Rivian (RIVN 2.84%) made a sizzling hot market debut last month. However, it's also facing a widely publicized lawsuit from a former executive at the company who alleges that she faced gender discrimination at the company and was fired after conveying this to the human resources division.
In this segment of Backstage Pass, recorded on Nov. 5 shortly before Rivian's IPO, Fool contributor Toby Bordelon responds to a viewer's question about these allegations and the ensuing lawsuit against the EV maker.
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Toby Bordelon: We're getting questions. I promise we'll have to make an attempt to answer some of these. We'd want to address Steve's right now since it's on this topic. He says, "Rivian just raised their IPO price targets of $72.74 in the face of this lawsuit claim."
Yeah, I saw that. They are raising their target. I don't know if something like this has an immediate impact on a company, especially in this IPO stage. I think there's a lot more that's going to overshadow that.
But my concern I think would be more of a long-term issue here if it becomes clear or public, or even the perception that you were not a welcoming place to work for everybody, then you start to lose out potentially on some talent, especially in this tight job market.
Especially when if you want to design cool cars, there are a lot of places you can go right now. You can go to Ford. You can go to Tesla, you can go to Volkswagen. There are options. There are other EV start-ups.
If Rivian gets a reputation as a place that's not great to work, they'll lose out on some of that talent in the next couple of years that goes elsewhere, and that prevents them from keeping up with their competition.
That's definitely a concern.
