Jesse Powell, the CEO and founder of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, told the Fox Business Network that any “woke” employees who stay with his company “will be managed out the hard way” because he doesn’t “tolerate that kind of behavior.”
Powell offered them four months’ pay to leave the cryptocurrency company. He told Fox News that around 30 employees took the offer out of more than 3,000 staff members. “There was a huge amount of support for this move, a huge amount of support for the company’s culture and mission and the reinforcement of those,” said Powell.
In a report detailing internal cultural turmoil at the company, the publication cited interviews with Kraken employees who recounted “hurtful” comments around preferred pronouns and demeaning statements toward women, among other incendiary remarks, made by the CEO.
He added that only a small number of employees were “creating distractions for the whole company. We’ve got people from more than 70 countries in the company that speak more than 50 languages. We’re incredibly diverse in many ways. I think that the problem that some people have is this diversity of thought.”
In a Twitter thread, Powell highlighted “20 people” who “sap the productivity out of another 400” because they’re “triggered” by “first world problems” such as pronoun use and “whether differences in human sex exist at all.”
Finally, Powell outlined the company’s perspective in an email where he said, “We will never ask that our employees adopt any specific political ideology as a requirement for our workplace.”
“That said, we ask that our employees respect the individual rights, privacy, and freedoms of others. Crypto is a freedom movement, and Kraken will remain a freedom company,” he continued.
Powell isn’t alone in his stance. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has similarly said a “woke mind virus” is hurting business at streaming giant Netflix, which also shared a culture memo with employees in May.
The company told employees to quit if they don’t agree with the content that it showcases, such as controversial comedian Dave Chappelle’s program, which caused backlash over jokes about transgender people.
Workplaces are now choosing if and how they would like to separate politics from work. The extreme divide in our political landscape, the coming years will be important to see if the business world shifts in a similar way.