Hi again @elonmusk
twitter.com
twitter.com
How can you feel shame about your impulse towards being a horrible bigot when the President of the free world or a multi-billionaire is just like you!
He was massively bullied as a child, now it's his turn!
He was not.
He might be lying, but it's just as likely that he's 'having my turn!'
Elon's father has talked about it in interviews. It seems Elon was the bully in this specific incident.
Pretty sad existence, even with all of his toys.
Elon has enough money that he could quit today and have enough money for 10 lives of pure hedonistic bliss... and yet chooses to spend his days on his phone, posting shitty memes and being a dick on Twitter.
It's mind boggling, really.
I do see that Trump redirected hate from his followers onto targets. Is that what is going to happen here? Is that the unsupportive toxic aspect of this type of social media?
I'm honestly starting to wonder if we humans might be more imperfect than we let on. Stranger things have happened before!
Now...on to read some stories.
That's weird, because what's this?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unforced_error
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/unfor...
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=unforced%20e...
OOPSADAISY: oh, how sweet is the irony...you said "there's" not "there's not" - I will just leave this up as further demonstration of my point, and some humble pie!
> What you're saying would suggest all errors are fundamentally alike, only differing in severity
You are working at the concrete level, I am speaking at higher levels of abstraction.
Note that what is said and what is received are often not the same - sometimes, it is even the opposite!
> ...but this is of course not the case.
The word "is" is very slippery/sneaky - watch out!
> I don't know of anyone who thinks in that way about people's behaviour.
Perhaps you do not know everyone - or, of those people you do know, you may not have comprehensive knowledge of their cognitive styles and capabilities.
> Your dismissiveness is woefully misplaced.
Your attitude is being noted, Mr Rivers.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/bed10ee3-765d-4985-89e0-4fa4742...
Now, back to all of the interesting stories in this thread...
Do you consider this a universal fact or a local fact?
Consider how a graduate level physics lecture would look to a C student in grade 9, for example.
> If you cannot comprehend why simply dismissing shit behaviour with "he's only human" is moronic then that makes you quite special.
This is quite interesting, what does it refer to that occurred in this conversation?
I recommend that if you're going to criticize someone, criticize something that they have actually done. Granted, this may be a lot less fun, but it is at least plausibly more optimal.
The guy politely tries to get his attention to find out whether he still has a job. And Musk's response is to interrogate him publicly, mock him, and accuse him of using his disability as an excuse to avoid work.
It's cretinous in so many different ways it's hard to see how the stupidest person would think it a sensible course of action.
Particularly post-Twitter, the problem has gotten _clearer_ to the public, but that was his first really public obvious "by the way, have I mentioned that I'm completely awful?" thing.
Public opinion might be up or down, depending on which community you're polling, but I believe he's back to being the richest person in the world[0], so I'd say he "got away with it" in every possible respect.
0. https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-once-again-richest-21554083...
It's a sign of immaturity.
Humbly, when I don't understand where Musk comes from on something, I don't assume that the disconnect is due to superior intelligence on my part[0] (but weirdly, plenty of people with objectively little accomplishment have no problem assuming that they are seeing something Musk is blind to)
So, everything that follows is conjecture for the sake of a probabilistic answer to your question.
I suspect Musk is "allergic" to the type of work/worker this person seems to do. The person's self-cited list of accomplishments doesn't actually list a single impactful accomplishment, which isn't acceptable for someone senior enough to not do any hands-on work.
Now, again, this is a guess, but I suspect that this type of "allergy" is a big component of Musk's success in general in how he works and who he hires for his companies. It likely serves his very well. As a "side effect" of that allergy, it probably compels him to toe/cross the line in cases like this. If you believe in something deeply, you speak to it even at your own risk.
Again, not saying that's what I would do, but I am also not the guy who runs Tesla and all these other companies, so if you have a choice between what I'd do, and what Musk would do, do what he would do!
[0] It's very popular to say he's a hype man who just rides the wave of provocative tweets. But... have people who say that ever seen, drove, ride in a Tesla? Those are real. Maybe people can't comprehend the amount of stuff you gotta get right to make and sell a car, if they did they would keep that totally distinct from the "hype" category. And aren't those ships going to space etc? It's a weird flex to claim that Musk doesn't get really important, difficult things done - and if you accept that he does, then it's weird to claim "but I don't understand how he works, so I assume he's the idiot"
What was the former employee expecting anyway ? Why someone suposedly as "talented" and wealthy as is is would ask and spill all of this publicly ? It's pure attention seeking
People can downvote but im 100% sure thats what elons think^^
In this context, does it matter what his net worth is? Are you implying it’s not possible that people defend him for his positions alone?
