Tech billionaires and CEOs stop pretending to care about you

With Trump in power, the benevolent begrudging is over

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

I’m working on a big news roundup for paid subscribers, which will come out later tonight or tomorrow, but in the meantime, I want to examine the death of the last decade’s past gods and why it’s actually sort of a good thing.

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Putting Up a Fight

The implications for society are probably not good, but it’s been clarifying and maybe even validating to observe the mass migration of so many vainglorious tech CEOs and corporate leaders to Mar-a-Lago, million dollar check in hand, to kiss Donald Trump’s ring and have their acquiescence memorialized in photos and mealy-mouthed social media posts.

Back in my old career, when I covered entertainment and its intersections with politics and technology, I was regularly bombarded with pitches for bespoke social justice initiatives and social impact programs from movie studios, or invites to celebrity charity events underwritten by a brand whose PR company always followed up via email to request a mention in your coverage.

This was the Obama era, when soft progressivism — companies loved to add rainbows to their logos — was en vogue, and we were meant to believe that media conglomerates, consumer brands, and Silicon Valley’s metastasizing beasts really did want to make the world a better place (by tethering us to addictive spyware). Google made “Don’t Be Evil” its public credo, and they all responded to consumer demand by positioning themselves as the standard-bearers of noble capitalism at the outset of the Trump era, during #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and in the wake of the insurrection.

There were earnest corporate statements, one-off boycotts of states with bathroom bans and voter suppression; diversity initiatives; and vows to “do better” when they were caught importing from foreign sweatshops that mass produced suicide or let neo-Nazis plan on their products.

A decade of performative corporate responsibility offered the illusion that the country had taken another leap forward, that setbacks could be overcome with well-meaning hashtags. Most importantly, it suggested that the most powerful corporations and the growing class of celebrity billionaires were decent at their core and that they could organize and oversee society more effectively than the government. Some of it, like the special LGBTQ+ branded products, is still ongoing, but the reality is more clear.

With a vindictive Trump headed back to the White House and a right-wing noise machine ready to pounce on even the slightest perceived hint of human decency, and driven by their own sociopathic sense of victimhood, these unprecedentedly wealthy men have decided that cruelty and recklessness are better investments than surface liberalism and support for the institutions that enabled their rise. They have done away with their acts of begrudging benevolence, from DEI programs to making sure their product isn’t a hive of harassment, hate speech, and domestic terrorism. Not only because they wanted to, but because it’s profitable and legally advantageous for them to do so.

This isn’t to say that Mark Zuckerberg’s long-term vision always included giving UFC boss (and close Trump ally) Dana White a place on the Meta board of directors, but I also doubt that he foresaw himself dressed like a divorced middle-aged man trying to sneak into TRL circa 1999. It’s just that he knows that ending all fact-checking on a site where misinformation has altered the course of global events will please Trump and possibly earn him some leeway when it comes to the right’s war on social media platforms. So what if his LGBTQ employees are now in open revolt over the decision to allow slurs back on public posts?

Jeff Bezos pretended to care about journalism and standing up to Trump’s personal attacks; now he’s trying to crush a union, get tax breaks, and avoid tariffs, so he had to go kiss the ring, too. Same goes for Tim Cook of Apple, a gay man who just met with the president whose judicial appointees want to strip away his basic rights. The pharmaceutical billionaire who rescued the LA Times was once seen as a generous savior of journalism, but now he’s using the paper as a way to suck up to Trump, too.

McDonald’s stayed silent for years as the president of the United States wolfed down their burgers and fries, but now they’ve announced the end of their DEI program. Heartbreaking.

This is where our elected officials should step into the breach, but so many of the politicians who offered a similar kind of broad stroke, buzzword righteousness when it was profitable have also abandoned their pretense of being guided by principle.

Concerned only with power but driven by defensive and overly simplistic understanding of election data, too many Democrats are folding even before Trump takes office. Dozens of House Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act, a police state anti-immigrant bill that tramples all over due process, and senators like Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman (whose wife was an undocumented immigrant) and Michigan’s Elise Slotkin, who rank and file voters sent tens of millions of dollars to get elected, have also indicated their support. Same goes for Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, who currently emails his list multiple times a day looking for re-election money.

Then there are resistance heroes like new California Sen. Adam Schiff, who benefited from the crypto industry plowing $10 million into attack ads against former Rep. Katie Porter and then promptly repaid them by killing a critic’s nomination to the SEC; Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has repeatedly sucked up to Trump, expressing excitement about RFK JR’s nomination to lead HHS and then embracing the idea of annexing Greenland. At the same time, he launched a PAC to raise money to “stand up” to Trump, so beware of those solicitations.

The obvious counter-argument to all of this is that these billionaires and politicians are acting like billionaires and politicians, making decisions that they think will be good for their personal and electoral fortunes. While I have my doubts as to whether aligning with this soulless, incurious moral deviant will actually work out for them, the most obvious justification is absolutely correct and ultimately illuminating.

For years, liberals cheered on corporations that virtue signaled solidarity to expand their consumer base and believed that the new generation of Silicon Valley leaders were ultimately more enlightened and civic-minded. They made fan art for politicians and bureaucrats whose careers are bankrolled by those corporations and industrialists. They thought the norms and institutions would save them from the encroachment of the ruthless social warlords who do not respect the norms or institutions.

And there’s no shame in that, really, because that’s what we were all raised and trained to believe. American exceptionalism went from aspiration to mythos to religion, and we always figured the good guys would step up and win the day.

I do not think that a vast majority of Americans are ready for what’s going to happen over the next few years, nor did they really believe or support the most pernicious parts of Trump’s agenda. But we can’t depend on a dawning of reality or a sudden mass call to action, because too many people who did that the first time are exhausted and lost, at least for now. Cynicism abounds.

So we have to start small, with allies that aren’t simply opportunists with profit motives. The AFL-CIO and SEIU, two giants of labor, have decided to merge again after splitting twenty years ago, and they’re investing heavily in protecting immigrant workers from the coming raids. There are lawmakers who are determined to fortify their states against legal assaults and corporate incursions, and in many cases even expand the rights of residents within their borders.

I’ve written a lot about that already, and it’ll be one of our main focuses over the next few years. In fact, my new report on the effort to protect workers across more than a dozen blue trifecta states, and the opportunities for new wins, was just published — check it out above, and I’ll have much more on what’s in there in the next 24 hours.

The takeaway here isn’t meant to be that we’re all screwed or that change is neigh impossible, and I’m not urging that we be pure idealists when it comes to choosing our representatives or allies. I’m not so much a radical as a realist, and that’s why I’m not advocating for a teardown of the entire system or salting the earth of the Democratic Party (would I like to see those things? sure, but again, I’m a realist).

This is actually, in a twisted way, good news, given the context. The masks are off. We know that these people and their companies don’t care about us, and we can adjust accordingly. It’s all the more reason to support labor and workers.

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