Elon Musk ‘cancels’ Tesla engineer for complaining about the CEO’s behavior

Elon Musk has reportedly ‘canceled’ a Tesla engineer for complaining about the CEO’s behaviors on social media.

As we recently reported, Tesla insiders are finally starting to speak out against Elon Musk over his increasingly unhinged social media presence.

For example, just today, he called CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen’s family a “crime family” because someone wrongly claimed that his daughter received millions of dollars from USAID when it was just someone with the same last name.

However, it looks like Musk and Tesla are actively suppressing employees speaking out.

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The New York Times reports that Tesla has fired Jared Ottmann, a manager of battery thermal supplier industrialization engineering, over his complaints about Musk.

Ottmann, who has been at Tesla for 6 years, says that he has been raising concerns internally about Musk’s use of social media for the last 3 years, but he ramped up his effort last month after Musk’s salute at the Trump inauguration.

The engineer specifically took offense to a tweet that Musk posted in the aftermath of the inauguration. Instead of apologizing and saying that he didn’t mean to make a Nazi salute, Musk decided to attack the media for even suggesting that the gesture was a Sieg Heiland tweeted this:

Ottmann commented on the post:

This post by Tesla’s current CEO name drops genocidal assholes as a joke and has 308,000 likes.

The engineer says that he raised the issue with Tesla and while he gets “personally support”, he says the company remains silent about Musk’s behavior:

Starting in 2022 and especially the last week I’ve raised the issue internally multiple times, with managers, HR, legal compliance, investor relations. And while overwhelmingly people offer personal support, Tesla as a company has remained silent.

Ottmann, who has been promoted 4 times in 6 years at Tesla, has now been let go.

Electrek’s Take

For a guy who calls himself a “free speech absolutist” and “anti-cancel culture”, he canceled this engineer pretty quickly when he didn’t like how he was exercising his free speech.

This is obviously an attempt at scaring other Tesla employees from speaking out at Tesla.

It’s one of my main concerns about the automaker: it’s not a meritocracy that attracts top engineering talent anymore. One of the main criteria to work at Tesla now is to support its CEO, who is off the deep end.