He’s still on the road a lot, even though he’s no longer the head of Siemens. The nice thing about it is that Joe Kaeser is always happy to tell the world what he experiences along the way. He usually does that via Twitter, so he’s a very modern representative of the age-old genre of travel writing. Kind of a travel twitterer.
On Thursday – it was on the plane from Berlin to Munich – he had experienced a lot again and tweeted about it. It reads like this: “I’m sitting on the plane to Munich in the middle of the members of parliament, who are audibly happy about the weekend…and at the same time exchanging internals across the aisle. Some with CSU wristbands. One from the FDP, the one who used to be flat wrote columns in tabloid magazines.”
Hui, you think to yourself – who might have been the flat columnist from the FDP? Fortunately, you can not only write down your own travel impressions on Twitter, others can also share in them. And so it didn’t take long before someone tweeted back who recently made a name for himself on the youth app Tiktok: the former Telekom HR Director, FDP politician and current Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Education Thomas Sattelberger (72). And he wrote: “What was shallower, others may judge your bow to Trump and Putin or my essays in ManagerMagazine. But I refuse to make the defamatory claim that I had exchanged internals. The CSU’ler may have done that, I sat up in silence my seat.”
Now you have to know that a few years ago, Kaeser had a dinner date with other managers and the then US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where it looked as if the two would get along splendidly. Tempi passati, Trump is no longer president, and maybe he never will be again. The reference to the Russian President, with whom Kaeser had to deal from time to time, was more snappy. For example, during a visit by top German managers to Moscow in 2019. Sure, Siemens and Russia share a 100-year history. But when Siemens gas turbines appeared in the Russian-occupied Crimea a few years ago, critics said: Traditions are all well and good, but everything has its limits!
Not only Sattelberger criticized Kaeser for his tweet
So when Joe Kaeser is traveling, you can experience something. Three years ago, for example, the then Siemens boss and social media all-rounder was sitting in a lounge at Frankfurt Airport while a TV screen was showing a broadcast from the Bundestag. Since Kaeser had time, he watched and listened. Heard that the AfD politician Alice Weidel spoke of “knifemen who are fed”, “good-for-nothings” and “headscarf girls”. And so Kaeser tweeted: “Dear headscarf girl as an association of German girls”. After that, there was a lot of discussion at Siemens about whether the boss should mess with an AfD politician or whether that belongs more in the political field. Or whether Kaeser only tweeted here as a private person, which of course is theoretically possible if private and business weren’t so difficult to separate.
Like now. Kaeser is no longer Siemens boss, but he still heads the supervisory board at the former Siemens energy technology division Siemens Energy, for example. In this respect, it is quite interesting how the tweet about the politicians flying back to Munich in a weekend mood continued. Namely like this: “Roughly calculate how many of them I’ll finance with my income tax,” Kaeser continues. And: “Don’t know if this money couldn’t be better spent. For higher salaries for nurses, police officers…and many people who are REALLY there for the citizens every day.”
Does Kaeser now want to abolish the parliamentarians? And if so, only those from the CSU (plus one from the FDP)? Has the ex-Siemens boss arrived in the extra-parliamentary opposition a few decades late? One who apparently took the matter very seriously wrote: “What populist nonsense. Of course democracy costs money. Do you have a better alternative?”
There are always alternatives, for example to the Berlin-Munich flight. The route could of course be covered in a much more environmentally friendly way with an ICE, which is built by Siemens, by the way. “The mistake is that you and the esteemed MdBs use the plane for the domestic route,” one tweeted back. “Six, and sit down.”