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Eric Bach, fired Chief Engineer, sues!

My point was not that the (alleged) statements were not offensive to Bach -- understandably, they were -- nor that Bach doesn't have a possible claim for unfair termination.

My point is that a claim of racism, i.e. the company had/has it our for someone because he is white, strikes me as a bit comical. By a superficial count, 12 of the 16 senior executives on Lucid's "Meet Our Leadership" web page appear to be Caucasian. Hard to believe they are leading a company that has racial animus towards Caucasians.

(ps. Not an employment lawyer)
 
lpinprov said:
My point was not that the (alleged) statements were not offensive to Bach -- understandably, they were -- nor that Bach doesn't have a possible claim for unfair termination.

My point is that a claim of racism, i.e. the company had/has it our for someone because he is white, strikes me as a bit comical. By a superficial count, 12 of the 16 senior executives on Lucid's "Meet Our Leadership" web page appear to be Caucasian. Hard to believe they are leading a company that has racial animus towards Caucasians.

(ps. Not an employment lawyer)
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I promise you he's looking for a settlement that's 1 penny less than the cost of lititgation. He's no human rights warrior.
 
lpinprov said:
My point is that a claim of racism, i.e. the company had/has it our for someone because he is white, strikes me as a bit comical. By a superficial count, 12 of the 16 senior executives on Lucid's "Meet Our Leadership" web page appear to be Caucasian. Hard to believe they are leading a company that has racial animus towards Caucasians.
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Actionable racial discrimination claims are not limited only to non-whites. A white person can possibly sustain a claim based on the circumstances, the context, and the animus of the alleged offender.

There is a lot of attention in the U.S. these days to claims of reverse discrimination in the context of affirmative action, wherein a white person claims they were discriminated against unfairly in favor of a non-white, and the courts (especially SCOTUS) are moving in that direction. But a white person can also claim racial discrimination in a more conventional context if the alleged offender can be shown to have had an anti-white animus, and they had the authority to take an adverse action against the claimant, or the company in which this occurred did not take action to stop what can be seen as a resulting hostile work environment.

It could thus be relevant that the alleged offender was named Rivera, giving at least some color to a claim that Rivera personally had an anti-white bias, as hispanic-surnamed people are in a class legally defined as separate from whites.

These things always come down to the facts that are actually proven, and we're a long way from knowing that.
 
socktucker said:
I promise you he's looking for a settlement that's 1 penny less than the cost of lititgation. He's no human rights warrior.
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A lot more is involved on Lucid's end than the cost of litigation. They will also assess reputational damage and the risk of losing in court.

Given that most of his stock options -- the bulk of his anticipated compensation -- could well be worthless for a good while (if not forever) given Lucid's stock trajectory, he may be hoping for a settlement revolving around their vesting, exercise, and termination conditions should the stock at some point recover.
 
I’m so bummed. I don’t know why he got fired and I don’t really care. I just thought Eric Bach was really cute.
 
He is very handsome, he looks a bit like Grigor Dmitrov to me.

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Bus Driver said:
I’m so bummed. I don’t know why he got fired and I don’t really care. I just thought Eric Bach was really cute.
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True honesty.
Gotta love it. :)
 
Bus Driver said:
Oh, yes! Dmitrov. Another hottie, and coincidentally one of my favourite men’s tennis players, Tommy Paul being another one…oh, dear, I fear this thread is going get shut down for veering precariously off-topic.
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everyone’s got eyes
 
What is more important is that someone in some position of power didn’t think it was a bad idea to call a German exec “Nazi” in the first place. Talk about a lack of awareness and a lack of judgment - there are zero ways to defend this kind of thing in any corporate culture no matter what the ethnicity of those that work there. It really is just stupidity on a disappointing level.
 
Leftlane said:
What is more important is that someone in some position of power didn’t think it was a bad idea to call a German exec “Nazi” in the first place. Talk about a lack of awareness and a lack of judgment - there are zero ways to defend this kind of thing in any corporate culture no matter what the ethnicity of those that work there. It really is just stupidity on a disappointing level.
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This. It’s the incompetence that worries me, far beyond the topic of what’s offensive or not. Though, that’s bad too, obviously.
 
Leftlane said:
It really is just stupidity on a disappointing level.
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That certainly may be the case regarding this narrow situation. But there is something beyond that going on at Lucid that perplexes me.

