After Minneapolis, Tech CEOs Are Struggling to Stay Silent

It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Apart from a few outliers (look at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and surprised. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “a pretty crazy idea” to think that his company had anything to do with the outcome. The following Saturday, I was leaving my favorite breakfast spot in downtown Palo Alto when I ran into Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. We knew each other, but at that point I had never really sat down with him to do an in-depth interview. But this was a moment when raw emotions soaked up all kinds of conversations and famous conversations, and even famous conversations. for what must have been 20 minutes.

I will not go into the details of a private conversation. But it will not surprise anyone to hear what was mutually understood on that street corner: we were two people bewildered by what had happened and shared the same unspoken belief that it was not right.

I have thought back to that day many times, certainly last year when Cook gifted President Trump a glitzy Apple sculpture with a 24k gold base, and most recently this past weekend when he attended a White House screening of the $40 million vanity documentary about Melania Trump. The event, which also included Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (whose company financed the project) and AMD CEO Lisa Su, took place just hours after the masked army of the Trump administration in Minneapolis put 10 bullets into the 37-year-old ICU nurse of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Alex Pretty. There was also a snowstorm, which provided a good excuse to miss an event that may very well haunt its attendees for the rest of their lives. But there was Cook, picking up a competitor's media product, looking sharp in a tuxedo, and posing with the film's director, who hasn't worked since he was accused of sexual abuse or harassment by half a dozen women. (He has denied the allegations.)

Cook's presence mirrors the behavior of many of his peers in the trillion-dollar tech CEO club, all of whom own companies highly vulnerable to the president's potential wrath. During Trump's first term, CEOs of companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google straddled a tightrope between opposing policies that violated their company values ​​and cooperating with the federal government. Over the past year, however, their standard strategy, executed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, has been to lavishly flatter the president and make deals where Trump can claim victories. These executives also pumped millions for Trump's inauguration, his future presidential library, and the huge ballroom he's building to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House. In return, business leaders hoped to blunt the impact of tariffs and avoid burdensome regulations.

This behavior disappointed many people, including me. When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, he was seen as a civic hero, but now he is shaping the opinion pages of that venerable institution into that of a White House cheerleader. Zuckerberg once cofounded a group that advocated for immigration reform and wrote an op-ed bemoaned the uncertain future of a young entrepreneur he coached who happened to be undocumented. Last year, Zuckerberg formally cut tires with the group, but then he already thought of himself as a Trump toady.

When Googlers protested Trump's immigration policies in his first term, co-founder Sergey Brin joined their march. “I wouldn't be where I am today or have any kind of life that I have today if this wasn't a brave country that really stood up and spoke for freedom,” said Brin, whose family had escaped from Russia when he was 6. Today, families like his are pulled from their cars and classrooms, sent to detention centers and flown out of the country. Brin and co-founder Larry Page built their search engine on the kind of government subsidy that the Trump administration no longer supported. However, 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 among the tech giants that Trump blundered into in September White House dinner where CEOs competed to see who could pander to Trump the most insincerely. Another immigrant, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, once described Trump's first-term policies as “cruel and abusive.” In 2025 he was among you offering hosannas to the president.