A federal judge on Tuesday gave a Black former elevator operator at Tesla Inc. two weeks to decide whether to accept $15 million in damages over racial abuse at the electric car company, far below the $137 million a jury had awarded.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco said Owen Diaz identified no controlling question of law to justify an immediate appeal of the reduced award, which includes $1.5 million of compensatory damages and $13.5 million of punitive damages.
Diaz alleged that his colleagues and a supervisor subjected him to a hostile work environment that included slurs, caricatures, and swastikas in his nine months working at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California in 2015 and 2016….