Picture by Jim Dyson/Redferns
Elon Musk seems to have been caught in a significant lie as he tried to benefit from the exact same variety, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) practices that he sought to destroy throughout his temporary tenure within the Trump administration.
As MuskWatch reveals, the billionaire’s mind chip firm, Neuralink, claimed in a Small Business Administration filing this previous April that it was a “small deprived enterprise,” a designation meant to assist in giving a leg as much as corporations run by racial and ethnic minorities.
In different phrases, Musk filed for a DEI designation — and he did so whereas he and president Donald Trump had been actively gutting such protections throughout the federal authorities.
That designation is, as MuskWatch notes, solely legally allowed below SBA and federal regulations to be claimed by corporations majority owned by socially or economically “deprived people.” It feels fairly secure to say that the world’s richest man, who can also be white, doesn’t fall into that class.
Only a month after that April 24 submitting, Neuralink accomplished a fundraising spherical that introduced its valuation as much as a whopping $9 billion dollars — a sum greater than the gross home product, per World Bank data, of a number of small international locations put collectively.
In a statement to CNBC, which additionally reported on the submitting, a Neuralink spokesperson claimed that the corporate “has by no means utilized for nor acquired a profit from the federal authorities,” and that the “small deprived enterprise” field that was checked on SAM.gov, the federal authorities’s contracting web site, was clicked in error. (Let’s hope they do not make any comparably minor errors whereas working on affected person’s brains.)
Whereas MuskWatch confirmed that there isn’t any indication the brain-computer interface (BCI) firm had ever gotten federal funds, even an faulty test mark might carry authorized penalties on condition that Neuralink CEO Jared Birchall and different executives signed the doc below risk of perjury.
Up to now, the multi-hyphenate billionaire has cast ample aspersions in opposition to so-called DEI initiatives, equating it with racism and calling it “actually illegal” — an extra-ironic alternative of phrases given the potential law-breaking that occurred when Neuralink utilized for small deprived enterprise standing.
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