Elon Musk – Wikipedia
Eight former SpaceX employees have sued Elon Musk, alleging sexual harassment and a hostile work environment at the company. They also claim that people suffered from retaliation if they tried to do anything about it. This is as Elon Musk dropped his own lawsuit filed against Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
The eight plaintiffs say they were all fired from SpaceX in 2022 after they published an open letter stating that Elon Musk’s “behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment.”
The lawsuit was filed in a Los Angeles court.
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It alleges that the company is guilty of “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter, and offering the reprise to those who challenge the ‘Animal House’ environment that if they don’t like it, they can seek employment elsewhere.”
“Musk thinks he’s above the law. Our eight brave clients stood up to him and were fired for doing so,” Laurie Burgess, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “We look forward to holding Musk accountable for his actions at trial.”
As for the OpenAI lawsuit, in March, Elon Musk filed it over breach of contract, charging that the company has failed to live up to its founding principle of working “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
Elon Musk founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit. He left the company’s board of directors in 2018. In 2019, after OpenAI restructured to offer “capped” profits to investors, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the firm.
“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said Elon Musk’s lawsuit.
However, OPenAI countered by releasing a number of e mails in which Elon Musk wrote back when the firm was just starting out about how the company needed to bring in huge revenues if it were to succeed in funding its goals.
In one such e mail, Musk wrote about OpenAI’s funding, “We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless relative to what Google or Facebook are spending. I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment. This is real. I will cover whatever anyone else doesn’t provide.”
Musk also lobbied for the firm to merge with his company Tesla.
While no reason was given for Elon Musk’s decision to drop his lawsuit, it is widely believed that the above revelations were the cause.
