Tesla Chief Executive Office Elon Musk speaks at his company’s factory in Fremont, California.
Noah Berger | Reuters
Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, accused “the media” and “elite colleges and high schools” of being “racist” against white and Asian people, espousing his views without providing evidence on Sunday.
Musk posted his comments on Twitter, where he has nearly 130 million followers, in response to news that media organizations around the country decided to cut the comic strip “Dilbert” from syndication after its creator, Scott Adams, delivered a racist tirade in a video on his YouTube channel last week.
In the video, Adams discussed a poll conducted by right-leaning Rasmussen Reports that said 26% of Black respondents disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” The phrase referenced in their poll has been labeled a “hate slogan” by the Anti-Defamation League. In his video, Adams called Black people who rejected that phrase as a “hate group.”
Adams also said that he personally chose to live in a community where few or no Black people lived, and then advised his white viewers to “get the hell away from Black people,” saying he didn’t “want to have anything to do with them.”
Adams’ video was published during Black History Month in the U.S., which was established in 1976 by President Gerald Ford as a period during which to honor the struggles and contributions of Black Americans.
Among the news outlets that dropped “Dilbert” were the Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Washington Post and USA Today.
Musk’s track record
Brian Levin, a civil rights attorney and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University said, in response to Musk’s tweets:
“Systemic racism requires not only widespread bigotry to be held within a group but also a structural component that allows discrimination and oppression to be imposed on a minority because of an advantage of access and power. A white billionaire from South Africa who recently lost a high profile racial discrimination case may not be in the best position to offer counsel.”
As CNBC previously reported, a San Francisco federal court ruled that Tesla must pay a former worker, Owen Diaz, for damages after he endured a hostile work environment and racist abuse at the company’s factory where he previously worked as an elevator operator.
Additionally, the EEOC, a federal agency responsible for enforcing civil rights laws against workplace discrimination, has issued a cause finding against Tesla, according to a financial filing from the company last year.
Prior to the EEOC finding, the California Civil Rights Department, formerly known as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, sued Tesla after a three-year investigation, alleging widespread racist discrimination at Tesla factories and facilities across the state.
The CRD alleged that Tesla has kept Black workers in lower-level roles at the company even when they have the skills and experience to be promoted to more senior roles; assigned Black workers more demanding, dangerous and dirty work in their facilities; and retaliated against Black workers who complained formally about what they endured, including racist slurs used by managers.
Musk made his claims about “the media” and some higher educational institutions and high schools in the U.S. without presenting any evidence.
Specifically, he wrote, “The media is racist.” He then added, “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians. Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”
According to Pew Research, newsroom employees are much more likely to be white (and male) than U.S. workers overall. In film and TV, according to McKinsey research, “Black talent is underrepresented across the industry, particularly off-screen.” Less than 6% of the writers, directors and producers of U.S.-produced films are Black, McKinsey found.
According to the most recently available U.S. Census Bureau data, about 29% of non-Hispanic white people in the U.S. have attained a bachelor’s degree or higher levels of education, about 18.4% of Black people in the U.S. have attained that level of education, and about 51.3% of Asian people have done so.
Despite Asian American educational attainment, Asians are underrepresented in leadership roles in U.S. academic libraries and higher education, according to research by Mihoko Hosoi, published in the Journal of Library Administration in 2022.
Musk also replied to one Twitter account that said unarmed white people affected by police violence only get a fraction of the media attention paid to Black people injured or killed by police. Musk claimed that the media coverage is “Very disproportionate to promote a false narrative.”
According to research by Brookings Institute, “Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police when Blacks are not attacking or do not have a weapon,” and “Black teenagers are 21 times more likely than white teenagers to be killed by police.”
Hate speech on Twitter
Imran Ahmed, the CEO and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in response to Musk’s tweets, “Elon Musk seeks to portray himself as some weird, bizarro champion of anti-racism whereas in reality when he took over Twitter, he made a series of disturbing decisions to change its rules to welcome racist hate back onto the platform and, as our research has shown, to profit from the controversy and attention hate generates.”
Ahmed also called on remaining advertisers to reevaluate whether they want to spend their budgets on Twitter, given Musk’s beliefs and changes he has made to the Twitter platform.
Since leading a $44 billion leveraged buyout of Twitter late last year and appointing himself “Chief Twit,” or CEO, Musk has stirred controversy and lost money at the social media business.
Under Musk’s watch, Twitter has restored the accounts of some previously banned and divisive figures, including neo-Nazi website founder Andrew Anglin. His moves led to an unprecedented rise in hate speech on the platform, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found, and drew an immediate outcry from civil rights leaders.
Hundreds of Twitter’s top advertisers have since halted or pulled back on ad spending there. One firm estimated that Twitter’s ad revenue declined as much as 70% in December from the previous year, Reuters reported. Musk acknowledged in a November tweet that the company suffered a “massive drop in revenue” after advertisers paused spending on the social media platform.
Musk and representatives at Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The price of the second largest cryptocurrency rose as high as $4,954.81 on Sunday afternoon. It was last higher by less than 1% at $4,776.46.
Meanwhile, bitcoin at one point erased all the gains from its Friday rally, falling as low as $110,779.01, its lowest level since July 10. It was last trading lower by nearly 2% at about $112,000. The flagship cryptocurrency hit its most recent record of $124,496 on Aug. 13.
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Ether (ETH) and bitcoin (BTC)
On Friday, crypto rocketed with the broader market after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted at upcoming rate cuts and investors returned to risk-on mode. Ether surged 15% and bitcoin gained 4%.
Ether, rather than bitcoin, has been leading the crypto marker for several weeks thanks to regulatory tailwinds, a boom in interest in stablecoins and buying en masse by a new cohort of corporate ether accumulators. On Saturday, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, the ether treasury company chaired by Wall Street bull Tom Lee, bought $45 million of ether, according to crypto data provider Arkham.
That shift in leadership has helped sustain ETH, which has sustained the $4,000 level this month after unsuccessfully testing the resistance mark a handful of times since 2021.
“The buyers are finally bigger than the sellers,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “ETH ETFs are drawing steady inflows, and public companies are beginning to treat ETH as a treasury asset they can stake for yield — a stickier form of demand than retail speculation.”
“Additionally, nearly a third of supply is locked in staking, scaling solutions are mature and, with rate cuts back on the table, the cost of capital is falling,” he added. “Those forces turned $4,000 from a resistance level into a foundation for re-pricing ETH’s next chapter.”
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SpaceX is valued at around $400 billion and is critical for U.S. space access, but it wasn’t always the powerhouse that it is today.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Using money that he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk and his new company developed their first rocket, the Falcon 1, to challenge existing launch providers.
“There were actually a lot of startup aerospace companies looking to take on this market. They recognized we had a monopoly provider called United Launch Alliance. They had merged the Boeing and Lockheed rocket launch capacity to one company, and they were charging the government hundreds of millions of dollars to launch satellites,” said Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator at NASA.
In 2003, Musk paraded Falcon 1 around the streets of Washington hoping to attract the attention of government agencies and the multi-million dollar contracts that they offered. It worked, and in 2004, SpaceX secured a few million dollars from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the U.S. Air Force to further develop its rockets.
Despite the government support, the company struggled. Its first three launches of the Falcon 1 failed to reach orbit.
“NASA, and specifically the the initial commercial cargo contract, is what saved the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy,” said Chris Quilty, president and Co-CEO of Quilty Space, a space-focused research firm.
NASA awarded the $1.6 billion contract, known as Commercial Resupply Services to SpaceX in 2008, just months after the first successful flight of the Falcon 1. The contract called on SpaceX to use its new rocket, the Falcon 9, along with its Dragon capsule to ferry cargo and supplies to the International Space Station over the course of 12 missions. In 2014, SpaceX won another NASA contract worth $2.6 billion to develop and operate vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Today, SpaceX dominates large parts of the space market from launch to satellites. In 2024, SpaceX conducted a record-breaking 134 orbital launches, more than double the amount of launches done by the next most prolific launch provider, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, according to science and technology consulting firm BryceTech. These 134 launches accounted for 83% of all spacecraft launched last year. According to a July report by Bloomberg, SpaceX was valued at $400 billion.
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are the primary means by which NASA launches astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. The company’s Starlink satellites have become indispensable for providing internet access to remote areas as well as to U.S. allies during wartime. The company’s Starship rocket, though still in testing, is also key to the U.S. plan to return to the moon. SpaceX is also building a network of spy satellites for the U.S. government called Starshield as part of a $1.8 billion contract. Even competitors including Amazon and OneWeb have launched their satellites on SpaceX rockets.
“The ecosystem of space is changed by, really it’s SpaceX,” Garver said. “The lower cost of access to space is doing what we had dreamed of. It is built up a whole community of companies around the world that now have access to space.”
Sanjay Beri, chief executive officer and founder of Netskope Inc., listens during a Bloomberg West television interview in San Francisco, California.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cloud security platform Netskope will go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK,” the company said in an initial public offering filing Friday.
The Santa Clara, California-based company said annual recurring revenue grew 33% to $707 million, while revenues jumped 31% to about $328 million in the first half of the year.
But Netskope isn’t profitable yet. The company recorded a $170 million net loss during the first half of the year. That narrowed from a $207 million loss a year ago.
Netskope joins an increasing number of technology companies adding momentum to the surge in IPO activity after high inflation and interest rates effectively killed the market.
So far this year, design software firm Figma more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut, while crypto firm Circle soared 168% in its first trading day. CoreWeave has also popped since its IPO, while trading app eToro surged 29% in its May debut.
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Netskope’s offering also coincides with a busy period for cybersecurity deals.
Founded in 2012, Netskope made a name for itself in its early years in the cloud access security broker space. The company lists Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Zscaler, Broadcom and Fortinet as its major competitors.
Netskope’s biggest backers include Accel, Lightspeed Ventures and Iconiq, which recently benefited from Figma’s stellar debut.
Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are leading the offering. Netskope listed 13 other Wall Street banks as underwriters.