Both him and Halli come off bad in this exchange, in my opinion. Not sure why money is a deciding factor to you.
>One of his best-known projects is Ramp Up Iceland, which is building ramps throughout the nation to increase accessibility for people in wheelchairs. He has also personally donated to the legal funds of victims of sexual abuse, and has garnered praise for charitable donations to families in need this holiday season.
https://www.icelandreview.com/news/haraldur-thorleifsson-swe...
He's definitely a man that gives back to his community. And seems to be busy creating, and working.
To a narcissist who doesn't like a person like this, the brain says "Either he's a fraud, or I'm the asshole". And a narcissist brain will settle that question in e heartbeat, with the wrong answer.
https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
Excerpt
Managing Elon was a huge part of the company (SpaceX) culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.
It seems that Elon really created his own bubble of quacks as followers, and feels empowered by that.
Actually, when I think deeper about it, it's a little scary...
- That employees have no right to know whether or not they’re employed?
- Or that employee private medical information should be allowed to be disclosed publicly?
This whole thing started because Twitter’s HR couldn’t tell this person if he was or wasn’t employed by Twitter. He guessed the only way he would get an answer was to publicly ask Elon on Twitter. And guess what, he was right! That indeed turned out to be the only way to get an answer.
Elon further decided to commit a bunch of privacy and employment rights abuses but fundamentally it was simply a question of an HR dept that didn’t know who it employed.
They're literally followers, if Elon said/did there's a good reason for it. As classic as it can be for a cult of personality.
They're agreeing with him that he is the infallible Dear Leader, pretty much. The Musk following, at this stage, is a full-blown personality cult; what Musk is actually saying/doing is rather beside the point.
I'm struggling to think of anyone who accumulated this degree of blind adulation and _did_ act like a normal, reasonable person; maybe being an arsehole is actually an entry requirement.
Unfortunately, that sort of behavior tends to appear as "magical thinking", "woo woo", "pedantry", "nonsensical", "a waste of time", "sea-lioning", {all the memes}, etc, despite it being essentially what the scientific method does, but in a very different and much simpler, deterministic problem space.
Crazies are at work here too.
Sycophant is sort of behavior profile. It's a thing that you can do, be a sycophant. It looks like that's what's going on for these so-called crazies.
Sad to see how easily HN is gamed.
Do you think this way: A thread of people dunking on Musk is so cool! Calling people crazies (implying that you are not crazy, only they are!) is so fantastic!
Tesla and SpaceX were both v risky bets. He also seems good at hiring the right folks to take ideas and execute on them.
Although like Howard Hughes he is quite the narcissist. Twitter is fumbling, he's being a d-head and picking fights in open.
I imagine it's costing him quite a few potential Tesla buyers.
Here's what will ruin Elon's day: Even with the algorithm now artificially boosting Musk's tweets¹, Halli's response has more likes.
¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-15/musk-forc...
Edit: works!
According to dang, flags almost invariably come from HN users, not from HN moderators.
It was the Musk fans.
I was going to reply and say that it's important for people to see the tweets anyway, but then I realized that the people most in need of seeing the tweets are the ones who did see them and flagged this submission.
I wonder if there are any "undecideds" remaining, or if everyone here has already sorted into pro-Musk/anti-Musk groups?
I heard some people started to change their minds about Trump after he mocked a disabled reporter, so I don't know.
This is indeed very interesting to HN (you can see that by the number of upvotes and comments). It touches on what we can expect when working in tech, and how tech billionaires treat their workers. The low value comments about Elon being rude or justifying his behavior will be voted down as they are less interesting than the actual matter at hand.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063457
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063442
... but rather to email us at hn@ycombinator.com if they think they're seeing manipulation or abuse. We're happy to look at the data in such cases.
I can tell you from long experience, though, that in threads on divisive topics, the Occamesque explanation is almost always adequate.
Maybe it's a personal failing on my part, but I used to live in blissful ignorance of what Musk was up to today. Would like to go back to that at some point. If I did care, it's easy enough to follow him on Twitter.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/how-the-a...
