Eight former SpaceX employees have filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the aerospace company and its CEO Elon Musk.
The eight former SpaceX employees — Paige Holland-Thielen, Yaman Abdulhak, Scott Beck, Rebekah Clark, Deborah Lawrence, Claire Mallon, Tom Moline and André Nadeau — claim that they challenged the alleged toxic workplace environment in an open letter to management and were then fired from SpaceX. The lawsuit cites several examples of Musk’s eyebrow-raising tweets, including his infamous “Pronouns suck” post and the time he shared a photo comparing Bill Gates to the pregnant man emoji with the caption, “In case u need to lose a boner fast.”
The alleged “pervasively sexist culture” of SpaceX was further perpetuated by the “common” practice of engineers applying “crude and demeaning names to products in an attempt at humor, often at the expense of women and LGBTQ+ individuals,” the lawsuit claims.