As Tesla shareholders prepare to vote on a $55 billion compensation package on Thursday, Elon Musk is going all out in promoting his vast business empire.
But Musk recently faced some embarrassing press coverage, this time from a new report looking into his interactions with several female employees at SpaceX, the rocket company he leads.
The Wall Street Journal said its report was based on interviews with former SpaceX employees, people familiar with the matter, and documents.
One woman told friends she met Musk as an intern at SpaceX in the early 2010s, kissed him shortly thereafter and eventually had sex with him, the article said. She became a full-time employee at SpaceX a few years later, the article said.
“Nothing Elon Musk did with me during my two years at SpaceX was in any way predatory or illegal,” the woman told the Post through a lawyer representing Musk and herself.
Musk did not respond to The Wall Street Journal’s request for comment.
Musk and SpaceX representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment sent outside normal working hours.
“The falsehoods, misrepresentations and historical revisionism contained in your email paint a completely misleading narrative,” SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
Masks, flight attendants and horses
The Journal also referred to a May 2022 BI article about an incident in which Musk was accused of exposing himself to a flight attendant on a SpaceX corporate jet.
BI has learned that the aerospace company paid a flight attendant $250,000 in 2018 to settle a sexual misconduct lawsuit against its billionaire founder.
When BI reached out to Musk for comment in 2022, he initially said there was “much more to this story” and that he needed more time to respond, but even after BI extended the deadline and made a second request, Musk did not respond.
“Masconomy”
In addition to Musk’s huge compensation package, Tesla shareholders are set to vote on Thursday on a proposal to incorporate the EV giant in Texas.
Musk tried to win over shareholders by campaigning on X and offering personal guided tours of his Texas factory.
The mercurial billionaire has also tried to turn what is often seen as a disadvantage – running as many as six companies at once – into an advantage.
Musk spent the weekend touting the benefits of having Tesla as part of his business conglomerate — what some have called “masconomy” — and promising Tesla shareholders several windfall benefits if they stick with him.
“As I’ve said before, if my company goes public, I will prioritize long-time shareholders in my other companies, including Tesla,” Musk said on Saturday. “Loyalty pays loyalty.”
But shareholders appear divided on whether to give Musk the help he’s seeking.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, a top 10 shareholder in Tesla, said last week that it would not vote in favor of the compensation package, in comments first reported by the Financial Times.
The Oil Fund did not support the package when it was first conceived in 2018.
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, another large Tesla shareholder, echoed that sentiment last month after CEO Marcy Frost told CNBC the pension fund would vote against Musk’s pay.
Meanwhile, Baillie Gifford, an institutional investor that has backed Tesla for more than a decade, plans to vote in favor of Musk’s compensation plan, Bloomberg reported.
Insiders told the outlet that the Scottish-based asset manager, once Tesla’s largest shareholder after Musk, believed the compensation package was justified given the company’s ambitious targets.