Peter Rawlinson and Eric Bach both left the company precipitously. Remember that Rawlinson left just days before an earnings call without any "ceremony" or public build up to his departure. He was just sort of there one day and gone the next.

Rawlinson and Bach were probably two of the most important players (the other being Derek Jenkins) in what Lucid accomplished with its debut product, the Air. Not only did it win Car of the Year and a slew of international awards, it became and remains the best seller in its category of premium EV sedans, beating out cars in the same category from Mercedes, Porsche, and Tesla.

It is not unusual for a Board to change leadership as a company transitions from one phase to another, particularly as a company shifts from a technology startup to an ongoing enterprise. But it is very unusual to do so without a plan already in place to bring in the right talent set immediately upon the departure of first-generation leadership.

Rawlinson still hasn't been replaced except on an interim basis, and it seems Eric Bach's portfolio was simply handed off to another manager. There has been no net increase or even replacement as of yet of engineering talent on the heels of their departures nor any addition of talent with different skill sets that might have been felt lacking in Rawlinson or Bach.

And all this has happened -- and not happened -- midstream in the launch of a critical second product with an even more critical third product deep into development.

The way this is unfolding just doesn't make sense.
 
hmp10 said:
It is not unusual for a Board to change leadership as a company transitions from one phase to another, particularly as a company shifts from a technology startup to an ongoing enterprise. But it is very unusual to do so without a plan already in place to bring in the right talent set immediately upon the departure of first-generation leadership.
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I can only wish that Tesla would have an independent board that would act in the best interest of the shareholders and not Elon, who has become an unstable polarizing detriment to the company. Hopefully Lucid will be shown to have a more mature and responsible board, but this doesn’t have great optics.
 
GoFast said:
Just one correction… I worked for Steve Jobs… He was far from an arrogant asshole. In fact, he was by far the most inspiring leader I’ve ever worked with.

And trust me… There was no one at Lucid who was 1/1000000 as effective as Steve Jobs…
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Jobs was both. I didn't work with him towards the end of his life, so maybe he grew up a bit and dialed back his asshole quotient. But I personally witnessed him being a raging asshole to people.
 
lpinprov said:
My point was not that the (alleged) statements were not offensive to Bach -- understandably, they were -- nor that Bach doesn't have a possible claim for unfair termination.

My point is that a claim of racism, i.e. the company had/has it our for someone because he is white, strikes me as a bit comical. By a superficial count, 12 of the 16 senior executives on Lucid's "Meet Our Leadership" web page appear to be Caucasian. Hard to believe they are leading a company that has racial animus towards Caucasians.

(ps. Not an employment lawyer)
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Biologists will tell you that "race" isn't a biological concept. Rather, it's a social construct. Which means it's quite possible to decide that German (Aryan?) is a race that can be discriminated against. Jewish people are superficially white, and yet anti-semitism is considered to be partly religious bias and partly racial bias. Another example is that "Hispanic" is technically an ethnicity, not a race, and many of them are white, and yet we commonly describe bias against Hispanic people as "racist".
 
TahoeMichael said:
. . . yet we commonly describe bias against Hispanic people as "racist".
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The anti-discrimination laws define the protected class relating to Latinos as people with Hispanic surnames, as the bias often arises from thinking a person may be of Hispanic origin based on their names even if they aren't: for instance, a woman named Smith who marries a Rodiguez and assumes that as her married name would be eligible to claim discrimination based on her name, not her actual ethnic origin.
 
It is far more interesting to me that Lucid has moved on from a several people who appear to oversee problem areas at the company. Whether they can upgrade those positions remains to be seen.
 
L-Dude said:
It is far more interesting to me that Lucid has moved on from a several people who appear to oversee problem areas at the company. Whether they can upgrade those positions remains to be seen.
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There was a point in time when you looked at Lucid's leadership page and you saw a massive list of executives. I thought at that time that was a crazy number for a company that young, even a car company. A lot of them came from "big names" in auto and tech.

Sometimes big names are just that. When push comes to shove, it boils down to who's putting points on the board and not pedigree.

An optimistic interpretation is that Lucid's executive management is making the moves it needs to to right the ship, because if things were going swimmingly this wouldn't be needed.

A less generous interpretation is it's just disorganized rage firing from an autocratic executive. Oh wait wrong company.
 
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