-billion dollar buildings, and require every employee to get up and drive in the worst traffic to this site, to sit and work in the exact same condition every day, and zero of those conditions enable better work product (i.e., the equipment is not better than what employees have at home, etc.). Both the boards approving such spending and the employees being asked to do this new waste-of-time commute would universally say
"W T F !?!"