Elon Musk’s Boundary-Blurring Relationships With Women at SpaceX

When Elon Musk personally contacted a former SpaceX engineering intern to discuss a role on his executive staff in 2017, the woman spoke with excitement to her friends about a high-profile problem-solving role at the rocket company, a dream for someone a few years out of college.

She and Musk had met years earlier during her internship, when she was still in college. She’d approached him with ideas for improving SpaceX. Her outreach had led to a date, which led to a kiss, and eventually sex, she told friends. The year after her internship, the billionaire had the fresh college graduate flown out to a resort in Sicily, before they ended things, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Musk, who is more than 20 years her senior, attempted to restart their relationship but she rejected his advance. They remained close as she tried to establish herself in the new job.
He texted her often and invited her to come over to his Los Angeles mansion at night on multiple occasions. Sometimes she accepted his invitations, but friends said she told them at the time that his behavior made her job harder.
She eventually moved off Musk’s executive team, according to friends she told and to people familiar with her time at SpaceX. The woman left the company in 2019.
Her lawyers, who also represent Musk, provided the Journal with two affidavits signed by the woman. The affidavits disputed some aspects of the Journal’s reporting but confirmed many others, including that she had a romantic relationship with Musk in the past. She said she invited him to dinner near the end of her summer internship and broke things off the following year.
She said at no point during employment at SpaceX from 2017 to 2019 was there any “romantic relationship” with Musk.
“Nothing that Elon Musk did towards me during either of my periods of employment at SpaceX was predatory or wrongful in any way,” the woman said.
She is one of several female employees at SpaceX who have told friends, family, or the company itself, that Musk showed them an unusual amount of attention or pursued them.
One woman, a SpaceX flight attendant, alleged that in 2016 Musk exposed himself to her and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex acts.
Another woman who left the company in 2013 alleged in exit negotiations with SpaceX human resources and legal executives that Musk had asked her to have his babies.
A fourth woman had a month-long sexual relationship with Musk in 2014 while she directly reported to him. The relationship ended badly, leading to recriminations over text and email as she left the company and signed an agreement prohibiting her from discussing her work for Musk.
Former SpaceX executives, as well as fired SpaceX employees who complained to the National Labor Relations Board in 2022, say a high-level group around Musk fails to apply his company’s own rules to the CEO, contributing to a culture of sexism and harassment.
They say there’s an understanding that Musk, a charismatic leader with many fans who call him a genius, can act with impunity. “Elon is SpaceX, and SpaceX is Elon,” one former engineer recalled an executive saying during a June 2022 meeting after the firings of some of the SpaceX employees, who had criticized Musk and demanded greater accountability at the company.
Musk, who is one of the richest men in the world, leads companies including the publicly traded electric-vehicle maker Tesla, rocket-maker SpaceX and social-media platform X.
SpaceX has won billions in federal contracts, and is key to NASA and Pentagon space programs. Tesla, meanwhile, is holding a shareholder vote that closes on June 13 over Musk’s $46 billion pay package, which was struck down by a Delaware court in January because of concerns about the approval process.
Musk didn’t reply to requests for comment.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, said the Journal’s reporting doesn’t reflect SpaceX’s culture.
“The untruths, mischaracterizations, and revisionist history in your email paint a completely misleading narrative,” she said. “I continue to be amazed by what this extraordinary group of people are achieving every day even amidst all the forces acting against us. And Elon is one of the best humans I know.”
She said SpaceX fully investigates all complaints of harassment and takes appropriate actions.
Other behavior by Musk, including his use of illegal drugs, has raised concerns among some executives and board members of SpaceX and Tesla, according to previous Journal reporting. Musk has used drugs including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine, at times with some board members, the Journal has reported.
An attorney for Musk, Alex Spiro, said at the time that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.” He said “there are other false facts” in the reporting about Musk’s drug use but didn’t detail them.
Encounters with Musk
This article is based on conversations with more than four dozen people, including former employees, people familiar with Musk’s interactions with female subordinates and friends and family of the women. The Journal also reviewed emails, text messages and other documents.
Since 2017, the era of MeToo has resulted in a pronounced cultural shift that has put more scrutiny on the conduct of executives in the workplace. Good-governance norms in the corporate world have shifted toward hard bans on supervisor-employee sexual relationships, out of concern for their potential to create power imbalances and conflicts of interest in the workplace.
Federal and state laws bar supervisors from sexually harassing employees. Some courts have recognized “sexual favoritism” as a form of harassment, blessing claims of a hostile work environment by employees who alleged that their bosses gave preferential treatment to colleagues with whom they were having consensual affairs.
A SpaceX policy discourages employees from directly overseeing romantic partners.
The women who described the encounters with Musk had jobs that meant they worked closely with him.
The college student studying engineering met Musk in the early 2010s during her summer internship at SpaceX. Musk and the woman went out for a meal after she sent him ideas about how to improve the company, she told friends. They bonded over “Star Wars” and kissed.
A year later, the chief executive arranged for the woman to meet him at a resort in Sicily, where he was attending an exclusive conference sponsored by Google, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.
The woman’s passport was in another city at the time so Musk had arrangements made for a friend of hers to bring it to the woman on an early morning domestic flight, documents show. The woman was then scheduled on a first-class flight to London and a private jet to Italy, the documents show.
The former intern told friends not to speak with Journal reporters and later said that she didn’t want to be part of an article, following outreach from the Journal.
Clare Locke, a Virginia-based law firm that also represents Musk and Tesla, sent the Journal legal letters on behalf of the woman that demanded her removal from the article. The affidavits signed by the woman were attached to the letters.
The woman said in one of the affidavits that after she broke off the relationship with Musk they remained friends.
‘Nothing out of the ordinary’
In 2017, Musk personally contacted the former intern about a fulltime job at SpaceX, which would be to find problems at the company and fix them. She moved from New York to the Los Angeles area to become a member of Musk’s executive staff. Former employees said that while she was a talented engineer, they found it odd that someone so junior was given such a high-profile role so close to the boss.
She said in one of the affidavits that she believes she was one of many candidates for the role.
After she arrived in California, Musk invited her for drinks and came on to her, touching her breast, friends said she told them at the time. One of them said the woman recalled Musk saying, “Oh, I’m so bad. I shouldn’t be doing this.”
In one of her affidavits, she said, without providing details, “Elon tried to rekindle our relationship prior to my employment, and I rejected the advance. While there was some initial awkwardness, it was nothing out of the ordinary after a rejection.”