Federal labor regulators allege that SpaceX illegally fired employees who publicly criticized Elon Musk, the exploration company’s founder and CEO.
According to allegations laid out in a complaint filed Wednesday by a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board, SpaceX wrongfully terminated eight employees and interrogated dozens more in 2022 after the workers wrote and shared an open letter calling for the company’s leadership to condemn Musk’s “disparaging” and “sexually charged” comments on social media.
The letter criticized SpaceX management for what the authors called the company’s failure to tackle a culture of “sexism, harassment and discrimination” within its workplace, the NLRB said in the complaint. Separately, they asked SpaceX to “condemn” Musk’s “harmful Twitter behavior.”
There’s often clauses in contracts saying you can’t publicly disparage the company. I’ve definitely had that in mine before.
No clue if that’s actually legal or not though.
If this was entirely private, within the company, that wouldn’t usually be a problem, but publicly people get fired for making their company look bad all the time. Again, maybe not legal. (edit: Also Musk would definitely be a target for this if he wasn’t the CEO)
Edit: I also watched a person criticize the CEO and get into an argument with him on a company call when the CEO asked for feedback, and he was fired the next day.