For Silicon Valley’s fawning CEOs their lucrative partnership with Trump is all that matters
Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the president’s wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady’s name.
Silicon Valley’s top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump. During his inauguration a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Cook sat smiling behind the president in the Capitol Rotunda. The obsequiousness has not stopped since: In August, Cook presented Trump with a custom plaque atop a 24-karat-gold base in the Oval Office. At a White House dinner the next month, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin praised Trump’s “civil rights” work, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman described Trump’s leadership as a “refreshing change.” Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are among the companies that have made donations to fund the new White House ballroom.
Tech has a long history of making moves to appease politicians in power, including ample campaign donations. But the industry’s leaders have not distanced themselves from Trump even as his administration has shattered constitutional and democratic norms. In Minneapolis over the weekend, an American citizen was shot in the street by masked federal officers after recording them with his phone. In the immediate aftermath, top Trump-administration officials blamed Pretti for his own death, despite contradictory video evidence. The uproar has been loud, and not just among Democrats. So far, Silicon Valley’s top CEOs have largely remained silent. [Continue reading…]
“Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this,” Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google’s DeepMind and a longtime Google executive, wrote in a social media post, calling the killing “absolutely shameful.”
A letter, known as ICEout.tech, was spun up by some tech employees and spread quickly over social media. It has since amassed more than 500 signatures from engineers, venture capitalists and other tech workers calling for the industry to demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials leave U.S. cities, cancel contracts with the agency and to not remain silent, even if it may be politically risky.
The actions were reminiscent of a bygone era in Silicon Valley. When Donald J. Trump took office in 2017 for his first term, tech workers were outspoken and urged their employers to use their political clout against the administration. At the time, engineers from companies like Google openly organized inside of their workplaces against Mr. Trump.
But in recent years, top Silicon Valley executives and investors including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Apple’s Mr. Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang wooed conservatives to form political relationships that could benefit their companies. Some tech giants cracked down on employees expressing their political views and fired those who broke the rules. Defense tech companies including Palantir and Anduril landed contracts to supply products to the federal government.
Yet the killing of Mr. Pretti, along with that of Renee Good, another protester in Minneapolis this month, has shaken that status quo.
“Every day, we are asked to put our trust in tech companies, who shape our lives and our futures in profound ways,” Galen Panger, a user experience researcher at YouTube who co-signed the letter, said in an interview. “But what future are they asking us to imagine now?”
Katie Jacobs Stanton, a venture capitalist and former executive at Twitter and Google, said in an interview that the videos of Mr. Pretti’s killing have driven a “real public backlash.” She added, “Speaking out for human rights, basic decency and the defense of our democracy should not be hard. What’s the point of power and privilege if you don’t use it when it matters most?” [Continue reading…]