Tesla Manager Fired for Criticizing Elon Musk on X

Manager and engineer Jared Ottmann, who worked with Tesla’s battery suppliers, has claimed that he was sacked for criticizing Elon Musk for a post on Musk’s social media platform X.

The said post made by Musk employed a sequence of wordplay to use the names of Nazis such as Heinrich Himmmler and Hermann Göring.

By dismissing a manager for objecting to a social media post by Musk that made reference to Nazi leaders, Tesla became the latest company in Elon Musk’s empire to make it clear that criticism of the CEO is unwelcome.

On January 23 this year, Musk posted, “Stop Göring your enemies, I bet you did Nazi that coming,” using a laughing-while-crying emoji to break up the post.

After criticizing Elon Musk’s latest pun-filled joke, the EV battery pack engineering manager acknowledged that he was sacked that January, ending his almost seven-year career at Tesla.

“This post by Tesla’s current CEO name drops genocidal a**holes as a joke and has 306,000 likes. “What’s a mensch to do?” Ottman wrote on LinkedIn

Musk had attempted to ridicule the outcry over his stiff right-armed salute at Trump’s inauguration by suggesting that his detractors lacked a sense of humor

While the Jewish rights advocacy group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) minimized the gesture, white nationalist Nick Fuentes referred to it as a “straight up Sieg Heil.”

Other Incidents Where Employees Got Sacked

Elon Musk’s companies have a history of retaliating against opposition, which also includes SpaceX and X.

In 2022, SpaceX dismissed nine workers after they demanded that the business disassociate itself from Musk’s social media remarks, one of which ridiculed allegations of sexual harassment against him.

In October, according to people familiar with the matter, a SpaceX employee was let go after expressing that he hoped Musk would cease wearing corporate clothing when he appeared on Donald Trump’s campaign trail on an internal message board.

The employee wrote that company clothing should not be worn at campaign events since it would be inappropriate for employees to wear political attire to work.

The company denied the employee access to internal systems a few days after the post was made.

Eventually, the company allowed him to return after concluding that there had been no breach of company rules, but the employee resigned a few weeks later.

Employees at X who opposed Musk were also let go in 2022, following his $44 billion acquisition of what was then known as Twitter.

Several staff members expressed their disapproval of the tycoon on the social media site, which got some of them sacked after an online argument with Musk.

The terminations contradict Musk’s frequently expressed intention to protect free expression, as in 2024, he provided funding for a lawsuit filed on behalf of a former employee of the payments company Block who had been sacked for making divisive tweets on a fictitious X account.

Investors in Tesla are also concerned that he is spending too much time in Washington and not enough time addressing the decline in auto sales.

The company’s stock has dropped almost 40% since its peak on December 17, and investors believe that his political actions are offending some consumers.