After Minneapolis, Tech CEOs Are Struggling to Stay Silent | EUROtoday

It was November 12, 2016, 4 days after Donald Trump gained his first presidential election. Aside from a couple of outliers (taking a look at you, Peter Thiel), nearly everybody within the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a convention I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated it was “a pretty crazy idea” to suppose that his firm had something to do with the end result. The following Saturday, I used to be leaving my favourite breakfast place in downtown Palo Alto once I bumped into Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. We knew one another, however at that time, I had by no means actually sat down with him to do a deep interview. But this was a second when uncooked feelings had been triggering all types of conversations, even between journalists and famously cautious executives. We ended up speaking for what should have been 20 minutes.

I gained’t go into the particulars of a personal dialog. But it is going to shock nobody to listen to what was mutually understood on that streetcorner: We had been two folks shocked at what had occurred and shared the identical unstated perception that it was not good.

I’ve thought again to that day many instances, definitely final 12 months when Cook gifted President Trump a glitzy Apple sculpture with a 24k gold base, and most just lately this previous weekend when he attended a White House screening of the $40 million self-importance documentary about Melania Trump. The occasion, which additionally included Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (whose firm funded the challenge) and AMD CEO Lisa Su, came about solely hours after the Trump administration’s masked military in Minneapolis put 10 bullets into 37-year-old Department of Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti. Also, a snowstorm was coming, which might have offered a very good excuse to overlook an occasion which may very effectively hang-out its attendees for the remainder of their lives. But there was Cook, feting a competitor’s media product, trying sharp in a tuxedo, and posing with the film’s director, who hadn’t labored since he was accused of sexual misconduct or harassment by half a dozen ladies. (He has denied the allegations.)

Cook’s presence displays the conduct of a lot of his friends within the trillion-dollar tech CEO membership, all of whom run companies extremely susceptible to the president’s potential ire. During Trump’s first time period, CEOs of firms like Facebook, Amazon, and Google straddled a tightrope between objecting to insurance policies that violated their firm’s values and cooperating with the federal authorities. In the previous 12 months, nonetheless, their default technique, executed with various levels of enthusiasm, has been to lavishly flatter the president and lower offers the place Trump can declare wins. These executives have additionally funneled hundreds of thousands towards Trump’s inauguration, his future presidential library, and the humongous ballroom that he’s constructing to interchange the demolished East Wing of the White House. In return, the company leaders hoped to blunt the affect of tariffs and keep away from onerous rules.

This conduct disillusioned lots of people, together with me. When Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post, he was seen as a civic hero, however now he’s molding the opinion pages of that venerable establishment into that of a White House cheerleader. Zuckerberg as soon as cofounded a gaggle that advocated for immigration reform and penned an op-ed bemoaning the unsure way forward for a younger entrepreneur he was teaching who occurred to be undocumented. Last 12 months, Zuckerberg formally lower ties with the group, however by then he had already positioned himself as a Trump toady.

When Googlers protested Trump’s immigration insurance policies throughout his first time period, cofounder Sergey Brin joined their march. “I wouldn’t be where I am today or have any kind of the life that I have today if this was not a brave country that really stood out and spoke for liberty,” stated Brin, whose household had escaped Russia when he was 6. Today, households like his are being pulled out of their automobiles and school rooms, despatched to detention facilities, and flown in another country. Brin and fellow cofounder Larry Page constructed their search engine on the form of authorities grant that the Trump administration now not helps. Nonetheless, Brin is a Trump supporter. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, himself an immigrant, oversaw Google’s $22 million contribution to the White House ballroom and was amongst tech grandees flattering Trump at a September White House dinner the place CEOs competed to see who might pander to Trump essentially the most insincerely. Another immigrant, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, as soon as slammed Trump’s first-term insurance policies as “cruel and abusive.” In 2025, he was amongst these providing hosannas to the president.