Elon Musk is a boob. The brash billionaire is also, as he can’t stop telling the world, embarrassingly obsessed with breasts – so much so that last year he painted over the “W” on the Twitter sign at the San Francisco headquarters so that it read “Titter”. This belaboured joke was a long time in the making: days before offering to buy Twitter in April 2022, he tweeted a poll: “Delete the w in Twitter?” It’s highly possible that Musk spent $44bn on the social media platform just so that he could one day turn this very stupid gag into reality.
This wasn’t the first time he’d publicly sniggered “Haha, female anatomy is hilarious!” like a dimwitted schoolboy. In 2021 he joked about starting a university called the Texas Institute of Technology & Science. Gettit? It’s a naughty acronym. Hilarious! Indeed, this particular joke never seems to get old for the 52-year-old. Earlier this year, he tweeted “Boobs just rock, it’s a fact,” alongside a meme of a man distracted by a woman’s cleavage.
An awful lot of people seem to dismiss Musk’s juvenile behaviour and incessant innuendo as harmless high jinks. But this is wrong: his misogyny matters. Musk heads multiple influential companies. His behaviour, it seems reasonable to assume, has a direct impact on their working environments. If the big boss thinks it’s acceptable to be crude and misogynistic in public, what message does that send to his employees?
Numerous lawsuits against Musk and his companies seem to hold the answer. In 2021, for example, just weeks after the billionaire’s “Texas Institute of Technology” quip, a Tesla factory worker called Jessica Barraza filed a complaint alleging the car company had a “pervasive culture of sexual harassment … including frequent groping on the factory floor.” Barraza claimed she was frequently propositioned and subject to comments like “Look at those titties” and “She’s got cakes”. Barraza is just one of a number of former Tesla workers who have filed sexual harassment lawsuits against the Musk-led company.
These issues aren’t confined to Tesla. Last week SpaceX (the entrepreneur’s rocket company) and Musk were sued by eight engineers who said they were illegally fired in 2022 for raising concerns about alleged sexual harassment and discrimination against women. The plaintiffs allege that they experienced harassing comments from co-workers that “mimicked Musk’s [Twitter] posts” and created a hostile work environment. The court filings claim Musk also participated in a video making light of sexual misconduct which, inter alia, demonstrated the “correct” way to spank a co-worker. “Musk trumpets SpaceX as the leader to a brave new world of space travel, but runs his company in the dark ages – treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” the complaint proclaims. Tesla and SpaceX deny any wrongdoing.
The SpaceX lawsuit coincided with a new Wall Street Journal report about the entrepreneur’s behaviour headlined “Musk’s boundary-blurring relationships with women at SpaceX.” Those blurred boundaries being that he, to quote the piece: “had sex with an employee and a former intern, and asked a woman at his company to have his babies”. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president said the Journal’s reporting doesn’t reflect SpaceX’s culture, adding “Elon is one of the best humans I know.”
Shotwell may protest that she knows a very different Musk, but none of these new allegations seem at odds with the public persona Musk has crafted for himself: that of a sex pest who is obsessed with breeding. This is the guy, after all, who fathered two children with a top executive at his artificial intelligence company Neuralink.
For a while now I’ve (naively) assumed that Musk’s shenanigans would eventually catch up with him. Surely nobody could go on treating this man, who seems to pride himself in being a raging misogynist, like a genius? Surely shareholders of his company might realise that a guy who seems to think that 50% of the population are nothing but walking wombs might not be the biggest business brain? But, like his pal Donald Trump, nothing Musk does seems to make a bit of difference to his cult-like followers or the wider business community. Tesla shareholders recently approved a $45bn (£35.3bn) pay deal for Musk: the largest-ever compensation package granted to an executive at a US-listed company. The moral to this puerile story? Misogyny pays.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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