Elon Musk mocks #staywoke shirts at Twitter that were made to support Black Lives Matter and once worn by Jack Dorsey

Susan Walsh/AP; Getty Images

• Elon Musk mocked Twitter's #staywoke t-shirts on social media.
• The shirts were promoted by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and designed to promote Black Lives Matter.
• Musk deleted a tweet that appeared to defend the police officer who shot Michael Brown in 2014, Bloomberg reported.

Elon Musk posted a video mocking a pile of #staywoke t-shirts that he said were found at Twitter's headquarters.

"Found in closet at Twitter HQ fr," Musk posted on Twitter early Wednesday morning, along with the crying-while-laughing emoji.

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022

The shirts, which date back to 2016, were made to support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and were promoted by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, who spoke in support of the BLM movement at a Recode event in 2016.

Dorsey said that he took two weeks off to work with the civil rights organization in 2014, creating a Twitter hashtag to promote the movement following the shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teen who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown was unarmed at the time, and the shooting sparked protests over police shootings of Black people.

Dorsey said at the Recode event, where Recode said organizers handed out the t-shirts, that the hashtag represents, "being aware, staying aware [of] what you're seeing on the TV screen [in Ferguson] versus what's happening on the ground."

In a tweet that has since been deleted, Bloomberg reported, the billionaire appeared to reference the police shooting and said "'Hands up don't shoot' was made up. The whole thing was a fiction," and linked to a 2015 report from the US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Brown's death. Musk later reposted the DOJ link without any additional text.

Musk and a spokesperson for Twitter did not respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication.

In the days following the shooting, the Associated Press reported that two men said they saw 18-year-old Brown raise his hands before being shot by an officer, but the DOJ's report into his death cites varying accounts. The officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson, had claimed he shot at Brown in self defense. In 2020, it was reported that Wilson would not face any criminal charges from the incident.

The DOJ's Civil Rights Division released another report in 2015 that found the Ferguson Police Department regularly targeted Black people even over "minor violations" like traffic tickets or parking infractions.