SpaceX employees say they were fired for snitching on Musk

In June, about 20 engineers were invited to a meeting held at SpaceX headquarters. The topic of conversation: the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk.

The day before, the rocket manufacturer had fired five employees who wrote a letter asking SpaceX to condemn Musk’s “harmful behavior” on Twitter. He had used social media to dismiss a report that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment complaint against him. Several of the female engineers entered the meeting expecting a sympathetic ear, as some managers and executives had indicated that they did not tolerate Musk’s behavior.

But the meeting, which had not previously been reported, soon became heated, according to two female SpaceX employees in attendance.

They said Jon Edwards, the vice president who led the meeting, characterized the letter as an extremist act and declared that the writers were fired for distracting the company and confronting Musk. When asked if the CEO could sexually harass his employees without a problem, Edwards didn’t seem to respond, the two employees said. But they said the meeting had a recurring theme — that Musk could do whatever he wanted at the company.

“SpaceX is Elon and Elon is SpaceX,” the two recall hearing Edwards declare.

The letter to SpaceX eventually led to the dismissal of nine workers, according to the employees and their lawyers. On Wednesday (16), accusations of unfair labor practices were presented to the National Council of Labor Relations, on behalf of eight of these workers, arguing that their dismissals were illegal.

The SpaceX case raises new questions about management practices at Musk’s companies, where there is little tolerance for dissent or labor activism.

Tesla, the maker of electric cars that Musk also runs, has resisted attempts to unionize at its plants and is embroiled in a legal action brought by workers who said they were not given adequate notice of their June layoffs.

After Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion last month, he immediately fired executives before laying off half of the social network’s 7,500 employees. This week, he had subordinates comb through employees’ internal communications and public tweets, leading to the firing of dozens of critics.

Interviews with the eight SpaceX employees who filed the allegations highlight Musk’s tight control of their workplaces, perhaps even beyond the bounds of federal law. Six of those employees spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals and are not identified by name in works council records.

Legal experts said the law, which gives workers the right to assemble for “mutual aid or protection,” likely protected the wording of the letter, which, in addition to addressing Musk’s online habits, urged SpaceX to enforce its harassment policies. more effectively.

“It was hard for me to believe what was happening, it was so brazen,” said Tom Moline, an engineer who had been with SpaceX for more than eight years when he was fired in June after helping to organize the letter. “Sounds like one of those times when employees have safeguards.”

SpaceX, Musk and Edwards did not respond to requests for comment on the former employees’ allegations.

Many of SpaceX’s roughly 11,000 workers are there because of the rocket maker’s mission. Founded by Musk in 2002 and headquartered in Hawthorne, Calif., the company aims to send people to Mars and make humans a “multiplanetary” species.

That mission, however, has at times been undermined by distractions from its CEO, said several of the former employees who brought up the labor allegations in interviews. Musk has openly criticized politicians and government agencies that have influence on federal contracts.

More disturbing, these officials said, is a culture that appears to condone sexual harassment and gender discrimination.

In December, a former employee published an article describing several instances of harassment and bullying by co-workers. She said there were little to no consequences when she reported the incidents. After the text appeared, other female employees began to speak out about what they consider to be predatory behavior by male colleagues.

The company, which does not disclose employee demographics but which workers say is male-dominated, has begun an internal audit of its harassment policies, The Verge reported.

Then, in May, Insider reported that SpaceX paid $250,000 to a flight attendant at the company in 2018 after she accused Musk of exposing himself and proposing sex to her. (Musk later said on Twitter that the episode “never happened.”) The story has exacerbated internal tensions, and several female employees have said in interviews that they were shocked when Musk joked about the allegations on Twitter.

The controversy also involved Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, who many employees said they considered an ally.

“I had a lot of respect for her in the beginning,” said Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the letter’s engineers and organizers who were fired. “I saw myself in what she did.”