Has he not actually seen Office Space? Does he not know that the guys going "what woud you say you actually do here" are the clueless consultants who don't really understand how the business works? Or am I the one who is either misremembering, or fallen out of touch with what memes mean these days?
That being said, this makes me curious how (if?) Elon manages/measures his reputational impact, and if he even cares how he comes across when he says things like this. Is there an upside (for Elon) to him acting like this?
>Is there an upside (for Elon) to him acting like
Behind every mad man is a sad man. He is using his workaholism (his addiction to work and also his addiction to power) to ease his depression.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-says-he-may-have...
Even Steve Jobs was depressed and his covert depression became overt after he was fired from Apple.
I hope those holding shares of Tesla stock feel really good about supporting this behavior.
Edit:
I want to know which account flagged the original post and I want them to explain why they did.
Hello. Is that you, Elon?
Publicly disclosing an employee’s disability, mocking it, claiming they are faking it, and then saying it is the reason they were fired.
"The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that."
They probably should have (and it's still editable as I type) marked it "here is the text of the tweet in question" because if you don't know that it does look like Karwebnetwork is the one making the offensive comment.
> did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Yes, Elon should be more kind, but like a great white shark, put a cage between you and them and move on. This holds for most people who reach the level he has. You don’t become this wealthy by being a decent human (broadly speaking, there are always exceptions).
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
(no current TSLA exposure, I intend to donate to Halli in some fashion)
I'm a current Tesla owner (2018 Model 3) and really like the car. But these are all reasons why I'm uncomfortable investing in another 5-7 years of Tesla ownership. Right now Musk has chosen to not destroy Tesla (or at least, not harm it much) but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun. Plus I intensely dislike the guy and want to encourage the growth of the EV industry away from a single, potentially unreliable supplier. And this is sad, because two years ago I would have gone to the mat to convince my friends and family to buy Teslas.
I see Teslas in town and admire them still. But wondered if this is a thing now for some.
"Elon Musk has made me embarrassed to drive my Tesla now" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34568470
Just last year, I was all-in on getting the Model S despite its cost going way up. I was determined to figure out how to do it. I was also extremely bullish on FSD and definitely had a few shares.
Today, I have almost no interest in getting a new Tesla, have serious doubts about FSD long-term and have sold all of my shares.
Tesla, as a company, is absolutely fantastic, and I am thankful for Elon doing an excellent job at pushing the old guard towards electric. However, I can't continue supporting a person who has such obvious disregard for others he thinks are beneath him.
He could literally brick your car tomorrow, or make it play an endless loop of Nyan cat at full blast or grab the camera footage and publish it on Twitter if he felt like it.
you're suggesting tsla is going to brick someone's car because of something they said on twitter just because elon told them to?
Bully a disabled employee about their disability being a sign of weak character.
Isn't that just the next step of this? I'm not saying it would happen, but it doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility given the level of petty we're dealing with.
This is kind of an odd lesson for you to take honestly. Everything he has done with Twitter has not merely been completely legal, but in fact has underlined how Musk couldn't get out of law and contract. He made a very, very bad buy, and Twitter's owners were happy to take it and made out like bandits. He tried desperately to get out of it, and despite effectively unlimited funds for legal representation, he could not. He failed to take precautions upfront, made a deal, and he was held to it. After that Twitter became private (though since he financed the purchase in part vs buying with purely his own wealth there are still some other players involved). He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either. It's just that it takes time for the legal process to take out and it's only been months. Twitter is also in a vastly less regulated space then vehicles.
I think there are reasonable reasons to be concerned about Tesla, but
>but at any point he might decide to illegally void all warranties or triple the price of supercharging just for fun
this isn't one of them in the slightest.
I have friends who worked at Twitter and were owed (and additionally, were promised by Twitter and Musk, in writing) both severance and RSU payouts. Musk has decided not to make these payments, so they are forced to sue/arbitrate for them. Similarly, Musk has decided not to pay AWS for services that AWS is contractually obligated to provide.
As a car owner, I'm confident that if Musk decided to break my warranty agreement I might eventually receive (some) compensation from the courts. Could his lawyers drag the process out by 2-3 years while my car remains broken? Absolutely. The only real protection I have against this is not to do any further business with Musk's companies, and I intend to do that.
