Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the world’s richest person, is siding with striking editorial staff members of Insider Inc. in their fight to get a new contract with the digital media outlet.
“They should keep striking. Fight on, comrades!” Musk tweeted Wednesday in reply to a post about the Insider editorial strike.
In May 2022, Business Insider published a story citing the friend of an unnamed SpaceX flight attendant who accused Musk of exposing himself to her during a massage and “offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage.” In response, Musk called the allegations “utterly untrue” and called the individual who was interviewed by Insider a “liar.”
Since taking over Twitter in October 2022, Musk has laid off about 80% of Twitter’s employees, which have declined from 7,800 before he bought the company to about 1,500 as he has attempted to cut costs.
Meanwhile, none of Tesla’s 100,000-plus workers are unionized. In 2018, amid an organizing campaign at Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., facility by the United Auto Workers, Musk had tweeted: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union… But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” Earlier this year, a federal appeals court upheld a decision by the National Labor Relations Board that found the tweet amounted to an unlawful threat that could discourage unionizing and ordered Musk to delete it.
The Insider Union says it represents more than 250 reporters, editors, video producers, copy editors and all other members of Insider’s U.S. editorial staff. It’s an affiliate of the NewsGuild of New York (CWA Local 31003).
As of June 2, the members of the Insider Union members have been on “an indefinite ULP [unfair labor practice] strike.” According to the union, in late 2022, “Insider management illegally changed our healthcare coverage without bargaining with the union.” After filing a ULP charge, “and despite the NLRB finding merit in our charge, Insider refuses to remedy the situation. Management also continues to stall on agreeing to our fair wage demands.”
“Until Insider management remedies the ULP and agrees to our demands on healthcare and pay, we won’t write, edit, or produce any content. Insider has earned millions of dollars off of our work — without us, the newsroom can’t function,” the Insider Union says in a statement on its site.
Founded in 2007 as Business Insider by CEO Henry Blodget, the company was acquired in 2015 by Axel Springer, one of Europe’s largest digital publishing and media conglomerates, for $343 million.
The New York Post this week reported that Insider editor in chief Nicholas Carlson “was seen frantically removing the flyers from lampposts in the Windsor Terrace section of Brooklyn” last Friday “and stuffing them into the basket of a Citi Bike.”
In a statement to the post, a rep for Insider Inc. said: “Of course, it’s been challenging for our newsroom to keep up the pace as half our team isn’t working. Thankfully, the other half is doing a spectacular job, so overall we’re fine. We miss those who are on strike, and hope to come to an agreement soon with the union.”
In December 2022, Musk briefly suspended the Twitter account of several journalists over claims they had “doxxed” him. That included Insider columnist Linette Lopez, who has reported on Musk and his companies for years. Lopez told the AP that shortly prior to her suspension she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included an email address for Musk from 2018 but which Lopez said was not current because “he changes his email every few weeks.”