SpaceX fired nine of its employees this year for being involved in a letter that called on the firm to denounce the "harmful Twitter behavior" of Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of spacecraft manufacturing company. The employees used the letter condemn Musk, who had Twitter to trivialise a news report that stated the fact that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment claim against him, according to an article published by The New York Times (NYT). The next day, a meeting was held at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where about 20 engineers were invited to discuss Musk. 


What was the SpaceX meeting about?


Since some managers and executives had indicated that they did not disregard Musk's behaviour, several engineers filed into the meeting expecting a sympathetic ear, the NYT article said. 


The news report which Musk had downplayed stated that a SpaceX flight attendant accused the billionaire of exposing himself and propositioning her for sexual favours. But the firm paid $2,50,000 for her silence, the report said.


The meeting held in June to discuss Musk has not been previously reported, according to the NYT article. Two SpaceX employees in attendance said the meeting quickly became heated.


Job Edwards, the vice president of Falcon launch vehicles at SpaceX, who was leading the meeting, described the letter as an extremist act and claimed that the employees who wrote it had been fired for distracting SpaceX and taking on Musk, according to the article. 


‘SpaceX is Elon and Elon is SpaceX’: Company senior at meeting


Edwards, when asked whether Musk could sexually harass his workers with impunity, did not appear to answer, the two employees said, according to the article. 


The recurring theme of the meeting was that 'Musk could do whatever he wanted at the company', the employees said. 


According to the article, they recalled Edwards declaring at the meeting: "SpaceX is Elon and Elon is SpaceX". 


Letter led to nine employees being fired


According to SpaceX employees and the lawyers of the laid off employees, the letter led to nine workers being fired. 


On behalf of eight of those workers, 'unfair-labor-practice charges' were filed with the National Labor Relations Board this week. The charges argued that the firings of the employees were illegal, the article said. 


According to the article, SpaceX laying off employees for speaking up against its head raises new questions about the management practises at Musk's companies, where there is little tolerance for dissent or labour organising. 


Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer that Musk co-founded, has resisted unionisation attempts at its factories. Several Tesla workers have brought legal action against the company, claiming that they were not given adequate warning before a layoff in June, the article said. 


Immediately after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk fired executives, following which he laid off half of the company's 7,500 employees. According to the article, Musk asked subordinates to come through the internal communications and public tweets of Twitter employees, leading to dozens of critics being fired. 


The article said that interviews with the eight employees fired from SpaceX highlight Musk's firm grip on his workplaces. His hold on his workplaces is perhaps even beyond the restraints of federal law, the article stated. 


For fear of reprisal, six of the fired employees spoke anonymously, and are not identified by their names in the labour board filings. 


The National Labor Relations Act, which gives workers the right to come together for "mutual aid or protection", most likely protected the writing of the letter, legal experts said. The letter, in addition to addressing Musk's online behaviour, urged SpaceX to enforce its harassment policies more effectively, the article said.


One of the fired employees is Tom Maline, an engineer who worked with SpaceX for over eight years, before being laid off in June after helping to organise the letter effort.


"It was hard for me to believe what was happening it was so brazen," Moline was quoted as saying in the article. 


Several employees said SpaceX’s mission was undercut by distractions from Musk


SpaceX has about 11,000 employees, who work for the spacecraft manufacturer because of its mission to send humans to Mars. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. The firm aims to make humans a "multiplanetary" species. 


Several of the former employees who filed the labour charges said in interviews that SpaceX's mission has sometimes been undercut by distractions from Musk, according to the article. The employees said a fact which is more disturbing is that there has been a culture that appears to tolerate sexual harassment and gender discrimination. 


An employee wrote an essay last year, opening up about sexual harassment


A former employee published an essay in December 2021, in which she described multiple instances of being harassed and groped by co-workers, and said there had been little or no follow-up when she reported the incidents, the article stated. 


After the employee's essay appeared, other workers began speaking up about what they considered a "pattern of predatory behavior" by male employees, the article said.


Workers say that SpaceX is male dominated. According to a report by The Verge, five former SpaceX employees, in December 2021, spoke up about harassment at the company. Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, had said that an internal audit will be conducted, followed by a third-party audit. 


May 2022: Musk dismissed a SpaceX flight attendant’s allegations against him


In May this year, Business Insider reported that SpaceX had paid $2,50,000 to a company flight attendant in 2018, after she had accused Musk of propositioning her and asking her for sexual favours. Later, Musk said on Twitter that the episode "never happened". 


According to the NYT article, several employees said in interviews that they were shocked when Musk joked about the sexual harassment accusations in Twitter.


Several employees were upset with Shotwell, who they said they had regarded as an ally. 


Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the engineers and letter-organisers who was fired, said: "I had so much respect for her at the beginning". 


Many employees said their view of her was already tainted by SpaceX's response to the earlier harassment revelations. Their view of her was tainted further after Shotwell sent a company-wide email saying she did not believe the accusations against Musk, the article stated.


SpaceX President wrote an email in favour of Musk


She wrote: "I have worked closely with him for 20 years and never seen nor heard anything resembling these allegations". CNBC reported the email in May. 


In response to Shotwell's email, employees started working on an open letter. Some participants said that despite their frustrations, they hoped to convey a desire to work with executives on a solution, according to the article. Since Musk and SpaceX were known to be strongly anti-union, and the company requires managers to receive training on how to discourage union activity, the employees did not want executives or other colleagues to see their effort as the start of a union campaign, the article stated. 


Holland-Thielen, who had taken the training course as an engineering lead, said that any time someone mentioned something or shared something from an actual labour union, she responded by saying they should save that for another conversation. 


How the letter-writing was completed


The letter-writing was completed along two tracks, one being the workers' personal software and was visible only to a few dozen employees, and the other being a collaboration platform visible to anyone at SpaceX, where workers brainstormed "action items". 


According to the NYT article, one proposal mentioned in the letter said SpaceX should disclose any other harassment claims against Musk, while another called for a public statement by the spacecraft manufacturer. These proposals made it clear that Shotwell's email about the allegations did not represent the views of every employee, the article said.


How was the letter received?


According to a screenshot viewed by NYT, the article said that Shotwell wrote on the internal working platform: "As always, I appreciate reading and hearing ideas to help make SpaceX better".


On June 15, the group circulated the letter. First, they sent the letter to Shotwell and several other executives, and then on a number of the messaging channels of SpaceX. 


The document read that Elon's behaviour in the public sphere is a "frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us". 


The initial response seemed favourable, with internal data showing that over a thousand people viewed the letter within a few hours, and more than 400 people signed it, many of them anonymously, according to the article. 


Managers appeared supportive of the article. In a meeting that was held after the letter came out, Edwards said two of the three proposals in the document were "great ideas", according to minutes of the meeting shared internally and seen by NYT. However, he described a third idea, that SpaceX separate itself from Musk's "personal brand", as "more tricky". 


Employees said that at the highest levels of SpaceX, the response soon became antagonistic, according to the article. 


An unnamed co-worker called the letter “distracting”


According to a report by The Information, Shotwell sent Moline and Holland-Thielen an email passing along comments from an unnamed co-worker who called the letter "distracting", and expressed disagreement with it. 


In her email, Shotwell wrote: "Please stop flooding employee communication channels immediately". She had copied senior company officials on that email, according to the NYT article. She further wrote: "I will consider your ignoring my email to be insubordination. Instead, please focus on your job."


Five employees were fired after the news outlets reported on the letter


News outlets reported on the open letter the following morning, and by that afternoon, human resources contacted Moline, Holland-Thielen and three other employees separately to tell them that they were being fired. Four of the employees said that an official cited their role in creating and distributing the letter, according to the article. 


Shotwell, who joined those conversations remotely, emphasised that the employees had wasted vast amounts of company time.


Holland-Thielen said the employees were trying to make this as palatable as possible to reasonable minds at SpaceX, and that one of the employees' lawyers, Anne Shaver, said the company had "viciously retaliated" against them, the article stated. 


A letter seeking clarification of a company's sexual harassment policies was generally protected by federal labour law, according to Wilma Liebman, who was a chairwoman of the National Labor Relations Board under former United States President Barack Obama. According to the article, Liebman said SpaceX could argue that the letters' writers sought to criticise Musk, activity that is not necessarily protected, rather than to improve their workplace. However, she said the “labor board” would probably disagree because the posts from Musk that employees criticised could be seen as creating a hostile work environment, according to the article. 


SpaceX laid off four more employees who the company said were involved in the letter


Workers said that word of the firings spread quickly, and executives and managers soon took a much harder line, the article stated. A manager told an employee the next week that the latter had to choose between his workplace concerns and getting to Mars, according to the employee, the article stated. The employee had eagerly shared the open-letter with co-workers, according to the article.


The employee was fired from SpaceX in July, followed by two others in August, after the company investigated their role in the letter. SpaceX also dismissed a ninth employee, the company believed was involved in the letter, in August. However, the employee disputed this. 


According to the article, Moline and Holland-Thielen said the abruptness of the firings made them suspect that Shotwell had bowed to the pressure.


Moline said he thought Shotwell was doing a good job protecting and advocating for SpaceX employees against some of the worst impulses that Elon and others might have had, but finally realising that she was not the saviour broke down the trust for him.