They love their dictator until it backfires, that's a quite old story.
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.
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.
And simple logic says that morally gray can't be as bad as morally dark, but hey, whatever floats your righteousness boat...
You would not want that either.
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 troll. Just flag it and move on.
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.
Vidkun Quisling
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.
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.
We should probably use a different word for Elon-style goals.
"Freedom for me but not for thee" is a far stretch from libertarianism.
Not perfect, obviously, but not this. There was a clear better choice and Trump wasn't it.
And everyone who refused to vote or voted Trump because they saw no difference between the two has to wear that like an albratross around their necks for the rest of their lives. And I pray that they live long enough to feel the consequence of their stupidity close around their necks like a noose.