Looking at what's been done isn't a good way of determining whether your process is efficient at doing said thing. You need to be able to compare it to something else.
To put it another way: If your method of writing novels is to hire an infinite amount of monkeys and put them to work on typewriters, you can't say "Something about this model must be working right, I came out of it with the complete works of Shakespeare!"
They landed a rocket on a barge in the ocean. Maybe with a better process, they could have done that two years faster, for 1/100th the cost, with no burnout. You don't know, and you can't say the model works right just because there's something to show for it.
All you know is that the process is able to eventually land a rocket on a barge. It doesn't tell you whether it's good at it.
True, but they also did that while maintaining the lowest launch prices in the industry and presumably they can now decrease that even further if they need to.
So while it may not be the most efficient process, the overall process is much better than their competitors since they can launch for so much less money.
I'm not sure that's quite a fair way of wording that (legitimate) question.
The whole company seems to be operating in the "burning the candle at both ends," not just the workers at the bottom. Also, it's not just "saving money" but pushing super hard to accomplish something extraordinary, i.e. generating new revenue, not just reducing costs. Additionally, the workers are partially compensated via stock options, so they share in the success of the company even if not through higher wages alone. So I'm not sure "mistreatment" is the right word to use.
At the end of the day, SpaceX (and Tesla) are not for everyone forever. I am not in a station in life to want to join right now, but may in the future. And maybe this strenuous effort is not especially profitable for SpaceX because of the churn that it creates. But that churn IS helpful for the industry (and thus, in my opinion, society) at large because it has spread SpaceX's know-how throughout the US aerospace community and resulted in alumni founding probably dozens of companies that can leverage the lessons learned from SpaceX. But some people work well in that environment and stay long term (which isn't to say it can't be improved).
So I am glad SpaceX is the way it is, and I hope they're successful in the future. But it also doesn't have to be the model for everyone else to copy. It might not work for everyone else, nor should it be expected to.
”Additionally, the workers are partially compensated via stock options, so they share in the success of the company even if not through higher wages alone.”
I wonder if the constant burnout and churn keeps employees from vesting and thus ever collecting much if anything in stock?
Of course you cannot answer that based on a single companies culture.
I'm refuting the statement that "saving money by paying peanuts, grinding people down to burnout, and then constantly having to rehire/retrain new people as the old ones leave" is unanswerable in the current context based on 1 company especially because this company seems to be destroying their competition.
Part of the fun of the monkeys/Shakespeare mot is that it's completely inapplicable to the real world, and thus absurd. The point of the "landed a rocket on a barge in the ocean" response is that whatever methodology SpaceX uses is not in that category -- it's an existence proof that what they are doing works in the real world, and is thus not absurd.
If they have a process proven to work, in a world where they are already doing things no one else has been able to do, changes to that process should be introduced very slowly.
Although your simile is reductio ad absurdum, a version of this idea does, occasionally get surfaced, in the form of using (modern) small, lower-power processors (e.g. Atom, mobile ARM) in very large numbers in the datacenter.
While touting the purchase cost or energy benefits, these ideas routinely ignore the overhead cost inherent in a distributed system, let alone the Fallacies [1], which is the GP's and OC's (and possibly your) point, I believe.
Well they landed a rocket on a barge in the ocean so something about that model must be working right