“Elon’s behaviour in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.”
As employee rebellions go, the recent uprising at SpaceX was mild and measured in its execution but devastating in its fallout.
It began with a post on the company’s intranet seeking signatures of support. In short, they felt chairman Elon Musk’s gung-ho online persona and gun-slinging approach to employment (what exactly does a “no-asshole policy” mean once in HR law?) was undermining their morale and their work.
You may question the wisdom of any employee who signs an open letter criticising the company owner. But this is where Musk’s recent comments and controversies start to tie together; and why a crisis at his space-industry firm has impacted, via his on-off plan to buy Twitter, the whole of his empire, Tesla included.
The SpaceX employees, emboldened by Musk’s repeated assertions that he was buying Twitter to protect freedom of speech, published their letter and accrued supporters (reports suggest more than 400).
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell summarily fired the five ringleaders and emailed her team to say that the other signatories had been pressured into it.
A whirlwind was picking up. Around the same time, Musk found himself being sued for $86bn (£70bn) for pumping-and-dumping a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
Separately, it was reported that Musk’s much-vaunted investment in another volatile cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, including taking it as payment for cars, has lost Tesla $500m (£409m).
And then the whirlwind became a tornado as a new suit from a Tesla investor landed, alleging the firm had failed to tackle complaints of workplace discrimination.
This followed a complaint by the state of California that “Tesla has created a toxic workplace culture grounded in racist and sexist abuse and discrimination against its own employees.”
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