Earlier this week, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk endorsed a tweet suggesting Black students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and shouldn’t become pilots.
“It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” he tweeted, intentionally mixing up the letters of the acronym for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Civil rights groups were understandably horrified at the billionaire’s racist comments.
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“The only thing anyone needs to hear from Musk about diversity in the workplace is an apology,” Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, told NBC News, calling his statements “abhorrent and pathetic.”
In his tweets, Musk appeared to imply that HBCU students shouldn’t be allowed to become pilots. However, neither his statement nor the tweet he was responding to stand up to virtually any degree of scrutiny, from made-up average IQ numbers to wrongfully correlating high SAT scores with high IQ.
Musk also claimed that a United Airlines program that allows students at three HBCUs to interview to become a pilot meant that the airline had “prioritized DEI hiring” over “safety,” a demonstratively false statement that only further highlights his twisted worldview.
Even fellow billionaire Mark Cuban saw through the racist fearmongering.
“BTW, looks like multiple layers of merit-based evaluations before they can fly for United,” Cuban tweeted, adding a link to the program.
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In a schoolyard bully-esque response, a clearly incensed Musk called him “a liar” — without offering any evidence, of course.
In the CEO’s mind, DEI initiatives seem to lead to mistakes like the door plug of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet falling out and forcing an emergency landing — a preposterous claim with no relationship to reality.
To be clear, Musk’s latest hurtful remarks shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given previous comments and conspiracy theories he’s already endorsed.
Musk’s ventures also happen to have a well-documented problem with overt racism in the workplace, with swastikas and nooses found at Tesla, according to a lawsuit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) last year.
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“Musk’s company not only refused to investigate complaints or take any steps to end the abuse, it viciously retaliated against employees who complained or opposed the abuse,” Morial told NBC.
It’s a sad state of affairs, with Musk’s racist tirades quickly becoming a common fixture on his social media platform X. Just over a month ago, Musk called an unhinged and antisemitic conspiracy theory “the actual truth,” leading to an outpouring of criticism and condemnation.
His latest remarks are only adding to the pile.
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“Reminder to Elon Musk: providing a home for the proliferation of hate speech and white supremacist conspiracy theories kills people,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote in response to one of Musk’s tweets. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion cultivates a more inclusive society.”
“They are not the same,” he added. “We are not the same.”
Yet Musk is digging in his heels. In response to NBC‘s reporting, Musk lashed out once more.
“Those are openly racist organizations,” he tweeted in a pitiful rebuke that will likely only stoke the flames.
