Tesla to Racism Lawsuit: You’re Acting Like Elon Musk

Serving up some chutzpah.

Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP

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As Elon Musk engages in a very public and increasingly combative effort to take over Twitter—a battle that has produced endless headlines and annoying tweets—the problems at his other little venture, Tesla, have escalated. On Monday, the multi-billion dollar electric cars company blasted a lawsuit accusing Tesla of ignoring years of rampant racism at its primary factory as being merely a “quick publicity stunt.”

California’s Department of Fair and Equal Housing, the state agency suing Tesla, “conducted a bare-bones ‘investigation’ without interviewing key witnesses, requesting key documents, or ever stepping foot in the Fremont facility,” Tesla wrote in a new filing, Bloomberg reports. The company is also accusing DFEH of “abandoning its founding purpose” in order to score headlines.

As my colleague Edwin Rios reported in February, California’s lawsuit came after a lengthy, three-year investigation—and the allegations are astounding. They include Black workers getting harassed with racist slurs such as the n-word and “porch monkey.” On a daily basis, Black workers were also allegedly forced to confront racist writing left on factory walls.

Nonetheless, on Monday, Tesla went on the offensive, claiming in effect, that DFEH was acting like Tesla’s founder—a man whose career is littered with attention-seeking, headline-making, and ultimately unsubstantiated trolls.

Meanwhile, Tesla and Musk are fighting another thorny lawsuit from shareholders over Musk’s 2018 tweets about taking Tesla private. According to a court filing on Friday, a judge ruled that Musk tweeted this despite knowing this was in fact not true. 

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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