Alexandr Wang got straight to the point: “Today, we’ve formalized an important hiring policy at Scale,” he posted. “We hire for MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.”

The CEO of the San Francisco-based AI and software company went on to post the entirety of the email that he shared with his team. “No group has a monopoly on excellence,” it read. “We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on… Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.”

The reception to Wang’s announcement perfectly illustrated the vibe shift: aside from two head-scratching pieces from TechCrunch (one that read, in part, "I would invite [Wang] — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off"; the passage was stealth-deleted in the middle of the night, the day it was published) there were no apoplectic hit-pieces written like there were when, in 2020, Brian Armstrong announced that Coinbase would be mission-first.