Normally I'd agree, but his father made his fortune from emerald mining in apartheid South Africa. Elon went to an all-white prep school that explicitly didn't allow black students. There's a pretty high chance that Elon was raised in a household that may not have been amazing on the whole racism front.
Looks like his fathers background is actually hard to pin down. A biographer of Musk believes his father made most of his wealth from his engineering business.
> Elon was born on June 28, 1971, to Errol and his wife Maye Musk when they were both in their 20s. This is important because the parents divorced in 1979, nine years after getting married, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the emerald mine in question came into the picture.
> The family owned one of the biggest houses in Pretoria thanks to the success of Errol’s engineering business,” a business that included “large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base.” Elon even admitted his father is “brilliant at engineering” despite being an overall “terrible human being.”
Judging people by skin color, not okay, we both agree.
But judging people by their ancestors seems to be the same kind of wrongdoing to me. Both are pretty arbitrary criteria that the target has no control over.
The information that Elon 'might' have a racist upbringing is not really relevant. Whats relevant is whether self-responsible Elon is doing (directly or indirectly) harm to others based on skin color or race or anything like that.
It's remarkable how all the replies to my message here completely ignore the comments in the articles made by actual Tesla employees who've been victims of racism.
People can’t escape their ideologies. This website is as tribal as anywhere else (actually, honestly worse than the median). Accepting that Tesla fosters and promotes a racist work environment is unthinkable for ideologues of a certain stripe.
To me, it doesn't seem likely (from the evidence I've seen) that Elon has created a culture of racism at Tesla such that it led to some blue-collar auto workers making racist jokes and comments to each other in the factory.
I am sure that happened, and it is awful, and Tesla should answer for it in court and through the proper channels. But to some degree, this seems like the type of thing that (unfortunately) can happen in an environment like that. It doesn't seem like there is much indication that is a part of Tesla at a high level or happening in Elon's other companies.
(Also all 3 of those articles refer to the same lawsuit.)
I've not heard Musk being accused of being personally racist - that was more one contractor used racist language in the presence of some other contractor stuff.
I'm sure this is all 100% true and in no way backlash for Musk's decision to shift operations away from California and very loud criticism of CA's politicians/bureaucrats.
He lost in court, multiple times. And he'll probably continue to lose.
It's not that people in the government have a vendetta against him. He's just petulant and thinks himself above the law. So, while I'm sure it's enjoyable to to knock him down a peg, he's doing it to himself allowing blatantly illegal shit to happen in his companies.
"Black Tesla employees describe a culture of racism: ‘I was at my breaking point’ " https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-25/black-tesl...
"California sues Tesla, alleging rampant racism at factory" https://www.npr.org/2022/02/15/1080884899/california-sues-te...
"Black workers accused Tesla of racism for years. Now California is stepping in" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/tesla-cal...