SpaceX fires employees who criticised CEO Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s SpaceX dismissed a handful of employees on June 16 afternoon after they published an open letter decrying the entrepreneur’s atrocious behaviour, according to a New York Times report.
Several reports were published on June 17 which mentioned an email from SpaceX’s President Gwynne Shotwell, who stated that the company had terminated the contract of several employees who had got together and put out a letter.
She states that the letter criticises Elon Musk for his actions and particularly said were a “frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks.”
The New York Times was the first publication to report about the issue which was based on the information they had from the three employees who were named.
It is still unclear as to how many people lost their jobs but Shotwelll states that all those terminated had crossed an unacceptable line.
Furthermore, Shotwell mentions in her email that employees were made to feel uneasy, frightened, bullied, and/or angered by the letter, which pressed them to sign something that did not reflect their opinions.
She concluded by saying that the company had way too much important work to work on than to get involved in such activism.
The firings took place the same day Elon Musk had addressed Twitter employees for the first time about his USD 44 billion deal with the microblogging website.
The purchase is still in the pipeline as Elon Musk tries to determine if Twitter has been hiding the number of fake accounts on its platform.