Earlier this week, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk endorsed a tweet suggesting Black college students at Traditionally Black Faculties and Universities (HBCUs) have decrease IQs and should not grow to be pilots.
“It should take an airplane crashing and killing a whole bunch of individuals for them to alter this loopy coverage of DIE,” he tweeted, deliberately mixing up the letters of the acronym for “variety, fairness, and inclusion.”
Civil rights teams had been understandably horrified on the billionaire’s racist feedback.
“The one factor anybody wants to listen to from Musk about variety within the office is an apology,” Marc Morial, president and CEO of the Nationwide City League, told NBC News, calling his statements “abhorrent and pathetic.”
In his tweets, Musk appeared to indicate that HBCU college students should not be allowed to grow to be pilots. Nonetheless, neither his assertion nor the tweet he was responding to face as much as virtually any degree of scrutiny, from made-up common IQ numbers to wrongfully correlating excessive SAT scores with excessive IQ.
Musk additionally claimed {that a} United Airways program that permits college students at three HBCUs to interview to grow to be a pilot meant that the airline had “prioritized DEI hiring” over “security,” a demonstratively false assertion that solely additional highlights his twisted worldview.
Even fellow billionaire Mark Cuban noticed by means of the racist fearmongering.
“BTW, appears like a number of layers of merit-based evaluations earlier than they’ll fly for United,” Cuban tweeted, including a hyperlink to this system.
In a schoolyard bully-esque response, a clearly incensed Musk called him “a liar” — with out providing any proof, after all.
Within the CEO’s thoughts, DEI initiatives appear to lead to mistakes just like the door plug of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet falling out and forcing an emergency touchdown — a preposterous declare with no relationship to actuality.
To be clear, Musk’s newest hurtful remarks should not come as a lot of a shock, given earlier feedback and conspiracy theories he is already endorsed.
Musk’s ventures additionally occur to have a well-documented downside with overt racism within the office, with swastikas and nooses discovered at Tesla, in response to a lawsuit filed by the US Equal Employment Alternative Fee (EEOC) final 12 months.
“Musk’s firm not solely refused to analyze complaints or take any steps to finish the abuse, it viciously retaliated towards workers who complained or opposed the abuse,” Morial instructed NBC.
It is a unhappy state of affairs, with Musk’s racist tirades rapidly changing into a typical fixture on his social media platform X. Simply over a month in the past, Musk referred to as an unhinged and antisemitic conspiracy idea “the actual truth,” resulting in an outpouring of criticism and condemnation.
His newest remarks are solely including to the pile.
“Reminder to Elon Musk: offering a house for the proliferation of hate speech and white supremacist conspiracy theories kills folks,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote in response to certainly one of Musk’s tweets. “Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion cultivates a extra inclusive society.”
“They don’t seem to be the identical,” he added. “We aren’t the identical.”
But Musk is digging in his heels. In response to NBC‘s reporting, Musk lashed out as soon as extra.
“These are brazenly racist organizations,” he tweeted in a pitiful rebuke that may probably solely stoke the flames.
Extra on Musk’s overt racism: Elon Musk Cosigns Racist Claim That Black Students Have Low IQs
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