🏛️ Affirmative-action ruling propagates into corporate DEI and ESG

“And frankly, downstream, how ESG works, because all these ESG check boxes now, some of them will actually become illegal, right?”

“DEI, to Chamath's point, it is illegal to hire people based on race, gender, any of those criteria, obviously.”

“Remember what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase? He basically just said, listen, we have a mission here. It's around crypto. We're going to focus 100% on this mission.”

“I mean, in a word, no, because by that point, it's an intractable problem. I've talked to CEOs that ask this question to me over and over again.”

“Yeah, and I would just be careful for you to add the word youthful because I think it's a get out of jail free card. It's definitely stupidity. The question is, is the cake baked? And if the cake is baked, then there's a big argument to never hiring these people.”

“If they're going to create a cancel culture where people get canceled for their decade-old tweets and so forth, then they should be prepared to live by that standard. ... So I wouldn't cancel them forever. But look, I do think that it's fine and appropriate for someone like Belacan to say, I don't want to hire you people.”

“So no, I don't think it's out of line. I think it's an important lesson for people. This is not freedom of speech.”

“And the DEI stuff is a road to nowhere.... Identity politics and DEI, it's just a dead end when you start judging people based on any criteria other than their character and performance in the world.”

“I think what Dill Ackman is doing is brave because he is taking on DEI, and that is, historically, that's been one of the most dangerous things you can do.... And finally, we have someone who's willing to take it on and challenge it, challenge it at an ideological level and then challenge it at like a just grift level.”

“My biggest political loser is the DEI movement... I think that that movement is going to take a big hit and took a big hit the end of this year and will continue to, I think, be questioned by donors and supporters of the ideologies of that movement.”

“sustainable asset ownership and ESG ownership across the world shrank by 15%, which you may say is that a big number or not, that's $5 trillion. ... So when the money starts to scurry, I think that you can pretty much expect that people's patience and support of these kinds of movements are waning.”

“My best trend is the return of colorblindness as the standard and the pushback on DEI. ... I think that this is a good trend and hopefully it continues next year because America should be a colorblind meritocracy.”

“I too, Sacks, was looking at the issue of DEI and I framed mine as DEI dying and meritocracy thriving.”

“if there is an incident or a near incident, you're going to see lawsuits that are going to focus on this issue.”

“eventually when this stuff gets litigated, as it just did at the Supreme Court, you start to pick this apart and you see that there's a lot of evidence that they are actually engaged in overt discrimination against certain groups like Asian Americans.”

“I, there is no company where I have majority control, where I have an HR department. ... And what is left over is the very dark part of HR in most organizations, which is the police person, the policeman, right? What is Sacks called? The commissar. That is why everybody hates HR. I have never met a company where that is a successful role over long periods of time.”

“I think a lot of founders don't understand that DEI is not something they have to do. They don't have to have a DEI organization. This has somehow become a thing. It's not required. I think people are realizing, why would you do that? Why would you create this large bureaucracy in the company that undercuts the meritocracy, that adds a lot of costs, and that slows you down?”

“if they've been given the job DEI and they've been given the job to do trust and safety, they're looking to fill their time and make an impact. You got to, I think, maybe have less of these people. I honestly think it's about cutting people.”

“And so I'm not a huge fan of race-based metrics or gender-based metrics. I'm generally more oriented around being blind to those variables and focus much more on the variables that can actually influence the outcome of the organization.”