My biggest concern is not warranties being broken: it is stuff like "Tesla issues a software update that disables core features of the car", which actually happened to my radar.
I always felt like the marketing around self-driving Tesla's was misleading. They named it misleadingly, ambitiously but misleadingly. So I feel Musk has broken the integrity of the feature since its inception and roll out.
Bizarre about the radar, that sounds like an actual safety problem.
Seeing how he makes guinea pigs out of everyone, to me suggests he'll do anything to get to Mars.
> He has since tried to blow off various other contracts and such, and there is no sign he'll get away with that either
You're certainly allowed to contain multitudes, but these seem to contradict each other?
Also, he's done a bunch of things at Twitter that are most definitely not legal, like attempting to fire/lay off people without proper notice in several different ways and jurisdictions.
This is a common thread from multiple people I've talked to who have worked for his companies. Everyone who works even close to his orbit are sycophants. You have to be or your career is... limited. I remember even applying for one of those companies some time ago. The phone screen went well and when I called the recruiter back a week later to ask how things were going, she said "[Hiring Manager's name] disagreed with Elon about something and no longer works here." Yow.
Tesla has:
* falsified worker injury reports
* fired employees for raising security concerns
* fixed cars under goodwill service instead of warranty repairs to avoid lemon laws and various other accounting shenanigans
* blatantly lied about and marketed products named as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, both of which have led to several accidents and even deaths
* personally attacked regulators or former regulators
* tried to quiet sexual harassment happening at the company
* industry lows in quality and reliability
* abused government subsidies
The labor abuses, personal attacks, and dishonest FSD marketing are downright distasteful (and illegal when found to be so by a court or regulator), but creative application of government subsidies is fine if the ends justify the means. There are no heroes, just people.
Edit: And I'm not suggesting this should be a normalized thing. Just that it's unfortunate how greed trumps any sort of regular decorum.
Not clear as the employee appears to live in Iceand, not USA, much less California.
I can't even guess what the law in Iceland might be. On one hand, it seems generally a pretty reasonable place. On the other hand it's a small place and won't have the time, bandwidth or interest in passing as many laws as bigger places do.
Are you from Iceland? I wonder if they have a kind of default rule that says "in this area, if we don't have our own law we adopt the one of X (say DK or EU)"
In the meantime Toferson is cleared to pursue the latest medical theory for muscular dystrophy.
Well, except for one recent notable exception involving a blue bird.
Nearly everything Elon disclosed didn't need to be disclosed publicly.
Just because someone asks you a question publicly, it doesn't give you carte blanche to unload every single detail you know about the person asking the question.
There is not one single thing case in there that makes it OK for an employer to disclose medical information about you, however vague or detailed.
It's not murder, but it's also wrong.
Or howabout if a truck driver gets blinded somehow. Do you still have to keep employing him as a truck driver, and going through the motions as if he is still employed?
That seems ridiculous. "Job at twitter" is not a resource to which people all have a right of some kind.
Ianal, but ...
To the point: just saying that "some employee has a disability" does not mean they are disclosing the disability. On the contrary, in order for the company to accommodate, it's needs to be said.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/index.ht...
Like if you or CEO you might not be able to confirm or debate and employee or (in the process of being fired) ex-employees health information. It just might be part of HIPAA that says you don't have the right to speak about that anymore.
To be clear, I haven't found this restriction in the regulations of that link I just shared but that's what I suspect given what I've seen of employer restrictions from my work history.
Update:
No I think I'm coming around to your perspective because it looks like HIPA is only applicable to health insurance providers. Not employers. Unless of course the employer is a self-funded health insurance provider, I don't know the details of twitter's health plan.
https://www.calltherightattorney.com/blog/2022/02/can-my-emp...
This link suggests that it might be an ADA violation. However Elon Musk could claim that he is revealing that the employee has a disability through Elon's reading of the employees Twitter feed which has public information about his muscular dystrophy. That's a way to weasel out of this ADA violation, potentially.
Update 2:
Ah but it looks like it's a civil rights violation:
> releasing an employee’s medical information in retaliation to that attorney opposing unlawful discrimination or harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that will give rise to a very good claim for damages as well.
It felt wrong, reading what Elon wrote, and it looks like, if this blog post is to be trusted, the law also agrees with that sentiment.
A couple of days ago there was someone asking about not using Windows laptop for religious purposes and the answer was that if that was a large hassle for the business, it was okay to say no.
