It's not about the employees liking the work or not. It's about whether or not Tesla is paying them to do work that does not benefit Tesla.

This is basic, basic, basic corporate law. It's not a "weird timeline" and it is in no way specific to the tech industry.

Managers, directors, CEOs, etc. cannot have the corporation do services for them for free because this deprives the non-management shareholders of value. Using their position as manager to assign employees to work on their house is in effect causing the corporation to provide them with renovation services for free. This self-dealing would be grounds for a derivative suit.

Also, it only takes one shareholder (in principle) to make this an issue. Even if you and most Tesla longs think Musk earned the right to do a little self-dealing here and there, it is an open invitation for legal action by SEC and other shareholders.

If you owned 100% of the company then all of that wouldn't be an issue, but it's still not something any legal department would OK.

The comment above you is wrong to call it wage theft--that would refer to workers not being paid the higher of minimum or promised wage for the time worked.

I feel like there is a lot of misinformation here and am compelled to comment, I’ve started and administered two corporations.

What you’re describing as self dealing isn’t illegal, thousands of corporations are run this way every day as long as taxes are paid correctly on the fair value of any transactions between the companies in question. It doesn’t even have to be profitable, Tesla could categorize the work they are doing for Twitter 100 different ways; marketing, R&D, team building, training, whatever.

As for minority shareholders, they have completely arbitrary rights depending on the bylaws, articles of incorporation, etc. If they are lucky, they might be able to periodically vote for board members given the right class of shares. Otherwise they have pretty much 0 input into how a company is run.

It's a field trip. Is taking the team out to lunch also "stealing from shareholders"?

Are you real my equating eating with your team the same as doing work for another org?

The mental gymnastics of Musk supporters are only matched by the Trump supporters.

You can only lose by trying to have a conversation with them.

> Managers, directors, CEOs, etc. cannot have the corporation do services for them for free

Sure, but do you know this to be the case here? There are a whole lot of assumptions flying out here that Elon just went and poached a bunch of engineers from Tesla to work on Twitter on Tesla’s dime. Pretty sure no one commenting her on HN as any idea of what the deal and detail actually is, all we apparently know for sure from this article is that one or more Twitter folk think that one or more Tesla folks are looking at their code. Beyond that…no details are really known.

Agreed I muddied things with the phrase wage theft. It’s theft from shareholders.