The Moral Cowardice of Tech Leaders

In praise of Scott Galloway

In these dark times when the leader of the free world votes with Russia at the United Nations and tries to grab Ukraine’s mineral reserves as the price of military aid I find comfort in a podcast called Pivot. It features Kara Swisher, probably the most influential tech journalist of the last two decades, and Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing who is also an entrepreneur who has made big successful bets on tech investments.

The podcast is a great way of keeping up with the tech scene in the company of two funny, well-connected and often profane hosts. But lately it has been mainly about one thing - the Trump administration and the cast of grotesque characters, led by Elon Musk, assembled to deliver a wrecking ball to American government and the global reputation of the United States.

The duo don’t hold back in their contempt for the crude and often criminal methods of the Trump gang. They have turned their fire in particular on Elon Musk’s DOGE, describing the activities of the Department of Government Efficiency as a coup and calling the young acolytes the Tesla tycoon has unleashed on every government department “arrogant little pricks.” Musk hit back, calling Swisher and Galloway "cruel, mean and deceitful human beings" who were "threatening" young DOGE professionals.

But in the latest podcast, Galloway’s fire is aimed not at the full-throated Trump supporters in the tech world but at those tech leaders who have opted for a quiet life, currying favour with the new regime rather than pushing back.

He says it is easy to see why Apple’s Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sat side by side at the inauguration allowing Trump to say “See, the most powerful, wealthiest tech executives in the world like me” . They rationalised it as maximising shareholder value.

But he says that was just the start of a shakedown which allegedly saw the CEO of Elon Musk’s X threaten government action to block a merger between two advertising businesses if they did not place their clients’ ads on the platform.

He points to Amazon’s “irrational” $40 million deal to buy Melania Trump’s memoir as an example of Trump appeasement and expresses the fear that, just as in Nazi Germany, the interests of the state and business will become intertwined. But then Galloway really sets to work on what he describes as the “lower case cowardice” of the tech leaders.

Of Tim Cook, who has in the past described privacy as a “human right”, he says this about his approach to Trump:

“You might be able to justify it by saying I'm a fiduciary for shareholders, but for the last 20 years, you have been claiming that you're a fiduciary for stakeholders, and American rule of law and decency and democracy is what got you so fucking rich in the first place.”

He wonders what Jeff Bezos might think as his life draws to a close: “Was I an American? Is that thought perhaps going to haunt you on your deathbed? Did I stand up? Did I answer the call? Okay, maybe I would have been worth 90 billion instead of 120 billion, and maybe my shareholders would have been angry..”

History would look back kindly on the tech tycoon who had the courage to defy their shareholders, but he wasn’t holding his breath:

“We're still waiting for one of them to stand up and say, I'm not going to be a brick in the fascist wall. “

As this magnificent rant drew to a close I found myself applauding - but also sadly aware how naive it was to expect moral leadership from CEOs. Look at Google, which dumped its “don’t be evil” mantra long before Trump made it sound “woke”.

Then I remembered a company I had spent a lot of time with as a business reporter years ago. BP had been through plenty of reputational challenges over the years but had been forward thinking, both in trying to make its workforce more diverse and in attempting to move its focus from oil to renewable energy.

But when I turned on the radio this morning one of the headlines was about BP. It was making big cuts in its renewables investments and switching back to oil and gas. Oh, and it was complying with Donald Trump’s order for it to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Thank goodness it no longer calls itself “British Petroleum”, though maybe I should not give its board ideas - “American Petroleum” would certainly be a better bet to get an invitation to the White House.