A rather transparent hit piece on the eve of the shareholder vote.
This type of behavior can be a liability, yes. It seems Musk is attracted to highly intelligent and capable women, and the work he does is in need of as many of them as it can get, so engaging with them is pretty likely to cause conflicts with company goals.
These are people's personal lives. We don't know what went on. What is acceptable? Whatever the participants find acceptable. It seems to me though from the article that none of the women being discussed here made a thing of it themselves, this seems like friends of theirs sending text messages to a newspaper. The only one of these stories actually involving the person in question is the flight attendant one, and while I can believe that it happened, I don't buy for a second that spacex cut her hours back over it. To me, this all looks like a nothing burger that some editor thought would be a juicy story, or that someone paid to have published. "Musk dates some women, they have relationship problems." "Billionaire propositions woman for a financially rewarding sexual arrangement." Big deal.
CNN CEO: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2022/02/02/j...
NBCUniversal CEO: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/media/jeff-shell-sexual-haras...
And so on… has Musk been confirmed to meet this level of misbehavior? For some of the above examples the answer is yes, for others no. But where there’s smoke there’s fire. It seems to me like you’re trying to move the Overton window on what is deemed acceptable CEO behavior.
I only have the headline to go from, since it's behind a paywall, but headlines like this are often an indicator that the article will also be designed around a suggestive narrative and 'fitting' anecdotes from a partial perspective.
I don't care one way or the other about Musk, and without the context of a pending shareholder vote the article just seems like the WSJ equivalent of a celebrity tabloid article that's designed to catch the attention of people who don't like the guy.
It could be either, or neither.. but it's a good practice to think about the presentation and context of information you consume, and a shareholder vote is relevant to that.