Discrimination, crude sexual humor and harassment were commonplace among SpaceX managers who encouraged a frat-style atmosphere at Elon Musk’s company, a group of former employees has claimed in a civil rights complaint.
The allegations in the filing to state authorities in California, reported on Tuesday by Bloomberg, come as the billionaire, also the owner of X, defends his aerospace company against a separate federal accusation that it fired the workers in retaliation for criticizing him for a series of sexually suggestive tweets.
In the new complaint to the California civil rights department (CRD), and in interviews, the seven former employees say the SpaceX executives routinely dismissed their concerns or harassed them by excluding them from meetings, promoting colleagues above them and joking about a sexual harassment accusation against Musk.
“I was left out of so many meetings that I was supposed to be in; I was left out of so many decisions that were my decision to make,” Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the complainants, said in an interview, Bloomberg said.
“I was forgotten on projects; I was forgotten in planning.”
She said she was hired in 2018 as a basic-level engineer, below male colleagues given seniority despite a similar level of qualifications and experience.
“Bringing things to light is the first step to actually make it better,” she said, expressing a hope that the civil rights case would put extra scrutiny on the company. The complaint says SpaceX violated California’s Fair Housing and Employment Act that bans gender-based discrimination and retaliation against workplace whistleblowers.
Holland-Thielen said in the complaint she was told by a manager she was being “too emotional” and “should be more humble” when she complained that a male colleague was taking credit for her work.
On a separate occasion, she said, she asked to speak with a manager about a colleague’s “inappropriate behavior” but was interrupted by the manager pointing to downward-pointing data on her computer screen and making the sexual allusion: “How can we get it, up, up, up?”
Last month, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accused SpaceX of unlawfully firing the workers for circulating a letter calling Musk a “distraction and embarrassment”. The employees sent it to SpaceX executives in June 2022 complaining of a series of social media posts the SpaceX founder made since 2020 on Twitter, now X, many of which were sexually suggestive.
“They told me that my employment was being terminated because they had determined that I was responsible for conceiving, writing, and distributing the open letter,” Tom Moline, another of the fired engineers, said in the complaint.
One particular tweet, which the workers say was instrumental in their decision to send the letter, was Musk’s reference to a 2016 incident, reported by Business Insider, in which he was accused of improperly touching a SpaceX flight attendant, and offering her a horse in exchange for a massage.
The California complaint says a SpaceX human resources executive found the exchange funny, and joked with words to the effect: “I’ve never been sexual harassed [sic], I must not be hot enough.”
Other Musk posts were frequently highlighted and discussed during SpaceX meetings and in group chats, the California filing says, and the workers said they could not easily avoid them because he also made important company announcements on the channel.
“It was very common for people to quote things that Elon had previously said, when it comes to engineering practices or jokes he had made,” Moline said.
“Basically anything that would make a freshman frat-initiate laugh was fair game in large parts of the company.”
SpaceX has 30 days to respond to the CRD, which has authority to investigate, mediate, or take legal action. The company did not respond to a request from Bloomberg for comment. The Guardian has also reached out to SpaceX.
Following the NLRB complaint, SpaceX responded by denying wrongdoing and suing the board in Texas, claiming its makeup “violated the US constitution”.
The NLRB is facing a similar lawsuit in a case involving a Starbucks employee who opposed the unionization of her New York store. The worker sued the board in October after it denied her petition for an election to dissolve the union.
The SpaceX and Starbucks cases are seen by analysts as part of a wider corporate push to undermine workers’ rights and defang a resurgent labor movement.
