A baker from San Jose, California, criticized Tesla on Wednesday after the electric car company ordered $16,000 worth of pies for a Black History Month event but quickly canceled the order and cost it thousands of dollars.
The Giving Pies owner Woaangi Rasetarinera wrote: Instagram that Tesla contacted her bakery on February 14th with an order for 2,000 mini pies to be delivered the following week.
On the same day, despite receiving a price quote and order approval, Rasetarinera did not receive payment from the Tesla City Flavor supplier, where the order was forwarded. Instead, the next evening, after 9 p.m., she received a call from a Tesla representative asking her double the order“, she said on Instagram.
By the end of the week, Rasetarinera still had not received payment. To make matters worse, the next time her Tesla contact contacted her, they were to say that Tesla no longer needed the order.
“This dramatic turnaround left me reeling as I realized the magnitude of the impact on my small business,” she wrote. “I invested time, resources and effort based on Tesla’s assurances, only to be left in the lurch.”
Tesla and City Flavor did not respond to the message Luckrequests for comments.
Gift Pies has a cancellation policy, but because Tesla didn’t pay the bill, Rasetarinera was unable to issue a refund. 2000 US dollars The bakery lost work on the order.
Rasetarinera forced employees to work overtime to fill the order, and she purchased more expensive vegan products and turned down three other catering opportunities during Black History Month to make time to order a Tesla.
This was the first time Rasetarinera had received an order from Tesla, she said—City Flavor approached the bakery last year about catering for a Black History Month event, but declined Rasetarinera’s offer.
The baker told Luck that a Tesla representative reached out to her on Wednesday to apologize, saying the original person did not have the authority to promise to pay her. The representative invited Rasetarinera to tour the plant and offered her the opportunity to host two Tesla events in March.
Another ill-timed controversy for Tesla
Rasetarinera, who is Black, told Luck that the neglect has nothing to do with racism and that it is simply a misunderstanding. Still, there is a deep irony in the automaker’s disdain for Black-owned businesses during Black History Month, which comes on the heels of multiple accusations of racism against the company.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla in September, accusing the company of tolerating anti-Black racism and retaliating against Black employees who spoke out. The lawsuit alleged that as early as 2015, non-black employees at Tesla’s Fremont plant repeatedly used racial slurs. Tesla paid a former black employee in April $3.2 million after a federal jury in San Francisco ruled that the electric vehicle company did not condemn severe racial harassment at its California plant.
Tesla also came under fire last month for rejecting the language of diversity in its annual report ahead of Black History Month.
In his report released on January 24, Tesla removed language from the Human Capital section that read: “With a workforce made up of majorities and minorities, empowering our employee resource groups to take responsibility for implementing initiatives that attract, develop and retain our A passionate workforce is vital to our continued success.”
Tesla published its first Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Report in 2020 and from 2021 includes information on diversity in the Employees section of its annual report, adding 606 words this year, including a description of efforts to “attract a group of diverse and exceptional candidates and support their career development.” While the 2023 report includes a statement that Tesla does not tolerate harassment or discrimination on any basis, that section no longer contains any information about diversity, Quartz reports.
The removal of diversity language in the report followed Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion, which he called “propaganda words” and “propaganda words.”literally definition racism.”
But Musk also uses DEI-focused language to bolster his own arguments. On Friday, Musk called Google’s now-suspended Gemini artificial intelligence model “unscrupulous.”crazy, racist, anti-civilization programming“after it has generated historically inaccurate imagesfor example, a woman father and a black founding father of the United States.
Musk published on X that a Google executive reached out to him in response to criticism.
“He assured me that they are taking immediate action to correct racial and gender bias in Gemini,” Musk wrote. “Time will show.”