Twitter CEO Elon Musk posted a 12-second video to the platform late Tuesday, documenting his find of a "secret closet" full of black #StayWoke t-shirts.
"Here we are at the merch and there is an entire closet full of …" Musk says in the video, before someone off-camera chimes in with, "secret closet."
"… hashtag woke t-shirts," Musk finishes.
The tech billionaire also tweeted that the #StayWoke shirts "stem from the Ferguson protests," referring to the protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 when Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American man.
"Obama's own DOJ proved this & exonerated the cop," Musk said in a since-deleted tweet. " 'Hands up, don't shoot' was made up. The whole thing was a fiction."
While it was unclear why he deleted the tweet, Musk apparently replaced it with a link to the Department of Justice's report on the shooting of Brown.
According to the Independent, the shirts were made by Twitter's "Blackbirds" group, which started selling them in April 2016 to "support and promote diversity at Twitter, create a more inclusive work environment, and enrich communities outside of" the company.
New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac said Twitter, under former CEO Jack Dorsey, was "proud of that messaging" and gave the shirts away at tech conferences.
"Elon Musk has said he's about context on tweets, so here's context for these shirts: They came from Twitter's Black employee resource group and were popularized by @jack, who wore a version around to conferences to support the group (and was sometimes ridiculed for it)," Mac tweeted.
DeRay McKesson, a Black Lives Matter activist and friend of Dorsey, was notably arrested wearing the #StayWoke t-shirt during protests in Louisiana over the shooting of Alton Sterling, according to Breitbart News.
According to the Daily Mail, since taking control of Twitter, Musk has laid off around 50% of the original 7,500 employees and accepted resignations from 1,200 more.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.