Elon Musk’s Disney meltdown is — as these things go — continuing apace. The billionaire is now claiming that the media conglomerate has “institutionalized racism” at its heart.
It’s been a pretty huge week for Musk’s rage against the Mouse House, which began last fall when Disney pulled ads from X-formerly-Twitter (alongside a host of other businesses) over its surging levels of bigotry often boosted and co-signed by its new owner.
After announcing plans to foot the legal bills for fired “Mandalorian” actor Gina Carano — dismissed from the “Star Wars” spinoff for anti-Semitic and transphobic posts online — he then suggested he might try to straight up buy Disney. Musk then took to his social network to keep trashing the entertainment giant.
In the post, the world’s richest man claimed that an “anonymous source” sent him Disney’s diversity and inclusion standards. The screenshot he shared shows a fairly boilerplate and innocuous list of guidelines stipulating that the company’s programming include more “underrepresented groups,” but per the South African tycoon’s assessment, it represents “mandatory, institutionalized racism and sexism!”
“No wonder most of their content produced over the past several years has sucked,” he added later in his Twitter thread. “Just trying to navigate the DEI minefield is going to crush the creative process!”
Aside from the obvious dogwhistles about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) somehow being more “racist” and “sexist” than actual racism and sexism, however, there’s a far more hilarious, salient point hidden in Musk’s initial purported whistleblower document — that those inclusion standards are not secret at all.
Indeed, as journalist Ed Zitron pointed out and as Futurism verified by doing an extremely cursory Google search for “Disney inclusion standards,” the document Musk posted includes the same text and color scheme as one with the ABC masthead atop it. Given that Disney has owned ABC for 28 years, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the two companies share DEI policies, and indeed, the document we got access to — again, by using Google and clicking on the first result — routes to a Disney.com subpage.
To be fair, the rest of Musk’s “DEI Gestapo” thread does include screenshots of purported Disney documents that expound on the guidelines in the initial standards page, suggesting that he did get something leaked to him.
Nevertheless, this lowercase-g goofy attempt at a flex is a perfect reminder of the monied and weaponized ignorance of the multi-billionaire in question. As for whether or not any of this noise will help the multi-hyphenate business owner purchase Disney, which as of today has a market cap of $200 billion, only time will tell — but if we were to place a wager between Musk and the company’s embattled chief executive Bob Iger, we’d put our money where the mouse is.
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