SpaceX Fires Employees Involved in Letter Critical of Elon Musk, Company

Her email didn’t say how many people the company let go. At least two people who helped lead the effort were fired, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Some employees at the company recently wrote a letter that called Mr. Musk’s public statements and behavior, particularly during the past several weeks, embarrassing and distracting. The letter asked SpaceX management to publicly separate the company from Mr. Musk’s personal brand, and to take steps to address what it said was a gap between SpaceX’s stated values and its current systems and company culture.

Ms. Shotwell said the letter-writing effort distracted from SpaceX’s work, including coming satellite launches and the expected first attempt to fly its massive Starship rocket system into orbit. The letter upset many staffers, Ms. Shotwell said, saying they felt pressure to “sign onto something that did not reflect their views.”

“We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism,” she said in the email.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The New York Times earlier reported on Ms. Shotwell’s email.

The company, based in Hawthorne, Calif., on Friday launched another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit, according to a SpaceX livestream.

It couldn’t be determined how many people signed the employee letter criticizing Mr. Musk. Privately held SpaceX has around 12,000 employees, Mr. Musk recently said. In addition to leading SpaceX, Mr. Musk is chief executive at

Tesla Inc.

TSLA 3.09%

and is pursuing an acquisition of

Twitter Inc.

In her email, Ms. Shotwell said SpaceX’s current leadership team is dedicated to ensuring the company has a great work environment; she criticized how those who participated in the letter used SpaceX resources.

“Blanketing thousands of people across the company with repeated unsolicited emails and asking them to sign letters and fill out unsponsored surveys during the work day is not acceptable,” she said.

The fired SpaceX employees have few avenues to challenge their terminations, legal experts said. Every U.S. state except Montana has “at will” employment laws, which means an employer can hire and fire workers for just about any reason except discriminatory ones.

The employees also can’t rely on the First Amendment since it doesn’t apply in a private employment context, said Stacy Hawkins, a professor at Rutgers Law School. The amendment only guarantees that the government can’t restrict speech, she said.

The workers may have some recourse with the National Labor Relations Act, which protects concerted activity when workers share information or views about the terms and conditions of employment, Ms. Hawkins said, but it is unclear whether the SpaceX employees’ statements would qualify under that statute.

In addition, the NLRA is restricted to nonsupervisory employees, said Kate Bischoff, a Minnesota employment lawyer and human resources consultant.

—Lauren Weber contributed to this article.

Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com