Elon Musk is weird, impulsive, sometimes hypocritical and often infuriating. He is also a national treasure: a true Ethics Hero in the culture wars.
Back in 2021, Disney fired Gina Carano, one of the stars of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts were insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant Disney is obsessed with (to its financial and cultural sorrow). The triggering tweet was one in which Carano, a conservative (can’t have that in Hollywood!) compared Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda to efforts by the political left to demonize people based on their political beliefs. Proving her point, Disney canned her, explaining, falsely, that her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms. Her complaint can be read here. She is suing under California law, which states that
“No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy: (a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. (b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.”
Disney is going to lose, or, if it decides that discretion is the better part of valor, have to settle with Carano for a significant sum. Usually big corporations win suits like this over individual plaintiffs because they have the resources to crush adversaries with their metaphorical wallets and outlast them. But Carano’s suit is being paid for by Musk, who delivered on his promise tweeted out a few months ago that if anyone faced legal problems stemming from exercising the right of free speech on X/Twitter, he would underwrite the litigation. Carano wrote in her tweet announcing the suit,
“…To my surprise, a few months ago I received an email from a lawyer who had been hired by X to look into my story & many others. Turns out after sending them as much information as I could gather these past few months, my now lawyers & X believe whole-heartedly in my case & are moving forward. I would like to express my deepest gratitude & thank you to @ElonMusk & @X for giving me an opportunity to bring my case to light.
So should we all.
Musk, however, is not restricting his battle with Disney to the actress’s travails. Yesterday he made public a document leaked to him from within the company. It is revolting, a flagrant imposition of racial and other quotas on hiring and professional development. Tweeting out this smoking gun, Musk wrote, “An anonymous source just sent me this from Disney. It is mandatory, institutionalized racism and sexism!” It is also quite possibly illegal, but the policies described are definitely unfair and unethical. Behold…
Yikes.
I think Musk should just buy Disney and its various captive entities like ABC, ESPN, LucasFilm and the rest. That would constitute a big step toward mopping up a cultural mess, perhaps even a more important step than taking over Twitter.
Ethics Alarms 
The best part is at the bottom:
“Context is critical when evaluating if a group is ‘underrepresented'”.
In other words, “We’re giving you all these rules about including underrepresented groups, but we’re not telling you what those groups are.”
And the chaser?
A little reminder that it’s illegal to ask candidates things like race, age, religion, gender, and a host of other things.
Putting the broader legal and ethical issues aside, that kind of directive is just setting HR up to fail. You can’t assign a task without clear conditions of completion. It would be way too easy for the higher-ups to second-guess HR on what constitutes “underrepresented”.
Yeah, “Setting them up to fail” is a management style I’m unfortunately familiar with. Indeed I imagine most working adults are, as it tends to crop up wherever you have spineless leadership. It’s a system for manufacturing scapegoats. Since the rules can’t all be successfully followed, it becomes easy for the higher-ups to swoop down after a disaster and point out the rules that weren’t followed.
Musk needs to wait until Disney is completely, hopelessly bankrupt. Maybe when Disney has to sell-off stuff to pay Comcast their $8.6 billion for Hulu, Musk can buy up portions of Disney at bargain prices.
I’d love to see the current value of Star Wars/Lucasfilm part of it.
Instead of Robin Williams’ Genie, you could’ve used Jafar in genie form for Disney’s representation.
Confession: at first I thought that WAS Jafar.