Apple co-founder says Apple Card discriminated against his wife
lite.cnn.io
lite.cnn.io
> Though permanently leaving Apple as an active employee in 1985, Wozniak chose to never remove himself from the official employee list, and continues to represent the company at events or in interviews. Today he receives a stipend from Apple for this role, estimated in 2006 to be US$120,000 per year.
At the top of the same page:
> As of November 2019, Wozniak has remained an employee of Apple in a ceremonial capacity since stepping down in 1985.
One of the references is to a tweet by Wozniak at https://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/1193424787248279552 directly concerning the Apple Card issue:
> I'm a current Apple employee and founder of the company and the same thing happened to us (10x) despite not having any separate assets or accounts. Some say the blame is on Goldman Sachs but the way Apple is attached, they should share responsibility.
I also believe "they" refers to legal responsibilities of the company as a whole, which are distinct and independent from the responsibilities of individual members. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood .
Even if you don't like corporate personhood, "they" can also refer to those people with an executive role, that is, the people who collectively made the decision. He does not have executive authority in this decision, so is not a member of that "we".
Why is "we" specifically meaning employment? Can't being a shareholder also count as "we"? That is, I can own a company, and control a company, but not be employed by the company - surely "we" still applies there.
Consider that, if Wozniak own shares of Goldman Sachs then, as shareholder, he could have a role in guiding its policies. (Ditto for Apple, of course.) But it wouldn't make sense to refer to both roles as "we", as that would make it even more confusing.
"Representative ... in a ceremonial capacity" is not "spokesman" except in the broadest of senses (eg, all employees, in some sense, can be spokespeople). It certainly isn't a spokesman for all of Apple's policies.
I'll note that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spokesperson comments "it is the job of a spokesman to faithfully represent and advocate for the organization's positions, even when these conflict with their own opinion."
This strongly suggests that Wozniak is not a spokesman, in the usual sense of that word, for Apple.
The Chinese are at least up-front about it, but I've heard talk out of the US financial software area for a long time beforehand as being something that was inevitable.