How many years do they have to work there before they get the bonus? Because $10 million is more than enough to retire, even in the Silicon Valley. So they can probably assume that most of these engineers will work there until the bonus pay date, and then retire and do whatever they want to do instead of what someone else tells them to do.

After all, most engineers are driven less by money and more by wanting to do cool stuff. If they have enough money to be able to only do cool stuff and never have to worry about money again, why would they want more money? Why would they choose to do what other people want them to do, when they can do the even cooler stuff that they want to do?

Bonuses that big tend to be counterproductive.

Also, a lot of lawyers will work on contingency.

In general, the court you file in can be either the court where one of the two parties is or the court where the event occurred. As the weaker party and the plaintiff, it would take serious legal finagling for the choice of venue to not be yours. So you could file in your own local court.

In your world. Not in everyone's world. The part you seem to ignore is that now you are relying on people's memory about important details unless you write down what happened like in a summary email or other documentation.

Bahahahahaha. Have you actually worked for a serious company? Meetings happen all the time. Sometimes key people are not available for every meeting. Should things be documented? Yes. In things called emails. You seem to still insist that work can ONLY be done in meetings. According to you.

The nice thing about exploding on the pad is that they should be able to do a proper failure analysis, complete with being able to X-ray the fragments of the failed components, because they can locate them all. :-)

That's where you get a libel judgement in the court where you live against both the company that got the first judgment and the credit agency that approved it. Clearly, someone who does not even know your correct birthdate is not you, and any credit agency involved clearly must have conspired in that fraud, so the preponderance of evidence is clearly in your favor. Thus, absent something you're not telling us, such as video footage of you providing a false birthdate, it should be trivial for you to get a civil judgment against them.

If everyone did this every time they got scammed, a lot of things would improve.

So you're saying that the new Starship is basically a V2, as well, but it is exploding prematurely? :-D

The problem I have is your insistence that every thing must be done in person. That is not necessarily true. Things can be discussed over email, zooms, phone calls, messages, etc. I can count the number of the times where work was delayed because the requirements were specified verbally and no one wrote them down. And then a game of telephone happens when multiple people disagree on key requirements and deadlines. There were no emails, no texts: just everyone insisting that everyone agreed on their interpretation of what happened in a meeting.

There are considerably more iOS phones in the U.S. market. Their market share hovers around 60% +/- 3.

It should be part of the written specifications as sometimes—hear me out on this—not everyone who works on the project can be present at a meeting. For example if they join the team later. My company is cheap and refuses to pay for a Time Machine so people can attend a meeting in the past.

The complaint was not that some people work better when physically located near team members. The complaint was Musk insisted that people work in open offices specifically or they cannot work for him.

So you would rather rely on people’s memory of verbal communications instead of relying on records of written communications? That seems more ripe for failure. However, part of every engineering project I have been a part is the insistence on written documentation for things like specifications. There are procedures for things like requests, changes, approvals, etc. These systems are now electronic so a piece of paper does not need to be located in a specific filing cabinet. That can be done remotely.

I'm talking about the IBM Simon from 1994(!), which apparently ran Datalight ROM-DOS on a NEC V20 CPU.

We all want to hear more about this.

It's incredible. You think of the evolution of evolution of smartphones from dumb ones through to clunky things with keyboards and weird limited, tiny apps, and so on and so forth.

No, the first smartphone was a slab (with concessions to the tech of the day with worse speakers and microphones and the need for an antenna) with featured a large touchscreen, with a grid-of-icons home screen, and hardware volume up/down buttons on the side and a lock slider.

Look up the IBM Simon. Loads of excellent links, consider yourself nerd sniped. The iPhone ripped it off 13 years later with state of the art (actually novel in some ways) 2007 era manufacturing tech rather than 1994 era tech, except the first release of the iPhone couldn't really be considered a smartphone until Cydia introduced their app store, since it didn't really have loadable apps, unlike the Simon.

We are not whining. We are warning people not to automatically believe ambitious promises that such efforts are easy. Here on slashdot, some people are already promoting Starship on how it can deliver 100 ton payloads cheaper than anyone else. The word "can" has not been demonstrated yet.

Er. No. People at SpaceX did. People seem to forget: Musk is not an engineer. He has limited understanding of the engineering. He just likes taking credit for the work his people do.