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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has something new on social media: diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In the wake of Musk’s recent critical articles about DEI policies and racial discrimination lawsuits against Tesla, the electric carmaker overlooked any language related to minority staff and outreach to minority communities in its 10-K filing with the SEC filed on Jan. 29. Bloomberg was the first to report on those omissions.
Previously, Tesla’s annual 10-K for 2022 celebrated the obvious diversity of its workplace: “At Tesla, our people are passionate about making a difference in the world and for others. With a majority-minority workforce, empowering our workforce teams to projects that attract, develop, and retain our passionate workforce is critical to our continued success.
In the company’s 2021 10-K, it had said one of its key human capital objectives was “attracting, developing and retaining top talent while integrating diversity, equity and inclusion principles and practices into our core values.” The same sentence was present in the filing for 2020 as well.
In those two reports, the company said it had reached out to “Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions” and sponsored different employee resource groups, such as “LGBTQ at Tesla” and “Asian Pacific Islanders at Tesla.”
Those two lines were omitted from the company’s most recent 10-K filing for the 2023 fiscal year, as well as any references to DEI, a diverse company or a majority-minority workforce.
In Musk’s eyes, DEI is “as morally as any other racism and sexism,” he tweeted in December. It’s a very different view than many U. S. corporations had four years ago, when big business responded to social unrest after the homicide. of George Floyd through Minneapolis police with public commitments to DEI.
And as recently as 2020, Tesla had been publishing its own corporate DEI reports, reaffirming its commitment to the mission.
CNN has reached out to Tesla for comment, though the company is not responding to press inquiries. In its latest 10-K report, Tesla said it evaluates and promotes its workers “based on their abilities and performance” and does not tolerate “harassment. “, retaliation, violence, intimidation and discrimination of any kind on the basis of race. ” color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, disability, or veteran status.
But the Supreme Court’s elimination of affirmative action in 2023, as well as the public impeachment of Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, have turned DEI into a political firestorm and heated debate in corporate America.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who led the push to remove Gay from her position at Harvard, published a 4,000-word opus on X arguing against DEI, and quickly became one of its most vocal critics. His lengthy post was retweeted by Musk last month.
“DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on you who uses it,” Musk wrote in his post sharing Ackman’s thesis. In a later article, the billionaire doubled down, adding, “DEI, because it discriminates on the basis of race, gender, and many other factors, is not only immoral, but also illegal. »
But even before Musk’s rants, and despite the goals set out in his previous 10-K dossiers, the electric carmaker was struggling with race and fairness.
Last April, a jury ordered Tesla to pay $3 million in a racial discrimination lawsuit filed through a former worker at its Fremont, California, meeting plant. Owen Diaz, who worked as an elevator operator at the plant, said he heard racial slurs and added the N-word, at the Fremont plant, and saw racist graffiti in the bathrooms and a cartoon that was insensitive to racism.
Separately, in 2022 the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing said the agency had received “hundreds” of complaints from workers alleging racism and harassment at the Fremont factory.
But despite the high-profile tweets from some of the wealthiest men on earth, hundreds of C-suite executives in the United States said their organizations remained committed or increased diversity, equity and inclusion efforts since 2022, according to a survey published by the employment law firm Littler.
Mark Cuban, a billionaire businessman and minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, objected to Musk’s posts in a thread that protects DEI as something for corporations and their workers.
“The loss of DEI-phobic companies is my gain,” Cuban wrote. “Having a variety that is representative of your stakeholders is smart for business. “
CNN’s Catherine Thorbecke and Nicquel Terry Ellis contributed to this report.
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