Elon Musk’s war against diversity hiring threatens to once again land him in hot water with advertisers.
The self-described “chief troll officer” of ad-dependent social media platform X tempted fate on Wednesday after agreeing with a post that suggested graduates from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) suffer from lower intelligence quotients and therefore present a statistically higher risk to life if hired to fly a passenger jet.
“It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” he wrote, using his preferred acronym for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. “People will die due to DEI.”
Aviation safety has become a hot-button issue ever since part of the passenger cabin of a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew out at 16,000 feet and nearly resulted in the first fatal accident in U.S. skies since 2009.
It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2024
Musk’s comments come amid a broader culture war debate over meritocracy and diversity ahead of what will likely be an emotionally charged election year.
The last time Musk interacted with bigoted social media users on his platform, he supported the theory that Jews are deliberately trying to marginalize America’s majority white population in what’s known as the Great Replacement Theory.
He soon came to regret it after the endorsement helped spark a flurry of advertisers pulling their spending from the platform.
One of his co-investors who helped provide capital for his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter also appeared to regret the impact his remarks had on its business interests. Mutual fund provider Fidelity marked down the value of its stake in X by a further 19% in November.
Musk later called the comment the dumbest thing he has ever tweeted and decided his latest anti-Semitic controversy demanded no less than a personal trip to Israel to show his contrition and support for the Jewish community.
While Musk acknowledged November’s subsequent advertiser boycott threatened to bankrupt X, the fallout for Tesla is less obvious to spot.
The carmaker did deliver a record fourth quarter in terms of vehicle sales, for example.
Investors will however have to wait until earnings are published on Jan. 24 to see whether this increase came at the cost of more rebates that sapped profit margins.
Most Tesla fans are reluctant to distance themselves from Musk while many, such as Tesla influencer Farzad Mesbahi, have quickly pivoted to support his campaign against the “woke mind virus.”
‘Your family’s lives are at stake’
Musk’s latest apparent endorsement of bigotry came in response to a post by a user with the X handle @eyeslasho. The user counts 122,000 followers, including well-known investors such as Bill Ackman and Marc Andreessen.
The post suggested United Airlines’ pilot development program, known as Aviate Academy, put Americans in danger by recruiting from HBCUs, because their graduates are purportedly not as intelligent as the population as a whole.
In 2021, United CEO Scott Kirby set out a goal of training 5,000 pilots over the decade, of which at least half would either be women or people of color. The target is roughly representative of the U.S. demographic population.
In their post, @eyelasho said that the average IQ of graduates from two United Airline HBCU “partners,” based on the average SATs at those schools, was about 85 to 90, compared to 115 to 130 for major airline pilots.
“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?” Musk asked, adding later: “Merit should be the only reason for hiring, especially where your family’s lives are at stake.”
Fortune has reached out to United for comment.
Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening. https://t.co/FcTyzZD0uW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 10, 2024
Academic researchers have long held, however, that SAT scores are closely tied to the socioeconomic status of the test-takers and especially correlate to race and the different educations people receive in America’s largely segregated schools.
“[D]ata show that socioeconomic background factors—family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity—account for a large and growing share of the variance in students’ SAT scores over the past twenty years. More than a third of the variance in SAT scores can now be predicted by factors known at students’ birth, up from a quarter of the variance in 1994. Of those factors, moreover, race has become the strongest predictor,” Saul Geiser, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, wrote in a 2015 paper.
