SpaceX employees fired over letter criticizing Elon Musk’s conduct

A number of staff at non-public spaceflight firm SpaceX who circulated a letter this week calling out the conduct of Chief Government Elon Musk have been fired, in accordance with studies.

Within the letter, the existence of which was first reported by the Verge, staff complained about Musk’s “dangerous Twitter conduct” and accused the Hawthorne firm of not addressing his conduct with a way of urgency.

“Elon’s conduct within the public sphere is a frequent supply of distraction and embarrassment for us, notably in latest weeks,” the letter states.

In response, SpaceX fired among the organizers behind the letter, the New York Instances reported. The paper cited an e-mail by which SpaceX President and Chief Working Officer Gwynne Shotwell mentioned the corporate had investigated and “terminated plenty of staff” concerned with the letter.

The letter alluded to sexual misconduct allegations in opposition to Musk that got here to mild in a report by Insider final month. Musk is alleged to have propositioned a flight attendant for an erotic therapeutic massage whereas aboard a SpaceX non-public jet in 2016. The corporate paid $250,000 to settled the sexual misconduct declare, in accordance with Insider.

Musk denied the allegations.

The letter writers additionally asserted that staff face unequal enforcement of the corporate’s worker conduct insurance policies, and referred to as on the corporate to create a transparent system for reporting and upholding repercussions for “unacceptable conduct.”

They referred to as on the corporate to carry management accountable and “publicly tackle and condemn” Musk’s conduct on Twitter, in accordance with the letter. The world’s richest man has used his Twitter account, which at the moment has greater than 90 million followers, to publish intercourse jokes, mock fellow billionaires together with Invoice Gates and Jeff Bezos, query the scientific consensus round COVID-19 and voice his growing affinity for conservative politics.

Musk has mentioned that SpaceX’s objectives embrace making humanity “multiplanetary” by enabling leisure journeys to area and the colonization of Mars. The letter calls into query whether or not the corporate’s tradition is match for that take a look at.

“The collaboration we have to make life multiplanetary is incompatible with a tradition that treats staff as consumable sources,” the letter states. “Is the tradition we’re fostering now the one which we goal to convey to Mars and past?”

The letter was reportedly shared on Wednesday on an inside Microsoft Groups channel with 2,600 staff, in accordance with the Verge. An unknown variety of staff signed onto the letter.

Additionally on Thursday, Musk held a video name with staff of Twitter to take questions prematurely of his deliberate $43-billion buy of the corporate. Following the decision, the web site Undertaking Veritas revealed what it mentioned have been non-public chat logs displaying feedback, a lot of them important of Musk, posted in firm Slack channels in the course of the assembly.

Musk responded to a right-wing activist’s tweet of the Undertaking Veritas leak, saying, “Attention-grabbing.”