As billionaire battles go, it isn’t quite the highly anticipated but sadly scratched pay-per-view MMA fight between Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — but it can get just as punchy as billionaires Mark Cuban and Musk trade jabs on the great DEI debate.
Oversimplifying, it’s like this: Musk thinks DEI — the practice of mandated diversity, equity and inclusion — will hollow out society and destroy American industry’s competitive edge. Cuban, on the other hand, believes that so-called “woke” companies that use DEI (as one among many criteria) to help evaluate hiring decisions and broaden the workforce directly benefit from the practice.
It’s complicated, and when the dialogue doesn’t descend into name-calling, the thoughtful consideration of what DEI means in practice and theory by these two titans of capitalism can be instructive and enlightening.
(NOTE: the comments, where people tend to demonstrate their unflappable ability to see issues just as they had before, no matter the quality of the arguments advanced by the billionaires, tend to be less helpful.)
The latest sortie in this billionaire offshoot of a much broader culture war is Cuban’s pointing out that Tesla, which Musk runs, is perhaps not as anti-DEI as followers of Musk might presume.
Implicit in Cuban’s point is that the diverse workforce the EV giant unsubtly boasts about in its public relations materials has contributed to Tesla’s outsize success — not least for Tesla shareholders. (Cuban says he himself is a happy customer with “multiple Teslas.”)
As you can see from @tesla's 2022 Impact Statement, they are proudly a Majority Minority company that supports DEI.
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 20, 2024
Which makes @elonmusk qualified to answer an important question:
"With 2/3 of your company being from under represented groups , can you share the Diversity… pic.twitter.com/XkeuqLrJU7
Cuban writes on X:
As you can see from @tesla‘s 2022 Impact Statement, they are proudly a Majority Minority company that supports DEI. Which makes @elonmusk qualified to answer an important question: “With 2/3 of your company being from under represented groups, can you share the Diversity programs you have in place to help you recruit such a diverse work force?
As of 2022, 11% of Tesla workers identified as Black or African American, 21% Asian, and 28% Latino according to the company’s Impact Statement, which asserts Tesla is:
“proud to be a majority-minority company with a large representation of employees from communities that have long struggled to break through the historic roadblocks to equal opportunity in the U.S.”
One response in the comments asserts that Tesla is forced into this diversity because it is a public company. The user posts a photo of Musk’s crew at SpaceX, privately held, which appears to show a less diverse workforce (see below).
It’s not clear if the user supports a questionable idea that SpaceX is more successful than Tesla, or if the point is only that — less restricted by DEI pressures — all Musk’s companies would look more like this.
It's because its a public traded company and being part of investment portfolios like black rock were forced to swallow Space X is privately held and the hiring is solely merit based pic.twitter.com/6qAmYup0yn
— AudioWorkshop1 (@w4thx_) January 21, 2024
Musk hasn’t said anything of the sort, however, and has recognized diversity’s positive impact in cases where it is not the priority, once tweeting: “I do think that if merit for a given job is roughly the same, then the tiebreaker should be diversity (of all kinds).”
I do think that if merit for a given job is roughly the same, then the tiebreaker should be diversity (of all kinds)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2024
