When Scale AI cofounder and CEO Alexandr Wang announced MEI—meritocracy, excellence, and intelligence—as the company’s new hiring and people policy, reactions in the tech industry swiftly fell into two predictable camps. On one side were tech leaders, mostly men, some very prominent including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who welcomed and applauded the move. On the other side, a collective eye roll from a more progressive crowd, who saw this as another incarnation of the growing war on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
It mattered little that Wang clarified that “the belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity” is “mistaken.” The fact that he directly replaced the acronym DEI with MEI ironically demonstrates the one thing these two sides agree on—that the two concepts are fundamentally in opposition with one another. Two ends of a spectrum, one that closely maps to American politics.