Edit:
> releasing an employee’s medical information
Does saying that X has a disability is a release of medical information, when that's public information in their Twitter profile and runs a business to help others with that disability?
Re: releasing otherwise public information:
That is a fantastic question. I don't know. I suspect there is a legal case to be made:
I think about this as a hypothetical "reasonable person", which is what appears in the courtroom TV shows that I personally have watched. Perhaps obviously, I am not a lawyer, But I do watch TV shows about lawyers <3.
1) A reasonable person might conclude that Musk did not research Harald's Twitter feed but instead merely read his name, after receiving the direct tweet from Harald, and then asked Twitter human resources' database to confirm he was in fact His Twitter employee.
2) Alternatively a reasonable person might conclude that Musk did research Harald's Twitter feed before replying. And so it was okay for Musk to disclose. Again I'm being very approximate.
So I think it's possible to make a case and it might be worth the potential legal victory and monetary payout for damages.
To reiterate something tangential to your question, I think it is clear that regardless of the disclosure, Musk's thinking around the termination does include Haraldur's disability. That's not right, legally, from what I've read.
Companies accommodate employees disabilities in order to allow the employee to do their jobs. Elon's argument is that they're not working, even after accomodations. It has nothing to do with the disability. Will it hold in a court of law? Ianal
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/499/am-i-a-c...
I'm pretty sure that if you allow the release of HIPAA covered information from a provider to your employer that the information stored by your employer is not protected by HIPAA anymore.
HIPAA restricts what covered entities can do (basically healthcare providers and insurance), not what can be done with medical information in general.
Of course most decent employers will handle even mildly sensitive information in a confidential way.
This is so far below the bare minimum of reasonable business behavior I think it will cause big problems for Elon hiring or acquiring companies.
We need to accept that CEOs care about morals because of their bottom line (money), not because of legals or that they're nice. It's not the job of a CEO to be nice.
People that hate your product will never buy it. That's why diet soda or fast food care about trees and the sea: paying customers. Money.
The difference between internal communication to accommodate and public communication to discredit should be obvious.
They won't, but I hope they do.
I admit it's a particularly juicy episode, but (a) that's not what HN is for and (b) it destroys what it is for. We're trying for very much the opposite here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935 if anyone wants it.
I also had never seen that Tumblr post which has been linked here, giving an account of how the culture at Tesla allegedly involved a lot of processes for managing and working around Elon. I think that's interesting, too, for questions it raises about leadership and celebrity and funding in general.
I admit that the conversation has not focused on those things too much. :-\
But I'm glad I saw the thread, at least.
A few weeks ago I also had a surgery that, for just a couple days, left me unable to sit up on my own or walk across the room, due to the pain.
And then I spent last night visiting a relative who is (I think) dying. She's completely lucid but now immobile to the point that she can't sit all the way up, get out of bed on her own, or walk, and I don't think her mobility ever increases much again from here. (Incidentally, she is also legally blind due to the same genetic condition as I mentioned before.)
I think my still-forming thoughts and feelings about all of that drew me to this story, and to Thorleifsson's persona.
It sucks that he has the condition that he has, but at the same time, he doesn't seem like a very pitiable person to me. He seems dignified, capable, successful, and loved. Someone to be admired, or even envied.
So it's really interesting to me, then, how some people see him as 'playing the pity card' when he describes his disability as it comes up in this discussion.
Like I said, my recent thoughts about disability are still forming so I don't have some interesting conclusion that I'm proud of. But I think there's a lot to think about here, beyond the outrage and hero worship.
Maybe all this hubbub will help push a thoughtful article or two about disability to the front page in the next few days. That would be cool.
Taking over a social network that already exists and seemingly bumbling around with it isn't moving the human experience further. It's distracting and pulling energy away from being the face of a lot of trailblazing stuff. I'm tired of headlines about him and Twitter.
Get back to all the shit you look at like "damn, that's being worked on too? Interesting!"
Trying to make a social network profitable and "free speech" (what a joke) isn't interesting. It's boring.
I imagine that's what's going on.
- VCs
- Tesla Shareholders
- Tesla Owners
- Twitter Employees
- SpaceX Employees
- General analysts of what really makes for the success of Tech Companies. The presence of the CEO or it's thankful leave of absence at the controls.
