Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Ellison (Oracle) consistently supported Trump before his win was certain and are tight with Trump. They were megadonors behind his campaign.
Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin) and Zuckerberg (Meta) pivoted towards Trump in 2024 after it looked like he would wind second time. They are opportunistic bastards who try to weasel into the good side of Trump with varying results.
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia etc. just bend the knee. They are reluctant but pragmatic and try to protect the company when their competition Amazon, Meta and Oracle are on the inside. Notice that in this final group, CEOs lack autonomy. At Alphabet, Page and Brin retain controlling authority (and they just try to avoid getting involved with Trump). Nvidia lacks a dual-class structure, meaning Jensen Huang (4% votes) can be outvoted on critical matters. Both Apple and Microsoft are "faceless" corporation where the CEOs serve as hired hands.
To go against moral principles purely for extra money is not "average human." And even if you think it's the case, it's equally as unacceptable as a fascist/supremacist/etc.
Trump may be fascist but the is still democratically elected leader with Senate backing him. It's not the Corporate leaders to decide to against democratically elected leaders even if they are bad. They have can only slow walk the decline.
This is patently silly. The US does not have a democratically elected dictatorship.
People and companies are free to do whatever the fuck they want that’s not illegal. They can resist any government priorities for any reason, including finding them destructive or anti-democratic or corrupt.
The government is able to change the laws within the current system to back its will—regardless of whether it’s in the interest of the people who voted for them, let alone the entire population.
> It's not the Corporate leaders to decide to against democratically elected leaders even if they are bad.
Refusing to join forces and contribute your efforts towards actively support fascism is not "deciding against democratically elected leaders". This sort of rhetorical sophism is unhelpful and, indeed, damaging.
It is ABSOLUTELY everyone's place, ("corporate leaders" included) to have principles and stick to them.
Personally, I agree with the principles of not using fallible AI for mass domestic surveillance analysis purposes, or for fully autonomous weapon purposes.
Nobody cares what the employees of a company think because capitalism doesn't care.
It's meaningless to talk about what the employees think or care about. They are selling their labor and value to the corporation that is legally entitled to outspend all of them to get whatever it wants.
I'd like to believe that Silicon Valley mgmt is Pro-Trump in the same way that Oskar Schindler was "pro Nazi".
You may not personally like who is in office, but you pretend to in order to survive.
This isn’t the case, sadly. Some people, like Ben Horowitz sadly, have gone completely off the deep end.
Some are culture warriors who feel they have been wronged, some are opportunists. But the thing with opportunism is that this is who they are and what they believe in. Having a president who is corrupt is exactly what they want because they know exactly how to work with him: quid pro quo.
There is no distance between them being pro-Trump and opportunistic. He’s the perfect embodiment of those values.
There are a few people like that (we know who they are) but either tech has changed or I never noticed but a significant portion of the senior leadership in the tech world is MAGA (not in the dumb way - but in a far more problematic "techno-libertarian" way)
Google employees were generally pretty anti-Trump, it's the senior leadership and the recommendation algorithms that are pro-Trump.
Senior leaders in Google are not pro-Trump.
Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Ellison (Oracle) consistently supported Trump before his win was certain and are tight with Trump. They were megadonors behind his campaign.
Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin) and Zuckerberg (Meta) pivoted towards Trump in 2024 after it looked like he would wind second time. They are opportunistic bastards who try to weasel into the good side of Trump with varying results.
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia etc. just bend the knee. They are reluctant but pragmatic and try to protect the company when their competition Amazon, Meta and Oracle are on the inside. Notice that in this final group, CEOs lack autonomy. At Alphabet, Page and Brin retain controlling authority (and they just try to avoid getting involved with Trump). Nvidia lacks a dual-class structure, meaning Jensen Huang (4% votes) can be outvoted on critical matters. Both Apple and Microsoft are "faceless" corporation where the CEOs serve as hired hands.
That strikes me as being a distinction without a difference.
If anything, I have less respect for people who support fascism for money than I do for people who actually believe in it.
> If anything, I have less respect for people who support fascism for money than I do for people who actually believe in it.
Silly logic. The first are average humans, the second are evil.
To go against moral principles purely for extra money is not "average human." And even if you think it's the case, it's equally as unacceptable as a fascist/supremacist/etc.
Trump may be fascist but the is still democratically elected leader with Senate backing him. It's not the Corporate leaders to decide to against democratically elected leaders even if they are bad. They have can only slow walk the decline.
You would not want that either.
This is patently silly. The US does not have a democratically elected dictatorship.
People and companies are free to do whatever the fuck they want that’s not illegal. They can resist any government priorities for any reason, including finding them destructive or anti-democratic or corrupt.
The government is able to change the laws within the current system to back its will—regardless of whether it’s in the interest of the people who voted for them, let alone the entire population.
(No the em dash isn’t AI.)
It's a blatantly inflammatory comment from a 42 day old account with a gibberish username.
It's a troll. Just flag it and move on.
It's not a requirement to donate to democratically-elected leaders though.
> It's not the Corporate leaders to decide to against democratically elected leaders even if they are bad.
Refusing to join forces and contribute your efforts towards actively support fascism is not "deciding against democratically elected leaders". This sort of rhetorical sophism is unhelpful and, indeed, damaging.
It is ABSOLUTELY everyone's place, ("corporate leaders" included) to have principles and stick to them.
Personally, I agree with the principles of not using fallible AI for mass domestic surveillance analysis purposes, or for fully autonomous weapon purposes.
> Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia etc. just bend the knee.
Vidkun Quisling
Nobody cares what the employees of a company think because capitalism doesn't care.
It's meaningless to talk about what the employees think or care about. They are selling their labor and value to the corporation that is legally entitled to outspend all of them to get whatever it wants.
I'd like to believe that Silicon Valley mgmt is Pro-Trump in the same way that Oskar Schindler was "pro Nazi". You may not personally like who is in office, but you pretend to in order to survive.
This isn’t the case, sadly. Some people, like Ben Horowitz sadly, have gone completely off the deep end.
Some are culture warriors who feel they have been wronged, some are opportunists. But the thing with opportunism is that this is who they are and what they believe in. Having a president who is corrupt is exactly what they want because they know exactly how to work with him: quid pro quo.
There is no distance between them being pro-Trump and opportunistic. He’s the perfect embodiment of those values.
There are a few people like that (we know who they are) but either tech has changed or I never noticed but a significant portion of the senior leadership in the tech world is MAGA (not in the dumb way - but in a far more problematic "techno-libertarian" way)
> in a far more problematic "techno-libertarian" way
We should probably use a different word for Elon-style goals.
"Freedom for me but not for thee" is a far stretch from libertarianism.