Tesla Fires Employee For Posting Critical Footage To YouTube
from the elon-meets-the-streisand-effect dept
It’s always difficult for me to land on an overall opinion of Elon Musk’s Tesla company. On the one hand, sure, the company has been instrumental in pushing the auto industry forward on electric vehicles. Whether Tesla will dominate that space in the future is an open question, but there can’t be too much doubt that more electric vehicles are being sold and used today simply because Tesla exists. On the other hand, both Musk and Tesla often times have taken actions that make them seem some combination of thin-skinned, willing to inflate the capabilities of their products, and even just overall being asshats.
There are the reports of Musk disregarding his own engineers’ concerns over public safety. There were attempts by the company to have Tesla owners sign NDAs so nobody finds out when shit goes sideways with a Tesla car, particularly in self-driving mode. And we must not forget Tesla petitioning the Chinese government to censor the company’s critics.
That last one is probably the most relevant, as Tesla has now reportedly fired one of its own staff members after he uploaded videos to YouTube showing incidents with Tesla’s self-driving mode from his own car.
Ex-Tesla employee John Bernal says he was fired for posting YouTube videos about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta. He had been creating the videos for about a year. Bernal says that Tesla also cut off his access to the FSD beta in the 2021 Tesla Model 3 that he owns.
The firing and beta cutoff occurred shortly after Bernal posted a video on February 4 of a minor accident in which his Tesla car hit a bollard that appears to separate a car lane from a bike lane in San Jose. In a subsequent video on February 7 providing frame-by-frame analysis of the collision, Bernal said that “no matter how minor this accident was, it’s the first FSD beta collision caught on camera that is irrefutable.”
Now, this is a terminated employee, so we should look at these claims with at least slightly narrowed eyes. That being said, Bernal is adamant that, while his YouTube videos were not cited in his termination notice, he had been told verbally by supervisors that his videos were the reason behind it. And it’s important to note that Bernal owns a Tesla as his personal vehicle and paid for the self-driving software. He claims he had no “improper use” strikes against him, leading to his conclusion that his access to the FSD software was also terminated due to those YouTube videos.
And so what is the result of Tesla showing its skin is thinner than what would be left on a pedestrian dragged across the asphalt by one of its cars in FSD Mode? Well, Bernal’s story is in the headlines, as are his videos, and his YouTube channel has several thousand new subscribers added in literally the past 24 hours as of the time of writing this post.
If Musk and Tesla imagined they were silencing a critic, they instead only invoked the Streisand Effect.
Filed Under: autonomous vehicles, criticism, elon musk, employment, fired, full self driving, john bernal, streisand effect, videos
Companies: tesla
Comments on “Tesla Fires Employee For Posting Critical Footage To YouTube”
Streisand… if only Musk were as smart as his mobile smart [things on wheels**], which maybe aren’t that smart, but certainly smarter than he is.
**I’m disinclined to call them “cars.”
Musk seems to have some immunity to that. It’s hardly the first time he’s done something like this. E.g., he published the private data of a journalist who’d complained about the software (while Tesla was headquartered in California but before that state’s privacy law was passed, unfortunately), and Tesla have removed self-driving software from cars after learning they’d been sold. They’ve sometimes undone such decisions out of “good will”, but to my knowledge have never faced any significant consequences.
non-dispargement agreement
Something serious like this should not be sealed.
Tesla would be enraged
On the one hand, sure, the company has been instrumental in pushing the auto industry forward on electric vehicles.
I will say that in my opinion, Tesla Automotive has not invented, only innovated. Then again, we can’t see the source code so it’s possible they actually did something new there, but as far as the electronics, all they’ve done is improved existing technology if even that much.
Re: So?
I agree that Tesla has probably invented very little. SO what? The same applies to Apple, Microsoft, IBM, just about any car company, … About the only company I know of that is genuinely inventive is 3M. The simple fact is that most of the world’s progress is though innovation, not invention.
That includes SpaceX. The raptor engine is a full-flow staged combustion engine. This engine cycle was invented before Musk was born. However, only three attempts have ever been made to actually build one and of those, only one (the SpaceX Raptor) has ever flown. This is pretty much purely innovation, but is still pretty darn impressive.
I guess he should have uploaded to Vimeo instead.
There are literally none of us
And would you just look at all the “people” from the OAN thread just howling at Elon for cancelling one of their employees.
What did he think was going to happen?
I am a bit of a Musk fan (mostly for SpaceX rather than Tesla) but yes he is thin skinned, tends to be an ass-hat, and he most certainly is a bit of a whackadoodle.
However none of this is a secret. Did he really think Musk would just say “Ha Ha that is a good one?”
Now should he have been fired? There are arguments either way but if you had asked 100 people who knew anything about Musk at all 99 of them would have said “yes he would be fired”.
Bernal had to know there was going to be some serious blowback on posting those vids and if he did not think about that at all then he is a bit of an idiot.
If Bernal had just been a guy on the assembly line I would say that Musk was being a serious ass-hat and had completely over reacted.
However this is a guy involved in testing and research. Someone in that position should really not be posting testing info on social media. How could you trust him going forward?
So I am on the fence on this one. It would depend on exactly what Bernal’s position and duties were.
Re:
I see nothing suggesting he didn’t know. Perhaps he thought these self-driving problems needed to be publicized, and intentionally manipulated Musk into giving him publicity (it’s so easy!).
Plus, he can now go after Testa for both improper firing (which it may or may not have been) and unauthorized modification to his car, and a competitor or regulator might offer a job based on this publicity. How long would a good tester really want to work at a place that doesn’t seem to take testing all that seriously?
Why would this prevent me from trusting him? As a member of the public, I don’t want problems like this kept secret.
How is this “testing info” anyway? The story says this was an actual accident that happened with publically released software on a public roadway. “Accident” means the employee didn’t intentionally cause a failure.
Wait for video takedowns over copyright claims. i actually half-expect it.
(But what if it was a monkey driving the car?)
More take-home from YouTube
I got a “job” at ILM off the papers on the wall at the Unemployment Office in October of 1975, no resume involved. Dan O’bannon (Alien, Dark Star, Blue Thunder, The Return of the Living Dead et. al.) produced the CGI in Luke’s binocular… but was never contracted again after he put a small paragraph in the Hollywood trades about Starwars. Discretion is the better part of …every employment contract, even in California.
By 1980 ILM was getting a thousand unsolicited resumes a week. Musk has well over 100,000 employees, that’s a lot of resumes.
Gov-Mnt protects those from the wrath of their superiors, not so for the rest of America.
Following the assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in January of 1883. ……The Pendleton Act provided that federal government jobs be awarded on the basis of merit and that government employees be selected through competitive exams. The act also made it unlawful to fire or demote for political reasons employees who were covered by the law. The law further forbade requiring employees to give political service or contributions. The Civil Service Commission was established to enforce this act. See https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/pendleton-act