SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and the SpaceX team are recognized by Vice President Mike Pence at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center following the launch of the company’s Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station in May 2020.
(Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Eight former SpaceX employees are suing the company and its founder and CEO, Elon Musk, alleging sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation, among other wrongdoing.
In June 2022, the eight employees helped distribute an open letter to SpaceX executives that decried Musk’s behavior and the purported negative impact it has had on the company and its workplace culture.
“SpaceX summarily terminated them for daring to seek changes that would simply align the workplace culture with the norms of legal civility as defined by state and federal law,” states the lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday (June 12) in California state court in Los Angeles. (SpaceX is headquartered in Hawthorne, a city in the L.A. metro area.)
“Upon information and belief, Defendant Musk personally ordered the Plaintiffs’ terminations,” the 76-page document adds. “This action seeks to hold SpaceX and Musk personally accountable for their gross misconduct.”
All eight plaintiffs “experienced exposure to unwanted conduct and comments of a sexual nature by Elon Musk that created a hostile and abusive work environment,” according to the lawsuit.
Much of this alleged conduct came via Twitter (now known as X), the social media platform that Musk bought in 2022 for $44 billion. Musk is very active on X, posting frequently from his personal account.
Some of this material is off-color. In October 2021, for example, the billionaire tweeted (it was still called Twitter then) that he was thinking of starting a new university called the “Texas Institute of Technology & Science.” The school “will have epic merch,” he added in another tweet.
The lawsuit cites this “TITS” university idea and a number of other Musk posts that made their way around the workplace.
“Musk’s utterances were quickly circulated by email, Teams channels, and/or word of mouth and widely discussed,” the lawsuit states. “On information and belief, Musk knew that his vile and offensive posts permeated the workplace and that management took no action to prevent these posts from entering the workplace and took no action to remove them.”
Such posts were part of a “pervasively sexist culture at SpaceX,” according to the lawsuit.
“In technical meetings, senior engineers referred to mechanical parts as ‘chodes’ and ‘schlongs’ (euphemisms for male genitals),” the document states. “It was also common for engineers to apply crude and demeaning names to products in an attempt at humor, often at the expense of women and LGBTQ individuals.”
The 2022 open letter drew attention to the plaintiffs’ concerns. Three of the eight plaintiffs were the chief authors of the letter, according to the lawsuit, while the other five “contributed feedback and ideas.”
The open letter’s creators made it viewable via SpaceX’s intranet on June 15, 2022, according to the suit. That same day, it alleges, Musk asked one of his human-resources representatives to travel from Texas to SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne to “deal with” the authors of the letter.
The three chief authors were terminated on June 16, the lawsuit states. SpaceX management then conducted an investigation to identify other key contributors, which led to the firing of the other five plaintiffs over the following two months.
Space.com reached out to SpaceX for comment on this story but has not yet received a response.
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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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