Elon Musk, Once a Tacit Backer of DEI, Now Focuses on Anti-White Bias

In the spring of 2017, two months after a Black employee sued Tesla and alleged that co-workers frequently called him the n-word with impunity, chief executive Elon Musk sent out a companywide email with the subject line “Doing the right thing.”

The note marked one of the first times that the billionaire tech icon, born and raised in privilege during South African apartheid, engaged in a public conversation about race. Avoid making offensive comments, Musk said — but don’t be overly sensitive.

“Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of an historically less represented group,” Musk wrote to thousands of employees, in a message later included in court filings in another lawsuit. But Musk added: “In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology.”

Over the next eight years, as he became the richest man in the world, Musk shifted from a Democratic-leaning critic of Donald Trump to a Republican-friendly Trump acolyte. He emerged as a hero on the far right who frequently comments on racial issues — and who wields extraordinary power overseeing the president’s cost-cutting operation, known as the U.S. DOGE Service. {snip}

An early target was the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at all federal agencies. While opposition to DEI programs has become a mainstream Republican position, Musk has articulated more radical views on race in interviews and posts on X, his social media platform.

He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.

Now, civil rights activists and government watchdogs are concerned that Musk is bringing these views on race and immigration to bear as he and his DOGE staffers scrutinize all corners of the government and execute major public policy changes. Having dispatched with DEI programs, Musk’s team is starting to purge those tasked with protecting employees’ civil rights and investigating discrimination claims.

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Musk’s comments circulate through a public address system unmatched in modern politics. With roughly 220 million followers, his X account is the platform’s most popular — with a reach that exceeds Trump’s — and it reflects a preoccupation with race, immigration and diversity. He posted about these topics an average of roughly four times a day in the four months leading up to Trump’s inauguration; about 10 percent of his posts were about those topics from the beginning of 2024 through the middle of this month, a sevenfold increase over 2021, according to a Washington Post review that used keywords to categorize them.

Musk frequently interacts with accounts that comment on racial issues and draw attention to crimes committed by Black people or immigrants. For example, Musk has interacted more than 60 times in the past year with an account named @iamyesyouareno that has about 471,000 followers. In response to a post that said, “White people aren’t allowed to have their own homelands,” Musk wrote, “I think it’s great that America is so diverse but this does seem asymmetric.” Musk also highlighted several posts that suggested non-White people “hate” White people by responding with exclamation marks or comments like “True.”

That’s a typical Musk tactic: amplifying a controversial opinion on a racially sensitive topic in a way certain to raise hackles on the left. “Something to think about,” Musk wrote recently in response to podcaster Ben Shapiro calling for Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd.

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Musk, 53, has argued it is White people who are frequently the victims of discrimination because of what he views as left-wing overreach to correct perceived racial inequities and to silence right-wing commentary. “We need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic, and anything that results in the suppression of free speech,” Musk said in a 2023 interview.

Musk frequently uses X to call attention to what he sees as anti-White racism. A Tucker Carlson podcast last year was billed on X with this takeaway: “There is systemic racism in the United States, against whites. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it. How come?” Musk reposted it, adding, “Concerning.”

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Musk was raised in South Africa during the last chapters of apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, a period he rarely discusses publicly. “I had a tough childhood,” he has said in multiple interviews. His parents divorced when he was 8, and he was bullied by classmates and verbally abused by his father, according to Musk biographies.

Still, Musk enjoyed the privileges that came with being White in Pretoria at a time when segregation was violently enforced on the impoverished Black majority.

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In a sign that the family disapproved of racial segregation, Musk and his brother attended an anti-apartheid concert, according to a biography by Walter Isaacson. Terence Beney, who knew Musk at Pretoria Boys High, remembered him attending a funeral for a Black friend who was killed in a car crash in 1987. Beney said that growing up in a country in which official censors would use nails to scratch banned records at radio stations helps explain why Musk cast himself as a “free speech absolutist” when he bought Twitter and reinstated social media accounts previously suspended for hate speech.

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Errol also served on the Pretoria City Council after defeating an Afrikaner member of the pro-apartheid National Party in 1972. Musk’s mother, Maye, is a Canadian-born model. Her father, Joshua Haldeman, moved the family from Canada to South Africa during apartheid and embraced racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to reporting by the Atlantic. He died when Musk was 2.

Musk, who left South Africa when he was 17, frequently says that slavery has been practiced all over the world for centuries by people of all races. “We are all descended from slaves,” he said in a podcast interview last year.

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By 2017, Musk was a monster Silicon Valley success story, worth an estimated $15 billion. He had led Tesla for nearly a decade and was hailed as an environmentally conscious innovator. Early in Trump’s first term, Musk criticized the president’s executive order banning travel from several majority-Muslim countries. He later resigned from an advisory board when Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.

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In 2020, the violent deaths of Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement. Musk briefly commiserated, writing “#JusticeForGeorge” on social media and demanding criminal charges against Chauvin’s colleagues present during Floyd’s arrest. A top Black Tesla executive wrote about her sorrow and fear after Floyd’s death, later adding that Musk “told me that I had his full support.”

At the time, Tesla was publishing DEI reports that highlighted “unconscious bias trainings” and recruitment on historically Black college campuses. But Murthy, who had started working as a Tesla engineer a few years earlier, said he routinely heard about and experienced racially insensitive remarks, echoing a claim made in the racial discrimination lawsuits against the company. He helped organize a protest in September 2020 in which he said five employees on the assembly line stopped working and sat mostly in silence for about three hours to honor Taylor.

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By the time the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued Tesla in 2023, a prominent index of sustainability-focused public companies had ousted the company, citing, in part, the racial discrimination claims. Musk called the index a “scam” and questioned how ExxonMobil could get a higher rating than Tesla. The index, he said, “has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

By the following year, Tesla had removed all DEI references from documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “DEI is just another word for racism,” Musk said on X. “Shame on anyone who uses it.” Musk endorsed Trump later in 2024, and his shift from tacit supporter of DEI to outspoken opponent was complete.

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