Elon Musk has been doing his best to promote his sprawling business empire as Tesla shareholders prepare to vote Thursday on a $55 billion pay package.
But Musk just got hit with some awkward press — this time, with a new report examining Musk’s interactions with several female employees at his rocket company, SpaceX.
The Wall Street Journal said its report was based on interviews with former SpaceX employees and people familiar with the matter as well as documents.
It cited one woman as having told friends that she kissed Musk soon after meeting him in the early 2010s when she was a SpaceX intern and eventually had sex with him. She became a full-time SpaceX employee years after her internship, the report said.
“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 told the newspaper via lawyers acting for her and Musk.
Musk did not respond to requests for comment from the Journal.
Representatives for Musk and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, sent outside normal working hours.
SpaceX’s chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, said in a statement to the Journal: “The untruths, mischaracterizations, and revisionist history in your email paint a completely misleading narrative.”
Musk, a flight attendant, and a horse
The Journal also mentioned a BI story from May 2022 about an incident in which Musk was accused of exposing himself to a flight attendant on SpaceX’s corporate jet.
BI learned that the aerospace firm paid the flight attendant $250,000 in 2018 to settle a sexual-misconduct claim against its billionaire founder.
When BI approached Musk for comment in 2022, he initially asked for more time to respond, saying that there was “a lot more to this story.” But Musk did not reply even after BI extended the deadline and reiterated its request.
‘Muskonomy’
In addition to Musk’s huge compensation package, Tesla shareholders on Thursday are set to vote on a proposal to incorporate the EV giant in Texas.
Musk has tried to woo shareholders by campaigning on X and offered personal guided tours of a factory in Texas.
The mercurial billionaire has also sought to turn what is often seen as a disadvantage — running half a dozen companies concurrently — into an advantage.
Musk spent the weekend touting the benefits of having Tesla as a part of his constellation of businesses, which some have referred to as the “Muskonomy.” He also promised multiple windfalls to Tesla shareholders if they stick with him.
“I’ve mentioned something like this before, but, if any of my companies goes public, we will prioritize other longtime shareholders of my other companies, including Tesla,” Musk said on Saturday. “Loyalty deserves loyalty.”
Shareholders, however, seem to be split on giving Musk the support he’s seeking.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, a top-10 Tesla shareholder, said last week in comments first reported by The Financial Times that it would not vote for the pay package.
The oil fund did not support the package when it was first conceived in 2018.
Another large Tesla shareholder, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, shared similar sentiments last month after its CEO, Marcie Frost, told CNBC that the pension fund would vote against Musk’s pay.
On the other hand, Baillie Gifford, an institutional investor that’s backed Tesla for more than a decade, is set to vote in favor of Musk’s compensation plan, Bloomberg reported.
An insider told the outlet that the Scotland-based asset manager, which was once Tesla’s biggest shareholder after Musk, thought the pay package could be justified given the ambitious targets tied to it.
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