Elon Musk paid a flight attendant for SpaceX’s corporate jet fleet $250,000 after she claimed that he had propositioned her for sex during a massage on a flight to London, Insider reported on Thursday, citing a declaration filed by a friend of the attendant in support of her claim. The woman then signed what Insider describes as “restrictive non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses that bar the attendant from ever discussing the severance payment or disclosing any information of any kind about Musk and his businesses.”
The flight attendant told her friend that Musk had asked her to come to his room “for a full body massage,” according to the friend’s declaration quoted by Insider. The attendant came into the room to see Musk “completely naked except for a sheet covering the lower half of his body.” During the massage, the declaration continued, Musk “exposed his genitals,” then “touched her and offered to buy her a horse if she would ‘do more,’ referring to the performance of sex acts.” The attendant, who rides horses, declined his offer, according to the friend’s statement, which added that she “is not for sale.”
The settlement was signed just months before California outlawed non-disclosure agreements in alleged sexual misconduct settlements, “unless they are requested by the plaintiff,” Insider noted.
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Musk disputed the publication’s reporting, telling Insider that there “is a lot more to this story” and calling the coming article a “politically motivated hit piece.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast on Thursday evening.
Late Thursday evening, Musk tweeted that “The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens – this is their standard (despicable) playbook – but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech.” A few minutes later, he replied to another account that “for the record, those wild accusations are utterly untrue.”
That was after John Cook, investigations editor at Insider, tweeted after the story’s publication that the outlet had reached out to Musk at approximately 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. Just hours later, Musk tweeted: “Political attacks on me will escalate in coming months.” As always with the billionaire, it is difficult to definitively parse the subtext of that statement, or whether it referred directly to Insider’s reporting.
It wasn’t immediately clear what impact, if any, Thursday’s revelations would have on Musk’s $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter. In recent weeks the billionaire has seemingly signaled that he wants to pay a lower price—or perhaps back out entirely—claiming without evidence that Twitter is dramatically underreporting the number of fake or spam accounts on its platform. Twitter’s execs have indicated they aren’t interested in giving Musk a better deal, though the company’s stock is trading more than 30 percent below his offer price of $54.20 per share.
Musk has steadily expanded the targets of his online trolling and critiques of late. On Wednesday, he lashed out against the publisher of a “social good” stock market index — the S&P 500 ESG Index — which had dropped Tesla from the ranks in part because it scored in the bottom 25 percent of its industry for adherence to certain environmental, social, and corporate governance standards. While the list makers acknowledged the electric carmaker’s work taking “fuel-powered cars off the road,” the company fell “behind its peers when examined through a wider ESG lens.” Specifically, Tesla’s scores suffered because of concerns about the way it handled a federal safety investigation after “multiple deaths and injuries were linked to its autopilot vehicles,” reports of alleged worker mistreatment at one of its plants, and other factors.
Musk also revealed on Wednesday that he will vote Republican in upcoming elections, and at various points he assailed the “leftist agenda” and the “woke mind virus.”
