Open Source: New lawsuit targets Red Hat’s DEI efforts. A familiar name is behind it.

I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.

In an interview last week with Time magazine, former President Donald Trump promised that, if reelected, he would fight “a definite anti-white feeling” in the country. And this week, a law firm headed by past Trump adviser Stephen Miller sued the Raleigh software giant Red Hat, alleging the company exhibited “anti-white” and “anti-male” bias in terminating an employee.

The ex-employee, a white male sales director who had been at Red Hat for eight years, opposed the company’s efforts to employ a higher percentage of women and people from underrepresented racial groups (he also objected to Red Hat’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement).

Red Hat called the allegations “baseless” in an email to the N&O, saying “neither race nor gender played any role in the decision to end this individual’s employment with Red Hat.” The company doesn’t shy away from highlighting its efforts on gender and racial diversity; on its website, Red Hat says more diverse hiring would enable it to better “innovate” and “serve customers.”

In the United States, 5.6% of Red Hat employees are Black, 5.7% are Latino, and 2.4% are biracial, according to company data. White employees make up 72.8% of the domestic workforce.

The lawsuit has arrived at a moment when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in academia and business have been put under the microscope to either ensure fairness or misleadingly score political points, depending on who you ask. Miller’s law firm, America First Legal, filed a complaint in December against Red Hat’s parent IBM over the company’s use of a “diversity modifier” which compensates executives who emphasize diverse hiring. The firm has filed a litany of other DEI-related complaints, including against MLB, the NFL, Nike and Disney.

Miller is a Duke University graduate, by the way. And depending how the next election goes, he could soon have more influence.

Stepping up after Tesla

Tesla has the most extensive electric vehicle charging network in the United States and now seemingly few people to maintain it as last week, the world’s largest EV maker cut its entire supercharging team. While this might damage the perception of the EV charger industry in the short term, it could also be an opportunity to one company just starting to manufacture charging stations in Durham.

“Everybody else now needs to fill in the gaps,” said Jed Routh, vice president of markets and products at Kempower, a Finnish company, which opened its first U.S. factory near Research Triangle Park last year. In December, Kempower shipped its first Durham-made charger, a seven-foot white cabinet with stacks of black and orange modules capable of providing 600 kw of electricity.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Energy, North Carolina has 1,590 public electric charging stations with a combined 4,314 EV charging ports. Kempower, which has around 120 employees in Durham, hopes to see that number rise. So too does Routh, who owns an electric Ford Mustang.

“You really do have to plan a trip right now,” he said of driving long distances, including across North Carolina. But while the lack of public EV charging stations is an issue, he noted the vast majority of his charging occurs at home.

“I drive a lot, the car has 44,000 miles in less than a year and a half,” he said. “I’ve probably publicly charged it about 11 times.”

Fatal VinFast crash leads to complaint

On the night of April 24, a family of four was killed in a Bay Area suburb when the VinFast vehicle they were driving slammed into a tree. Local authorities are still investigating the accident, but on April 29, the person who lent the car to the family (a co-worker of the driver) filed a complaint with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, saying the car’s steering wheel had once automatically maneuvered to the right, pulling them into a different lane.

The person who issued the NHTSA complaint said they were “concerned that the failure recurred while the coworker was driving.”

VinFast, a new Vietnamese carmaker, has plans to build its first North American assembly plant in Chatham County. In an email Thursday, a VinFast spokesperson said the company “is aware of this tragic accident and our hearts go out to the family. The authorities are currently investigating the cause of the accident and will share their findings when their work is completed.”

This wasn’t the only recent complaint about a VinFast vehicle’s steering. On March 26, a driver informed NHTSA their 2023 VF8 suddenly started to “steer randomly” after the advanced driver assistance system allegedly malfunctioned.

Clearing my cache

• SAS Institute cofounder and CEO Jim Goodnight remains North Carolina’s wealthiest person, according to Forbes, with a net worth of $9.8 billion. This is up from $7.4 billion last year.

• Bloomberg spent time with our regional Federal Reserve Bank president as he toured Winston-Salem, Mount Airy and Yadkin County to hear from business leaders and residents about the economy.

• Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has split with his long-time management company Night Media, Semafor reports. A few management firms, the writer shares, have been “privately reluctant to work with the creator, who has a reputation for being a tough client.” Tough or not, the Greenville, North Carolina-native will soon have the world’s most YouTube subscribers. The MrBeast account currently has 256 million subscribers, within 10 million followers of the top account, T-Series, from an Indian music studio. Some are live tracking the race.

National tech happenings

• TikTok sued the U.S. government Tuesday over the law that forces TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to either sell the platform or be banned. TikTok contends it violates the First Amendment. The government says it’s a national security issue.

• Customers of FTX, the crashed cryptocurrency exchange led by Sam Bankman-Fried, should receive all their money back — plus interest.

• Apple released a new iPad commercial that has a lot of people talking (possibly yelling). The spot shows a hydraulic crusher destroying a litany of cultural objects like a guitar, video-game controllers, metronome, books, paint, digital cameras, more paint. The crusher than lifts to present a new iPad.

The ad spot seems to have many critics, including actor Hugh Grant, who posted, “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.” Apple later issued an apology and scrapped plans for it to run on TV.

Thanks for reading!