The Tesla CEO criticized Jeff Bezos' ex-wife McKenzie Scott for donating billions of dollars to charities helping women and minorities
Elon Musk is back at it again. The Tesla $TSLA CEO and owner of X $TWTR, formerly known as Twitter, aimed at McKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon $AMZN founder Jeff Bezos, on Wednesday in reply to a tweet criticizing her philanthropy. An X user who Musk often replies to complained that Scott donates money to organizations that deal with “issues of race and/or gender,” and said her foundation is “the ultimate expression of the most awful group in the US.”
“Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse’ should filed [sic] be listed among ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died,” Musk replied, according to an archived version of the now-deleted post.
The world’s third-richest person has been divorced three times. Two of those divorces were with his second wife, English actress Talulah Riley. He had earlier divorced his first wife, Justine Musk, in 2008.
Musk has been profoundly critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and has been called out for sexism repeatedly over the years. Tesla dropped language referencing diversity from its annual shareholder report just weeks after saying DEI is “just another word for racism.” The billionaire has also been criticized for claiming that Boeing $BA’s issues with the 737 Max 9 were caused by hiring too many non-white pilots and factory workers.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Tesla for tolerating “widespread and ongoing racial harassment” at its flagship facility in California. In 2019, workers at a Tesla facility in Buffalo, New York, complained to the commission that they worked in a segregated factory hostile to Black and Hispanic employees. One of his other companies, SpaceX, has been sued for “routine, widespread, and longstanding” employment discrimination against asylum recipients and refugees.
This latest incident isn’t even the first time he’s aimed at Scott.
In May 2022, Musk said he planned to vote for Republicans because of criticism levied at his companies by Democrats. He added that he thought his companies had been sidelined because of Scott’s donations to “PACs posing as charities.”
“It’s safe to say that MacKenzie [ahem] Scott is not exactly a big fan of her ex-husband. Unfortunately, a lot of others are getting caught in the crossfire,” Musk wrote at the time.
Scott and Bezos got divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage. Scott received about $38 billion in Amazon stock in their divorce settlement and has given away more than $16.5 billion to over 1,900 nonprofits.
Recipients of Scott’s philanthropy have included Planned Parenthood, which received $275 million in 2022, and Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black university in Texas, which received $50 million in 2021. Thirty-nine percent of Scott’s most significant grants — those with at least $20 million — have gone to organizations in the South, with a focus on historically Black colleges and universities, according to a Harvard Business School analysis.
“My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful,” Scott wrote in a 2019 letter to the Giving Pledge. “It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”
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