So this lawsuit dates from 5 years ago. Silicon valley in effect. Move fast and break, er, not being racist.
Payout is nuts but will probably be appealed.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-former-worker-subjected-to-racist-workplace/
From the article, it's $6.9 million in compensatory and $130 million punitive. Ostensibly the latter part is more about correcting Tesla's behavior, although it's true such numbers tend to be cut down significantly if not mostly wiped out on appeals.
Perhaps not coincidentally, corporations don't necessarily change their behavior from damage awards they can reduce to a rounding error in their budgets.
People are now saying Blue Origin was a "toxic" workplace, whereas before it was just an underperforming one. Now that they demanded their employees actually come back to work to collect a paycheck and are pushing to accomplish something it is suddenly toxic.
From the following, it seems like there were systemic issues in terms of leadership and goals going back years.
https://arstechnica.com/science/202...f-blue-origin-leaders-trying-to-catch-spacex/
The essay that claimed the culture was toxic was written by someone who was removed from the company in 2019, so at least that claimant doesn't have the motivation about needing to come back to work.
Other claims, and the reactions by the company do correlate with something long-term and serious.
https://arstechnica.com/science/202...cry-safety-and-sexist-culture-at-the-company/
The company denounced the author of the essay, and said she was fired for breaking export laws, which is possibly non-standard in several ways.
One, it's typically not a responsibility of someone working in employee communications be be directing or managing IP of that kind, and because companies normally don't dive into that level of detail on firings. It's not a professional look, and making it that personal wouldn't be inconsistent with a toxic culture.
Further, the article points out that the CEO of BO is extremely poorly rated on Glassdoor relative to other CEOs in the industry or elsewhere, and his tenure matches up with the period in question.
The first article about how BO was given ideas on how to turn its fortunes around years ago, and we now know it mostly didn't listen, which seems like dissenting opinion isn't handled well.
While SpaceX does get results, I do recall in the past descriptions of quite a lot of burnout in Musk's companies. Execs and managers also had anecdotes of churn and high pressure from Musk.
For SpaceX, it helps that people feel their work is going into something that makes it to space and is accomplishing a vision.
I'm not sure if there isn't some long-term cost in terms of burning out potential innovations and institutional knowledge, even if the results presently are good.
Perhaps because there's a different CEO for SpaceX, among other things, it's been able to handle the mercurial Musk.
Tesla's been an example of more clear own-goals that made things significantly harder for itself due to Musk's decisions and behaviors.
Just seems a little convenient how these things play out and I would not be surprised to hear the same things when the solar or boring company decide to fold.
The solar company effectively folded prior to being acquired by Tesla. There were stories about its mismanagement and handling of its solar tiles project. More pertinent to the thread, the acquisition was by many accounts a bailout of Musk's family members and himself using Tesla's resources--which in many companies would have been stopped by a board that wasn't composed heavily of the CEO's family and friends. The ROI for Tesla on that buy is decidedly poor.
The prior is probably a bit RPSC though.
