Since the Elon Musk takeover, Twitter has been grabbing more headlines than usual. News of mass layoffs, mass resignations, toxic work culture, peculiar temporary updates, summoning terminated employees, publicly firing employees, and whatnot have bombarded the offline and digital media. Twitter, which used to be a melting pot of various demographics, is now barely fluttering to survive the global meltdown of its own.
The system began crashing at an supersonic speed after the Tesla & SpaceX CEO vastly overpaid in the $44 billion dollar Twitter deal that seemed to have sprung out of sheer naivety. However, Musk has had a deep-rooted trajectory of making callous decisions.
Apparently, Linette Lopez, a columnist at Business Insider, claims to have spent 3 years (2018-2021) investigating Elon Musk’s Tesla. Recently, she summarized “some of the sloppy, dangerous, callous” she had learned over the year in a detailed Twitter thread.
Reportedly, in 2012, Tesla was aware that one of its models had a battery flaw that could eventually start a fire. But they went ahead and sold the model anyway.
Musk once ordered employees to stop conducting the standard break-and-roll test on nearly finished Model 3s in the manufacturing factories. Apparently, the break-and-roll test takes place in the final stages of manufacturing.
The Business Insider article from 2018 mentioned the test ensures “that the car’s wheels are perfectly aligned and checks the brakes and their function.” This meant that Tesla was deliberately sidelining the safety quotient to scale up the production. However, another article by CNET called the reaction ‘overblown.’ It stated that Tesla was doing on-track testing that rendered break-and-roll-tests redundant.
In an interview with CBS Good Morning in April 2018, Musk revealed that Tesla was in a ‘production nightmare‘ cos of ‘robots.‘ He said, “We have this crazy complex network of conveyor belts, and it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing.” Apparently, the electric vehicle company had fallen behind its production goal and could not deliver Model 3 electric cars to customers who had pre-ordered the same on time.
Few months later, Business Insider reported that the production nightmare was still ongoing and the company was generating an ‘incredible amount of waste.’
In 2022, Linette Lopez accused Elon Musk of becoming a “tool to whitewash the regime’s (China) crimes against humanity” with his overtly compliant and deferential self with China at a time when the US-China relationship was at its nadir.
Tesla acquired a financially troubled SolarCity, a solar energy company, in 2016, resulting in a lawsuit brought by Tesla shareholders on its CEO. The acquisition slapped billions of dollars worth of debt on shareholders. They alleged that Musk was able to get them on board with the deal after “misrepresenting the financial well-being of SolarCity,” reports CNBC. Shareholders also argued that Musk controlled the Tesla board.
However, in April 2022, a Delaware court ruled in favour of Elon Musk.
Musk recently gave his Twitter employees an ultimatum to quit or leave — basically do or die — if they cannot commit to a hardcore working culture for a ‘breakthrough Twitter 2.0.’ This set off waves of mass resignations at the social media company. But the billionaire has a knack for propagating a toxic work culture. Long working hours and inhumane conditions often get associated with the working environment at Musk’s Tesla.
Also Read: Elon Musk Asks Twitter Staff To Commit To ‘Hardcore’ Culture; They Quit En Masse
Here’s how people reacted to this detailed Twitter thread.
Don’t you ever think Elon Musk will ever stop creating news! And this is not NECESSARILY a good thing.
