It was just 18 months ago that former Tesla worker Owen Diaz won a massive $137 million verdict after a jury found that he had endured a brutally racist work environment at the company.
Months later, a judge reduced the payout to $15 million. Diaz opted to reject that sum, and the case was retried this year.
The outcome didn’t go his way. On Monday, the new jury awarded Diaz approximately $3.2 million, including $3 million in punitive damages.
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Speaking to The Daily Beast, Diaz expressed frustration with the make-up of the jury, which he alleged was not made up of “my peers,” but rather by “whites and idiots.” Many of the jurors seemed to have comfortable financial lives, he said, meaning that they didn’t “realize what it is to [live] paycheck to paycheck,” nor did they comprehend the “historical significance of what was said and what was done” at Tesla.
Diaz said he plans to appeal the verdict, since “justice still hasn’t been served.”
As for his decision to reject the $15 million payout, Diaz said he has no regrets, because he didn’t believe that figure would have forced the company to make meaningful change.
“It’s just so rampant inside of the company, it’s to the point where it just has to stop,” he alleged. He added that he had hoped the jury would see through Tesla’s “BS and help a lot of African Americans be able to work and not have to keep going through the things that they’re going through.”
In cases of systemic harassment, “it’s not like we can take these [CEOs] to jail,” he argued. Money is the most impactful way “they can be punished.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, tweeted that he believed “the verdict would’ve been zero” if Tesla had been able to introduce additional evidence in the trial. “Jury did the best they could with the information they had. I respect the decision,” he wrote.
The Daily Beast reached out to Tesla for comment. The email address listed for media inquiries auto-replied with a poop emoji.
Diaz argued that the evidence in his case was clear. As he told The Daily Beast in 2021, his supervisors at Tesla allegedly mocked him with racist imagery and slurs.
“[I] had supervisors telling me, ‘[N-word], hurry up and push the button’; ‘[N-word]’ push these batteries out of the elevator.’ And they were also telling me, ‘[N-words]’ aren’t shit,’” he said.
Some elements of the broken culture were left unaddressed because of Tesla’s use of arbitration agreements, he claimed, which can limit employees’ ability to file lawsuits.
Diaz said he remains committed to reforming the automaker. “Hopefully, if I can’t accomplish it, the next person [who files a lawsuit] will be able to.”
Until then, he said he remains at peace. “I’ve got a good job, you know, I own my own home. I’ve got my wife and my kids… Family is everything to me.”
