Workers assemble cars on the line at Tesla’s factory in Fremont. David Butow (Photo by David Butow/Corbis via Getty Images)
David Butow | Corbis News | Getty Images
Electric vehicle maker Tesla has settled a racist discrimination lawsuit in which a federal jury previously awarded $3.2 million in damages to Owen Diaz, a Black man who worked as an elevator operator at its Fremont, California factory in 2015.
Attorney Lawrence Organ, with the California Civil Rights Law Group, who represented Diaz told CNBC via e-mail: “The parties have reached an amicable resolution of their disputes. The terms of the settlement are confidential and we will not have additional comment.”
The same firm is representing current and former Tesla employees in a proposed class action lawsuit, Marcus Vaughn v. Tesla Inc., alleging that the racist discrimination and harassment of Black workers has continued at the automaker. Diaz is not part of that litigation.
Organ told CNBC by phone on Friday, “It took immense courage for Owen Diaz to stand up to a company the size of Tesla. Civil rights laws only work if people are willing to take those kinds of risks. Even though the litigation chapter of his life is over, there’s still a lot of work to do for Tesla.”
He said, “When I started this case, I suggested that the conduct would stop if Elon Musk would make a statement and a commitment to his employees that this is not tolerated. We haven’t heard that after seven years of litigation, a nine-figure verdict then a seven-figure verdict. Why isn’t he stopping this conduct? That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. Tesla is supposed to be the factory of the future. But this conduct is from the Jim Crow past.”
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has also sued Tesla, accusing the automaker of violating “federal law by tolerating widespread and ongoing racial harassment of its Black employees and by subjecting some of these workers to retaliation for opposing the harassment.”
Tesla has called the EECO’s allegations “a false narrative that ignores Tesla’s track record of equal employment opportunity.”
Diaz’s case
In 2023, as CNBC previously reported, Diaz testified in a San Francisco federal court that his colleagues at Tesla regularly used racist epithets to denigrate him and other Black workers, made him feel physically unsafe at the factory, told him to “go back to Africa” and left racist graffiti in restrooms.
Diaz’s Tesla colleagues also left a racist drawing in his workspace, he said. The drawing was a rudimentary reference to Inki the Caveman, a 1950s-era cartoon whose main character is a Black boy portrayed with large lips, wearing a loincloth, earrings, and a bone through his hair.
During his trials, Diaz recounted that he had encouraged his son to work at Tesla, but would later regret the referral because his son was also exposed to a racially hostile workplace.
In his first trial, a jury awarded Diaz a much larger verdict, including punitive damages, of $137 million after he and his attorneys persuaded the jury that he had endured serious racist discrimination and the company failed to take all reasonable steps to end and prevent that and further civil rights violations.
Diaz and Tesla sought a retrial to decide damages after Judge William H. Orrick reduced the jury’s awarded amount to $15 million. Diaz once again prevailed, securing the $3.2 million verdict.
Elon Musk on X
The settlement with Diaz comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk faces widespread criticism for his handling of hate speech on X, formerly Twitter, which he owns and runs as CTO.
As NBC News recently reported, Musk has shared unverified claims of cannibalism in Haiti this month on X, and shared posts smearing Haitian migrants as likely cannibals.
Progressive news organization MotherJones also reported that “the tech billionaire has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform,” and “spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology.”
Tesla, which lacks a traditional public relations office in North America, did not respond to a request for comment.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.