Environmental, social and governance investing was swept into the dustbin of history in 2023, and it appears 2024 is going to be the year DEI will die, Fortune reports.

The collateral damage from billionaire hedge fund investor Bill Ackman’s successful fight to unseat Claudine Gay as president of Harvard was only one nail in the coffin of diversity, equity and inclusion, say DEI detractors.

Ackman, in making his case against Gay for her inability to slam antisemitism at Harvard, decried the university’s racist, anti-capitalist “DEI ideology” as the reason for Gay’s cowardice.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most powerful businessman, echoed Ackman’s message, posting on X: “DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it.”

Musk’s and Ackman’s belief is that applying screens on candidates for positions is reverse racism.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramswamy has spoken fervently against DEI ever since he published his book Woke, Inc. in 2021, but with a different take.

Ramaswamy, whose parents are Indian Hindu immigrants, believes DEI discriminates against minority candidates by considering their gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation ahead of their merits and professional credentials.

By all measures, DEI is on the decline, including a 23% decrease in diversity, equity and inclusion job listings on Indeed last November from a year earlier.

Big tech giants, including Google and Facebook, drastically cut their DEI programs this year, in some cases slashing the budgets by as much as 90%.

The about-face, human resource executives say, is due to a growing skepticism in the nation towards DEI, the Supreme Court’s ruling in June to make affirmative action at institutions of higher learning illegal, and budget cuts.

In many cases, companies are afraid of a wave of DEI-related labor litigation.

While some DEI defenders call their movement “racial reckoning,” opponents say companies with diversity policies have taken them so far as to have become biased against non-minorities.