Another month, another endorsement of a deeply racist conspiracy theory by multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk.
Late last year, Musk threw a massive tantrum on stage following outrage at his calling an unhinged and antisemitic conspiracy theory “the actual truth.”
Now, Musk has similarly endorsed a tweet suggesting Black students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and shouldn’t become pilots.
“It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” he tweeted, in response to a post arguing that IQ averages were lower at HBCUs, and lower than the “average IQ of US Air Force pilots.”
DIE was a likely intentionally rearranged acronym of DEI, which stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
The original post went as far as to imply that students at HBCUs had IQs that put them near “the threshold for what is considered ‘borderline intellectual impairment.'”
Musk was referring to a United Airlines program that allows students at three HBCUs to interview to become a pilot, which was established in 2021.
“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?” he tweeted in a separate post, despite the existence of extremely strict requirements for applicants.
Needless to say, he’s incorrect on almost every conceivable level. For starters, the basic concept of IQ representing cognitive ability has long been debunked. The original tweet also appears to imply that a high SAT score is correlated to a high IQ, which is also wrong.
As Gizmodo points out, the original tweet even got the HBCUs’ test scores wrong as well, with SAT scores at all three colleges in reality falling around the national average. The data also shows that HBCU graduates generally have strong financial and professional outcomes, even though HBCUs are often under-funded compared to other educational institutions.
That’s not to mention the fact that SATs have been shown to reflect racial inequity in the US.
“The whole conversation is obviously racist on its face,” Akil Bello, Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at FairTest, told Gizmodo. “It specifically insults the intelligence of entire universities, picking and choosing statistics and ignoring facts to make the basic argument that if you’re Black, you’re unqualified.”
The news comes after Musk spent hours on his social media echo chamber arguing that immigrants shouldn’t be allowed into the country and spreading misleading conspiracy theories about the government booting people out of their homes to make space for “illegals.”
The billionaire’s embarrassing and disappointing social commentary has been going on for quite some time now. Especially following his disastrous acquisition of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Musk has let loose, spreading racist conspiracy theories and disinformation to his millions of followers.
Advertisers on the platform have clearly been rattled by his racist outpouring as well, leaving the company with a glaring ad revenue hole.
And who can blame them? It’s one thing to advertise on a platform that allows your ads to appear next to hateful posts. It’s another when the owner of said platform is the author of those posts.
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