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Eight former SpaceX employees have filed a lawsuit against the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk and his company over alleged sexual harassment, discrimination, illegal firings, and retaliation.
The eight former SpaceX employees – four women and four men – were all fired in 2022 after writing an open letter criticizing Elon Musk and raising concerns about alleged sexual harassment and discrimination against women in the workplace.
In the letter, which was signed by at least 400 other employees and submitted as an exhibit in the lawsuit, it states that Musk’s “behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment.”
It also claims Elon Musk “runs his company in the dark ages — treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter, and offering the reprise to those who challenge the Animal House environment that if they don’t like it they can seek employment elsewhere.”
Following the release of the letter, the former employees claim in the lawsuit that “Musk personally ordered the Plaintiff’s terminations.”
Reuters reports that a series of tweets posted by Elon Musk are also being used as evidence in the lawsuit, including several of referencing his penis.
It will have epic merch
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2021
The lawsuit says Musk’s conduct fostered a “pervasively sexist culture” at SpaceX where female engineers were routinely subjected to harassment and sexist comments and their concerns about workplace culture were ignored. Senior engineers, for example, used euphemisms for sexual acts and male genitals to describe rocket components, according to the lawsuit.
“These actions … had the foreseeable and actual result of offending, causing distress, and intruding upon Plaintiffs’ well-being so as to disrupt their emotional tranquility in the workplace,” the plaintiffs said in the lawsuit.
One of the former SpaceX employees who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Elon Musk, Paige Holland Thielen, spoke to CNN and described what it was like working for the billionaire and his company.