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Comment by illuminati1911 | Hacker News Reader

illuminati1911

I think private companies can decide themselves what companies they want to invest in. Whatever the reason is, even outside of US. So I'm pretty sure this is legal.

As European (we don't have this racial segregation fetish so please excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject) I'm more interested how they define black and brown companies? What if the company is owned by 3 people, 2 black, 1 white? Will they invest 33% less because the company is partially owned by a person of wrong race? What if it's 50/50? What about muslims? Women? LGBTQ? What if the company is owned by white people, but upper management is fully black? Where do they draw the line?

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As another European observing the political climate overseas I get what you mean; with the same news reversed and Apple announcing founding for Historically White Colleges and Universities and venture capital funding for White and Pale entrepreneurs it would be still legally sound as this one but would cause a shit storm so big, no umbrella or anorak would be able to protect anyone from it.

I don't get how the subjects of clear publicity stunts like these don't get offended that a multi-billion dollar company is piggybacking a legitimate movement investing a buck to get two more later on. The argument "if they are doing something good and getting profit out of it, it's a win-win" just does not sound right on the ideological level. If you want to do good, you can do it for free, especially if you have billions in cash.

This is actually fairly easy. Typically in tech, management and ownership % for white men approach 100% in the limit. So companies will typically count as investing in a minority business all of the edge cases you can think of, because the norm is ~100% white men in positions of power in a company.

> if the company is owned by white people, but upper management is fully black

This is an intellectual creation that does not exist in the real world as a company that has received institutional capital.

Well, would you count Jews as “white” in this context? Because Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all managed and/or mostly owned by Asians and Jews.

Jews come in many ethnicities. I would imagine that for example Jews from Ethiopia are not considered "white." But I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

The point was that you claimed that close to 100% of businesses were owned and managed by “white men”. Clearly that’s not remotely true.

Context is tech businesses funded by institutional capital. Statement is directionally correct in that context.

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