But several female employees said their opinion of her, already tarnished by the company’s reaction to previous harassment revelations, had weakened further after Shotwell sent a company-wide email saying he didn’t believe the allegations against Musk.

“I have worked closely with him for 20 years and have never seen or heard anything like these allegations,” she wrote.

The email was previously reported by CNBC.

Within days, the employees began to organize an open letter in response.

Despite their frustrations, some participants said, they hoped to convey a desire to discuss a solution with executives. Musk and SpaceX were known to be strongly anti-union — the rocket maker requires managers to receive training to discourage union activity — and employees didn’t want executives or other colleagues to see their efforts as the start of a union campaign.

“Whenever someone mentioned something or shared something from a real union, I thought, ‘Hey, let’s save that for another conversation,'” said Holland-Thielen, who took the training course as an engineering leader, hoping to eventually become a manager.

The writing of the letter followed two paths. One was by workers’ personal software and was only visible to a few dozen employees. The other took place on a collaboration platform visible to anyone at SpaceX, where workers discussed “action items.”

One proposal said that SpaceX should disclose any further harassment claims against Musk; another called for a public statement from the company making it clear that Shotwell’s email about the allegations did not represent the views of all employees.

Shotwell seemed sympathetic even though she had been nominated.

“As always, I enjoy reading and hearing ideas to help improve SpaceX,” she wrote on the internal work platform, according to a screenshot viewed by The New York Times.

The group distributed the letter on June 15 — first to Shotwell and several other executives, and then to various company messaging channels.

“Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us,” the document read.

The initial response seemed favorable. Internal data showed that more than 1,000 people viewed the letter within hours, the officials said. More than 400 signed, many of them anonymously.

Managers also seemed supportive. Edwards, the vice president, said in a meeting after the letter’s release that two of his three proposals were “great ideas,” according to meeting minutes shared internally and seen by the Times. He said a third idea – for SpaceX to separate itself from Musk’s “personal brand” – was “more complicated”.

But at the top levels of the company, the reaction quickly turned antagonistic, the female employees said. Within hours, Shotwell sent Moline and Holland-Thielen an email forwarding comments from an unnamed co-worker who expressed disagreement with the letter and called it disturbing. The Information previously reported about this email.

“Please stop flooding employee communication channels immediately,” Shotwell wrote in his email, which he copied from senior company officials. She added, “I’ll take your ignoring my email as insubordination. Instead, focus on your work.”

The following morning, the media reported the open letter. That afternoon, Moline, Holland-Thielen and three other employees were contacted separately by human resources and told they were being terminated. One employee cited her role in creating and distributing the letter, four of the employees said.

Shotwell joined these conversations remotely and stressed that workers had wasted too much of the company’s time.

The officials were surprised.

“We were really trying to make this as palatable as possible for the reasonable minds at SpaceX,” said Holland-Thielen.

One of the employees’ lawyers, Anne Shaver, said the company had “cruelly retaliated” against them.

Shotwell did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Wilma Liebman, who was chair of President Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Council, said a letter seeking clarification about a company’s sexual harassment policies was generally protected under federal labor law. She said the company could argue that the writers of the letter sought to criticize Musk, an activity that is not necessarily protected, rather than to improve his workplace. But she said the labor board would likely disagree because Musk’s posts that female employees criticized could be seen as creating a hostile work environment.

Word of the layoffs spread quickly, workers said, and executives and managers soon took a much harder line. The following week, an employee was told by his manager, who eagerly shared the open letter with co-workers, to choose between his workplace concerns or go to Mars, according to the employee.

Workers said the company fired that employee and two others in July and August after investigating their role in the letter, and that it also fired a ninth employee involved in the letter in August, citing poor performance, which the employee disputed.

Moline and Holland-Thielen said the swiftness of their dismissals made them suspect that Shotwell had given in to pressure.

“I thought she was doing a good job protecting and defending us from some of the worst impulses that Elon and others could have,” Moline said. “Finally, realizing she wasn’t that savior broke my confidence.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves