Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, attends the inauguration of a new hub in France dedicated to the artificial intelligence sector, at the Google France headquarters in Paris, France, on Feb. 15, 2024.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
After Google scrapped its diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, hiring aspirations in February, CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the matter with his employees at a company all-hands meeting.
“We believe in building a representative workforce,” Pichai said, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity, and we’ll continue to do that.”
“At the same time, as a company we will always have to comply with local laws,” Pichai added.
Among the most notable changes by Google thus far was with Melonie Parker, the company’s chief diversity officer. As of February, her title has been changed to vice president of Googler engagement.
Google’s approach to DEI is emblematic of changes that companies across the U.S. are making to their DEI programs in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election and initial actions in his return to the White House.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color – demographics that have historically been overlooked.
While DEI started as an umbrella acronym to even the playing field, it’s become a loaded term.
In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard University’s affirmative action admission policies – a decision that had implications for how corporations hire. In one of his first acts of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January to end the government’s DEI programs and put federal officials overseeing those initiatives on leave.
The order directs “all departments and agencies to take strong action to end private sector DEI discrimination, including civil compliance investigations.” The administration has targeted nearly 50 companies that it’s deemed to be in violation of its anti-DEI rules, Bloomberg reported in February.
Among the first of those targets is the Walt Disney Company. The Federal Communications Commission informed the company on Friday that it will begin an investigation into the DEI efforts at the media giant.
Trump has shown he’s willing to fault DEI policies for human tragedy.
Following a midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and a Black Hawk military helicopter above Washington in January, Trump blasted the Biden administration’s DEI policies for the crash without citing any evidence. Trump claimed DEI “could have been” to blame for the deadliest plane crash in the U.S. since 2001.
“When you have the president blaming DEI for a plane crash, I think it makes sense that companies don’t want to be out there no matter how they define it internally,” Emerson said.
Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, companies are not necessarily ending their efforts. They’re rebranding them. Many companies are continuing DEI work but using different language or rolling it under less charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”
Paradigm’s CEO Joelle Emerson is an advocate for diversity and inclusion.
Source: Paradigm
DEI by any other name
Joelle Emerson has worked since 2014 as a consultant for several hundred clients on workplace performance as well as diversity and inclusion strategies, but last year, she changed the language used to describe her digital platform Paradigm.
Whereas before Paradigm marketed itself as helping clients “harness the power of diversity and inclusion to create a culture where everyone can do their best work and thrive,” the company’s website now states that its solutions “create an inclusive, high-performance culture where everyone can do their best work and thrive.”
Paradigm began using DEI in 2020 after the term proliferated in the corporate response to protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
“We started using that a lot on our websites so that companies searching for ‘DEI’ could find us,” Emerson told CNBC. “Pre-election, as we were seeing a lot of the backlash, we reduced our use of the acronym because I didn’t think it would be the best description of what we do.”
Devika Brij, who does similar work through her Brij The Gap consulting firm, detailed her efforts to distinguish her work in a newsletter sent out in February titled “Tailored Career and Leadership Development Isn’t DEI.” For companies like Brij’s, the re-branding is critical to the future of their business – some of Brij’s clients have slashed their DEI budgets by as much as 90% since 2023, she said at the time.
It’s not just consulting firms that are rebranding DEI.
JPMorgan in March announced that it will replace “equity” with “opportunity” in a rebrand of its DEI program. Walmart in November said it was shifting from DEI to saying “Walmart for everyone.” Among Fortune 100 companies, there was a 22% decrease in the use of terms like “DEI” and “diversity” and a 59% increase in terms like “belonging” between 2023 and 2024, according to Paradigm.
Emerson said 2023 marked the turning point for DEI in Silicon Valley.
That’s when Google began getting rid of staffers who were in charge of recruiting people from underrepresented groups, CNBC reported. The company also let go of DEI leaders under Parker.
Amazon also reorganized its DEI group in 2023 and brought global teams under one umbrella named “Inclusive Experiences & Technology.” The company renamed the group to better represent the nature of the work, a company spokesperson told CNBC, adding that Amazon remains committed to building a diverse and inclusive company.
As part of that overhaul, Amazon’s Candi Castleberry changed her vice president title from “VP of Global Diversity Equity and Inclusion” to “VP of Inclusive Experiences & Technology.”
Tech’s DEI rollback has accelerated in 2025.
Google, which has cloud-computing contracts with federal agencies, announced in February that it would retire its aspirational hiring targets following Trump’s executive orders. Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.
“Our values are enduring, but we have to comply with legal directions depending on how they evolve,” Pichai told staffers at the February all-hands meeting.
He and Parker were answering a question from staffers about how the company’s DEI programs would be impacted given Trump’s recent executive orders.
“As a federal contractor, we have been reviewing all our programs, all our initiatives,” Parker said. “With regards to training, we’re going to deprecate, or stop or sunset, a number of our training programs that are focused on DEI.”
A spokesperson for Google did not clarify which of the company’s DEI programs have been cut.
Pichai went on to assure workers that Google would continue to support its employee resource groups. Those are employee-led networks within the company that focus on specific demographic or affinity groups, such as “Women@Google” and “Black Googler Network.”
Those comments, however, came before the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission published guidance in March that listed ERGs as a potential violation of Trump’s executive order if they are exclusionary. Google’s ERGs are open to all employees and do not exclude any protected groups, the company spokesperson told CNBC.
“Based on the current legal climate, we’re reviewing our DEI programs and making changes where needed,” the Google spokesperson said in a statement.
Melonie Parker speaks on stage during The 37th Annual Hispanic Heritage Awards at The Kennedy Center on Sept. 5, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Paul Morigi | Getty Images
The sensitivity of the term DEI came to the forefront earlier this month at Austin’s annual South by Southwest conference. There, Google and Oracle had been slated to participate in a panel, originally titled “Successful Workplaces: Balancing Growth and Well-Being.”
“Attendees will leave with actionable insights to align business success with a thriving workplace culture,” an early description of the panel noted.
Oracle dropped out from the panel in February. That month, panel organizers informed participating companies that they were considering changing the focus of the conversation to the state of DEI in the workplace.
“The fact that the Trump administration took such an aggressive approach to DEI just made obvious, in our view, how timely this discussion was,” said panel organizer Luis Gramajo, founder of nonprofit Sunday Afternoon Foundation, which helped organize that particular SXSW panel.
The Google panelist dropped out in March after the panel’s name was officially changed to “Post-DEI Workplace: Tech Companies Managing Through Turmoil.”
“We went through I don’t know how many prep calls, we changed the title of this eight plus times, we lost people who were afraid to be on this panel,” said Chelsea Toler, one of the SXSW panelists and a co-founder at Logictry, an Austin startup.
Google was not informed of the change until late February, the company spokesperson told CNBC, adding that the panel’s new topic was outside of the employee’s role and experience.
“We had a couple different panelists back out because this conversation, which is so important, has become kind of nuclear at this point, which is wild,” said Diana Ransom, Inc. Magazine executive editor and the panel’s moderator, at the event.
Gramajo said he doesn’t begrudge any of the panelists or companies that pulled out of the panel.
“They are, as we all are, navigating an incredibly complex and uncertain time, where the rules are not clear,” he said.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy looks on during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, U.S., February 26, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Amazon has also pulled back on DEI.
The company told staffers in December that it was halting some of its DEI programs as part of a broader review of those initiatives. It also eliminated references to inclusion and diversity in its annual report while altering a website to remove sections titled “Equity for Black people” and “LGBTQ+ rights.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy characterized the DEI eliminations as being part of Amazon’s ongoing cost-cutting efforts.
“If you look at us, kind of like a lot of other companies, particularly after George Floyd, and particularly because we’re so decentralized, we had a lot of programs in this area,” Jassy told staffers earlier this month, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “We had about 300 programs.”
Amazon began evaluating its DEI programs “a couple years ago,” Jassy said.
“We realized there were several of them where we weren’t getting enough value out of them for us to be investing in that way and those programs, we streamlined those,” Jassy said. “And in the programs where we were having a real impact, we doubled down.”
It’s unclear which programs Amazon cut and which it has expanded.
Continuing the work
“The acronym of DEI is completely unhelpful,” said Aubrey Blanche-Serrallano, vice president of equitable operations at Culture Amp, a human resources platform. “Diversity is incredibly valuable and important, but that specific acronym obscures a lot of what we’re talking about.”
For all the backlash toward DEI in Washington, recent studies show that this type of work remains popular among workers and companies.
Pew Research in 2023 found that 86% of workers say they have a neutral-to-favorable opinion about increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Paradigm, meanwhile, published a study last year which found that 73% of companies included diversity, equity and inclusion in their company values, on par with 2023.
“The feeling of the moment doesn’t match a lot of the data I’m looking at,” Blanche-Sarellano said.
The experts that spoke with CNBC said they’ve yet to lose any clients as a result of the DEI backlash. To the contrary, they said they are optimistic that organizations will be forced to be more thoughtful about their plans and do away with “performative” aspects of DEI that did little to move the needle.
Experts said one key example of performative actions were when companies signaled support for social media movements, like 2020’s Blackout Tuesday, without any meaningful action to follow. Another example were companies that added chief diversity officers to their ranks without giving them formalized decision-making power or budgets.
Among the changes happening now are companies shifting away from diversity reports, which tracked hiring based on different genders and ethnicities, and focusing instead on tracking the rates at which promotions and attrition happen, Emerson said.
Companies are also changing how they have candidates apply for programs, Emerson said. With internships designed for specific ethnicities, for example, candidates might no longer simply check whether they are black or Hispanic but instead write an essay about their background, she said.
Some experts are helping their clients calculate how much risk they may face by continuing DEI work under different names.
“There’s a lot of legal gray area right now,” Blanche-Sarellano said. “At the end of the day, they want to focus on investing in their employees, not spend all their resources on a lawsuit.”
Y-Vonne Hutchinson, chief executive officer of ReadySet, speaks during the Bloomberg Breakaway CEO Summit in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, June 18, 2019.
Mark Kauzlarich | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Companies have to weigh the risk of regulatory compliance and the potential for public backlash against the cost of doubling down on DEI, said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a firm that helps clients “build adaptable organizations.”
“A lot of these companies have more diverse consumers,” she said. “They still have to think about what is going to make them money and viable businesses have to think about a global audience.”
ReadySet, for example, has what it calls a “DEI Risk Assessment Tool” which measures DEI risks across five dimensions: Legal and compliance, reputational, financial, cultural and workforce and operational risks.
By changing the terminology that is used, companies can prevent their work from being susceptible to misunderstanding, said Emerson, adding that her firm Paradigm is advising companies to be more specific about what they want to achieve.
“We should be more precise in the language we use,” she said.
But while some experts are encouraging companies to change their terminologies, others are advising those in the field to continue touting DEI.
That was the case at the Post-DEI panel at SXSW. The panelists challenged the notion that they should stop using it.
“DEI means everybody has a fair and equitable opportunity to succeed,” said Fran Harris, an entrepreneur based in Austin. “We have to remind people what DEI is – it is the work. It’s not just an acronym. It’s the work of creating equal opportunities, period.”
Panelists encouraged attendees to not succumb to fear.
“In this country, when we stop using our voice because we’re scared, we’ve lost,” Logictry’s Toler said.
A jury in Miami has determined that Tesla should be held partly liable for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, and must compensate the family of the deceased and an injured survivor a portion of $329 million in damages.
Tesla’s payout is based on $129 million in compensatory damages, and $200 million in punitive damages against the company.
The jury determined Tesla should be held 33% responsible for the fatal crash. That means the automaker would be responsible for about $42.5 million in compensatory damages. In cases like these, punitive damages are typically capped at three times compensatory damages.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys told CNBC on Friday that because punitive damages were only assessed against Tesla, they expect the automaker to pay the full $200 million, bringing total payments to around $242.5 million.
Tesla said it plans to appeal the decision.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs had asked the jury to award damages based on $345 million in total damages. The trial in the Southern District of Florida started on July 14.
The suit centered around who shouldered the blame for the deadly crash in Key Largo, Florida. A Tesla owner named George McGee was driving his Model S electric sedan while using the company’s Enhanced Autopilot, a partially automated driving system.
While driving, McGee dropped his mobile phone that he was using and scrambled to pick it up. He said during the trial that he believed Enhanced Autopilot would brake if an obstacle was in the way. His Model S accelerated through an intersection at just over 60 miles per hour, hitting a nearby empty parked car and its owners, who were standing on the other side of their vehicle.
Naibel Benavides, who was 22, died on the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Her body was discovered about 75 feet away from the point of impact. Her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, survived but suffered multiple broken bones, a traumatic brain injury and psychological effects.
“Tesla designed Autopilot only for controlled access highways yet deliberately chose not to restrict drivers from using it elsewhere, alongside Elon Musk telling the world Autopilot drove better than humans,” Brett Schreiber, counsel for the plaintiffs, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “Tesla’s lies turned our roads into test tracks for their fundamentally flawed technology, putting everyday Americans like Naibel Benavides and Dillon Angulo in harm’s way.”
Following the verdict, the plaintiffs’ families hugged each other and their lawyers, and Angulo was “visibly emotional” as he embraced his mother, according to NBC.
Here is Tesla’s response to CNBC:
“Today’s verdict is wrong and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology. We plan to appeal given the substantial errors of law and irregularities at trial.
Even though this jury found that the driver was overwhelmingly responsible for this tragic accident in 2019, the evidence has always shown that this driver was solely at fault because he was speeding, with his foot on the accelerator – which overrode Autopilot – as he rummaged for his dropped phone without his eyes on the road. To be clear, no car in 2019, and none today, would have prevented this crash.
This was never about Autopilot; it was a fiction concocted by plaintiffs’ lawyers blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility.”
The verdict comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that his company can pivot into a leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.
Tesla shares dipped 1.8% on Friday and are now down 25% for the year, the biggest drop among tech’s megacap companies.
The verdict could set a precedent for Autopilot-related suits against Tesla. About a dozen active cases are underway focused on similar claims involving incidents where Autopilot or Tesla’s FSD— Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — had been in use just before a fatal or injurious crash.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiated a probe in 2021 into possible safety defects in Tesla’s Autopilot systems. During the course of that investigation, Tesla made changes, including a number of over-the-air software updates.
The agency then opened a second probe, which is ongoing, evaluating whether Tesla’s “recall remedy” to resolve issues with the behavior of its Autopilot, especially around stationary first responder vehicles, had been effective.
The NHTSA has also warned Tesla that its social media posts may mislead drivers into thinking its cars are capable of functioning as robotaxis, even though owners manuals say the cars require hands-on steering and a driver attentive to steering and braking at all times.
A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions, TeslaDeaths.com, has reported at least 58 deaths resulting from incidents where Tesla drivers had Autopilot engaged just before impact.
A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025.
Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.
The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.
The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.
Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.
Stock Chart IconStock chart icon
Bitcoin falls below $115,000
The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.
“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”
Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.
Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.
Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.
The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.
The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.
In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.
“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.
Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids.
The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”
Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.
“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.
One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.
Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.