A San Francisco jury has ordered Tesla to pay a black former employee nearly $3.2 million after he sued over racial discrimination.

In October 2021, Tesla had been ordered to pay Owen Diaz $137 million by a jury when the original trial ended in October 2021.

A judge later reduced the amount in keeping with legal standards, but Diaz rejected the judge’s proffered damages amount in favor of a new trial.

Diaz was an elevator operator at the electric vehicle-maker’s Fremont, California factory between June 2015 and July 2016, where he was subjected to racist abuse and a hostile work environment, according to the court filing.

In his lawsuit filed in 2017, Diaz said African American employees at the factory, where his son also worked, were regularly subjected to racist epithets and derogatory imagery.

Instead of a modern workplace, the plaintiffs “encountered a scene straight from the Jim Crow era,” said the suit, originally filed by Diaz, his son, and a third former employee.

Diaz alleged that, despite complaints to supervisors, Tesla took no action over the regular racist abuse.

Following the original verdict in the suit, a Tesla human resources vice president downplayed the allegations of racist abuse in the lawsuit but acknowledged that Tesla “was not perfect” when Diaz worked there.

The company also said at the time that conditions have improved in the workplace since Diaz worked there.

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Elon Musk was reportedly involved in a romantic affair last fall with the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, a long-time friend of Musk and a Tesla investor.

Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated fortune of $240 billion, while Brin is ranked eighth world-wide, with a $95 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Both were longtime friends, with Musk saying for years he regularly crashed at Brin’s home in Silicon Valley.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the affair allegedly prompted Brin’s divorce from Nicole Shanahan in January.

According to court filings, the two cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the split and the filings were submitted just weeks after Brin learned of the affair, according to the Journal.

Tensions between the two men and their teams have been growing over recent months, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to the Wall Street Journal.

A source close to the matter told the Journal that Brin instructed his financial advisers to sell his investments in the Tesla CEO’s various businesses. Brin formerly invested $500,000 in Tesla in 2008.

At the time of the affair which reportedly began in December 2021 in Art Basel in Miami Brin and Shanahan were separated, but still living together.

Sources said Brin and Shanahan were encountering difficulties in their marriage at the time, largely tied to stressors connected to COVID-19 and caring for their 3-year-old daughter.

The affair also allegedly started when Musk and his girlfriend, Grimes, were broken up. Grimes and Musk have two children, including most recently a daughter who was born via surrogate the same month of the affair.

In the divorce filing, Brin cited December 15, 2021, as the date of their separation.

In an interview earlier this month with the news website Puck, Shanahan who spoke about her divorce said: “I hope for Sergey and I to move forward with dignity, honesty and harmony for the sake of our child. And we are both working towards that.”

Musk has been in the spotlight recently, following a string of personal and business issues. He has faced manufacturing problems with his Tesla company and a court battle over his wish to backout from a $44bn bid for the social media site Twitter.

Musk’s private life has also come under scrutiny over the previous few months. He has been accused of exposing himself to a flight attendant at his aerospace company SpaceX – although he has denied the allegations.

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The world’s richest man, Elon Musk has opened up about the worst year of his life.

In an interview with the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley club and the Kilowatts podcast, Musk discussed the early days of his electric car company, Tesla and its growth.

Musk told the hosts that his first years as CEO of the company were by far the most difficult. He revealed that 2008 was a “nightmare year” for Tesla and SpaceX, and in his personal life.

“Technically I was CEO from mid-2007, officially CEO in late-2008,” Elon recalled. “Man, that was a lot of drama. That was a nightmare year.”

“Part way through that year, Space X had failed its third launch, and I only ever thought we had money for three launches. We were zero for three launches with Space X,” Musk said.

Since then SpaceX has since launched numerous cargo payloads and astronauts to the International Space Station for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), including 19 rocket launches this year alone but Musk says so many things were sacrificed including his marriage.

“My marriage had fallen apart, so I’m getting divorced,” Musk continued as he recalled his worst year.

“The Tesla financing round was falling apart, and we’re nowhere near production. And we have the Great Recession.”

Elon and Justine Musk divorced in 2008. The pair have five children together.

“Good times,” he joked. “Extremely brutal to say the least – the lowest of the lows.”

Musk said later in the interview that bankruptcy was “knocking at the door” from 2008 to 2012 that he had to invest $40 million of the money he made from the sale of PayPal into his companies, splitting it between Tesla and SpaceX.

“Fortunately the fourth launch of SpaceX reached orbit,” he said.

“If that fourth launch had failed, SpaceX would be dead, for sure. And then we closed the Tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible, which was 6 p.m., Dec. 24, 2008. Crazy,” he added.

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