Matthew LaBrot, a Tesla employee who created the website Tesla Employees Against Elon Musk, was fired from the company two weeks ago. LaBrot claimed in a LinkedIn post that he was terminated for having created the site, and because he was part of a larger group of employees who publicly asked Elon Musk to resign from the company.
Not so, say the employees behind the letter, who signed off as “Tesla Employees for a New Chapter.” They argue that Tesla’s troubles are not due to missteps in Model Y production, but rather to the public reputation of the company’s polarizing CEO, Elon Musk. “Let’s be clear: we are not the problem. Our products are not the problem. Our engineering, service, and delivery teams are not the problem. The problem is demand. The problem is Elon.”
It’s worth noting that Tesla itself made a similar statement on its earnings call last month, conceding somewhat hilariously that “unwanted hostility towards our brand and our people had an impact [on sales] in certain markets.”
Employees shouldn’t make public announcements (in their capacity as employees) unless authorized to do so by management. The official policy at my last job was that we weren’t to say anything unless explicitly instructed otherwise by marketing. The places I’ve worked at that didn’t have an official policy would have expected the same thing from me, just because it’s common sense.
As an employee, you can speak about your own specific working conditions with your manager. You can, through private channels, contact upper management about the company’s general strategy but that seems like a silly thing to do unless you know something that management doesn’t. (And Tesla’s upper management is well aware of what people think of Musk.) You definitely can’t try to organize public pressure against upper management’s decisions while you’re being paid to obey those decisions.