Eight former SpaceX employees have filed a lawsuit against 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 denouncing Musk’s behavior and the alleged negative impact it had on the company and workplace culture.
“SpaceX summarily terminated their employment for daring to seek changes that would simply align their workplace culture with legal standards of civility as defined by state and federal law,” it states. The suitWhich was filed on Wednesday (June 12) in California state court in Los Angeles. (SpaceX is headquartered in Hawthorne, a city in the Los Angeles metro area.)
“Upon information and belief, Defendant Musk personally ordered Plaintiffs to be terminated,” the 76-page document adds. “This action seeks to hold SpaceX and Musk personally liable for their gross misconduct.”
All eight plaintiffs were “subjected to unwanted behavior and comments of a sexual nature by Elon Musk that created a hostile and abusive work environment,” the lawsuit said.
Much of this alleged behavior 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, frequently posting from his personal account.
Some of these materials are not colored. In October 2021, for example, the billionaire chirp (It was still called Twitter at the time) that he was thinking of starting a new university called the Texas Institute of Technology and Science. He added that the school “will have epic merchandise.” Another tweet.
The lawsuit cites the university’s “TITS” idea and a number of other Musk posts that have made their way into the workplace.
“Musk’s statements circulated rapidly via email, Teams channels, and/or word of mouth and were widely discussed,” the lawsuit states. “From 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 “widespread sexist culture at SpaceX,” according to the lawsuit.
“At technical meetings, senior engineers referred to mechanical parts as ‘chodes’ and ‘schlongs’ (a euphemism for male genitalia),” the document said. “It was also common for engineers to call products rude and insulting names in an attempt at humor, often at the expense of women and people from the LGBTQ community.”
The 2022 open letter drew attention to the plaintiffs’ concerns. Three of the eight plaintiffs were the primary authors of the letter, according to the lawsuit, while the other five contributed “their observations and thoughts.”
The creators made the open letter viewable via SpaceX’s intranet on June 15, 2022, according to the lawsuit. On the same day, Musk allegedly asked one of his human resources representatives to travel from Texas to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne to “deal” with the authors of the letter.
The three lead authors were terminated on June 16, the lawsuit said. SpaceX management then conducted an investigation to identify other major shareholders, leading to the firing of the five other plaintiffs over the next two months.
Space.com has reached out to SpaceX for comment on this story but has not yet received a response.
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