Elon Musk Reportedly Had Sex With SpaceX Intern

A stunningly inappropriate workplace relationship.

Space Oddity

SpaceX CEO and tech billionaire Elon Musk had sex with a college intern several years ago, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Tellingly, long after she left the company in 2019, she had Musk's lawyers representing her when WSJ came knocking recently for comment about the relationship, and would only provide details about her relationship with Musk via affidavits.

Regardless, the power imbalance of the initial relationship is stunningly inappropriate. The richest man in the world seeking out an intern at his company for a sexual relationship invokes US President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky during his time in the Oval Office.

Worse, it sounds like the relationship is part of a concerning pattern at SpaceX, which has lucrative government contracts with NASA, with the WSJ reporting that Musk has had other inappropriate interactions with women employees there.

This includes the time when Musk reportedly exposed his penis and groped a SpaceX flight attendant. And when Musk, an ardent pro-natalist, repeatedly harassed a woman about carrying his babies — recalling the hoopla around the news that Shivon Zilis, director at Musk's brain chip startup Neuralink, was the mother to two of his 11 so far documented children.

Some of these women, even if they started friendly with Musk, left SpaceX under cloudy circumstances after being strong-armed into signing non-disclosure agreements and pocketing settlement money, according to WSJ, raising questions on power imbalances, conflicts of interest, and a CEO who's not beholden to anybody, not even to his company's code of conduct that looks down on couples having authority over one another.

Legal Troubles, Roger

When the flight attendant incident hit the news in 2022, several SpaceX employees were fired after they complained in an internal letter that the space outfit tolerated harassment in the workplace, according to the WSJ.

This volatile environment of harassment and recriminations even included SpaceX chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, who accused another staff member of having an affair with her husband. Adding to this tangled toxic web, this same accused employee had an affair with Musk that ended badly. (Hope you're keeping up!)

As for the former college student, she and Musk had met while she was a summer intern at SpaceX back in the early 2010s, WSJ reports, which led to romance and a whirlwind trip to a Sicilian resort.

They later broke up, but reconnected when Musk hired her in 2017 to be part of his executive team. But things turned "awkward" at the job because, she told friends, she rebuffed his repeated advances.

She later left in 2019, probably wiser to the workings of the world.

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