- General admirers of human imperfections
- Promoters of AI has a better deserving custodian of the Planet
- Remote bored Aliens, with a lifespan of 50,000 years, and a curated HN feed, laughing their 4 mouths off out of our primitive illogical egos.
It's factually really relevant to hacker news.
It's about a technology innovator, Musk, who has behaved in a way which actively stifles innovation from other unique thinkers - like people who have muscular dystrophy and are pursuing remaining in the public sphere, themselves helping to refine human technology for everyone's benefit.
It's fine being on Reddit as well.
I get it. Musk is polarizing, he has fanboys and haters. I don't care much for what either has to say about him, because their reaction to whatever he does is mostly emotional and emotional responses aren't that interesting. Everyone who's ever had emotions knows how they feel, and I'm not learning anything from knowing that you hate Musk.
It can feel good to get together with like-minded individuals and talk to each other about how much you hate someone, how terrible they are and how you are right and all that (or the opposite, which I'd flag too). I'm not trying to deny you that, I just don't think that it has to happen here, as there are places which are already serving that role specifically.
At the same time, there aren't many other places that avoid it and aggregate interesting content that is curated by people from lots of different backgrounds and where you have a chance to find something that you would've otherwise never been in contact with. I believe that's more important than group-validation of shared dislike.
Online rage, celebrity gossip, cults and anti-cults, ideological battle, internet tropes, and personality drama are all destructive to the intent of HN. This topic is rich in all of those and then some. There's no curiosity here, no interesting new things, no respectful or playful exchange—just people hammering on what they already feel, going after their objects of hatred and each other. That's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
If anyone assumed otherwise, now would be a good moment to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate one's image of what HN is supposed to be!
Edit: I just inserted "or celebrities" into the guidelines. It was already implied, but it won't hurt to make it explicit.
Don't you think that certain links can be newsworthy despite generating predictably ugly discussion threads?
It does seem that you're saying the site is not about news per se.
You seem to have this personal weird exception to the guidelines, which is "Please submit the original source... unless it's a corporate press release." ;-) But you still allow meta-links about corporate press releases, which may put the PR in larger perspective but don't otherwise clearly gratify intellectual curiosity.
I'll diss the corporate press release any day! Beyond that I'm not sure I follow your specific point. What do you think we should do differently?
The question is why HN allows a meta-link about a corporate PR (for example, a Verge story about the PR, since you don't like the direct link) but not something like this? Why is "Corporation X announces Y" intellectually interesting, but this isn't?
Anyway, if this submission remains flagged, then this newer one should be flagged too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063232
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35061369
* "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." -- is what I'm noticing from the Guidelines. I dismissed @luckylion (hi!) as categorizing this subject as being off-topic for HN.
Reframing in the context of the Guidelines:
I learn from the topic an appreciation for Accessibility (the technology-area that enables marginalized groups). Specifically, how it can be possible for a severely handicapped designer to contribute, greatly in this case, only having the use of fingers for up to 2 hours.
And I learn, how bias by leadership poses difficulties countering it non-linearly / disproportionately to that marginalized individual. Specifically the disabled ex-employee contacted the CEO through Tweeting, the next-most-convenient technology route after failing to successfully use corporate facilities (https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1632931816750346242).
It is hard in my experience to contradict and correct the dominant paradigm when it's at fault. As a technologist, I think about the problems society faces, in this case posed by Twitter Inc's reliance on Tweeting, to a disabled individual.
So I did/do think this subject is appropriate for HN - it's something to be built on; I disagree with the subject's flagging since many of the spin-off discussions are what deserve flagging for "celebrity" character politics.
Certainly the key-takeaway, ADA / Civil Rights violation + character-maligning by innovator of another innovator, is dressed-up in "celebrity". Though not tragic; the now-fired disabled employee seems to be excelling at life.
Elon just needs to stop tweeting, find a competent "Gwen Shotwell" to run Twitter and get his focus back on succeeding (or failing) at the kinds of very high-risk, high-impact things he might be remembered for in a hundred years (like energizing the entire private and public space industries). I guess I'm weird but I try to separate my personal feelings and preferences when assessing the effectiveness and value of public figures (politicians, corporate leaders, celebrities, etc). In cases like this, it's not easy.
Title should be: "Picking a fight with a disabled acquired founder who didn't knew he was fired since 9 days"