SpaceX Workers Who Called Elon’s Tweet Storms ‘an Embarrassment’ Are Shown the Door

Elon Musk, who wants to buy Twitter to bring back freedom of speech, apparently does not extend the same lofty ideals to his other companies. On Thursday, the same day he waxed lyrical about “free speech” in a town hall with Twitter employees, SpaceX fired a number of workers who criticized their boss in an open letter that called his increasingly outlandish tweet storms “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us” and “harmful.” The letter cited SpaceX’s “No Asshole” policy and asked execs to publicly condemn Musk’s behavior. In an internal email obtained by The New York Times, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the episode “made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views.” She called the letter “overreaching activism” that distracted from their mission to “get to Mars.”