Posted by belter 2 days ago
> Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/tim-cook-apple-donate-1-mil...
Would cancel my Apple family plan but like my family, instead, bought a refurbished second hand iPhone instead of buying a new one recently.
Will be speaking with my wallet in a variety of ways, along with calling, marching, etc. We start here... let's see where we end up. The moment is _now_.
Trump dropped his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him after the insurrection.[1] They want to avoid an antitrust trial.[2] They want Trump to pressure the EU into allowing surveillance capitalism.[3] They want influence in negotiations over Section 230.[4]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-meta-settlement-zuckerberg-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-ceo-zuckerberg-lobbies...
[3] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
[4] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/section_230_bipartisan_b...
He basically paid $1M to try and save thousands of jobs at Apple (and of course increase Apple’s value)
Apple is the 8-th largest company in the world by revenue [1]. If they wanted to oppose the admin, they would be uniquely positioned to do so. That they choose not to tells me that either they support the admin or that they choose not to. That they chose the option that shows active support for the admin has a negative impact on my ability to empathize with their CEO.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by...
Shareholders can sue, yes, but in the U. S. you can sue anyone for anything, and "suing" is not the same as "winning".
It is also entirely true that you cannot just do whatever you personally want with shareholder money.
The truth here is in the middle.
Apple (well, Cook) certainly did not have to donate to him. But the fact of the matter is that they will have to work with this administration to run their business over the next 4 years, and I am sure that $1m is a small investment to make Cook's life easier.
This is true. But it has nothing to do with fiduciary duty.
If, hypothetically, Cook said "fuck this administration, we don't like their politics, we're not going to work with them", their shareholders could and probably would sue them. Those shareholders could make a case that Cook was asking of his own political interests, point to other organizations that did make exemption deals, and sue for losses in their share value. The reason for this is not entirely wacky: when you borrow someone's money to do something, you can't do your own pet projects with it.
Now that, of course, doesn't mean that Cook had to donate. But Cook is businessman himself, runs Apple to make money, and doing that is his modus operandi.
In this case, it's already happening:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/02/nyc-sue-tesla-over-elon-musk-...
But fundamentally, shareholder maximization is the goal stated by both common business sense and legal rulings. I personally believe that long-term optimization rather than short term is a more successful strategy. But in the short term the board could remove him for going against the feds. Shareholders could sue if it caused a drop in value or impacted global operations. Caused by I don't know, tariffs that could have been avoided with a corrupt monetary contribution.
I'd love to actually see a CEO refuse to grease the palm and them get sued for not doing something corrupt. Would be a case to follow.
The point is, as I understand it, that CEOs of publicly traded corps are not afforded the freedom required to make an ideological stand and keep their job.
This is something that should be expected in an absolute monarchy, not a democracy.
While that might sound like an improvement (and kind of is as at least we're getting more honest), I also view it as a big regression. At least when there's perceived shame in being corrupt, people aspire to be better. When it just becomes routine, I fear it's the beginning of the end.
I don't think he "supports" or is "against" this administration, I think it's much simpler: he does not care. I know this is cynical, but if the last three years in the software world has taught us anything, it seems like these tech CEOs regard their employees as expendable, and they're willing to change their political allegiances when they feel like it.
Maybe all of us would do that if put into this position, I don't know, no one wants to give me billions of dollars to run this experiment. Regardless, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.
No. Reject this.
Tim Cook is going to find out very soon what happens to anyone who makes a deal with Donald Trump: he gets what he wants, and they don't get paid.
> I’m sure he doesn’t support the admin
Why, are you a personal friend of his?
The billionaries are the only people who can actually apply a meaningful level of practical opposition to autocratic rulers. Instead they chose to bend the knee, because they think it better fits their self-interest. Which is what their Russian counterparts did with Putin 20 years ago, and where are they now? Either confined inside a pariah state, or dead.
If Tim Cook gave you a million dollars, would it be fair to say he doesn’t support you?
It’s silly the kind of gymnastics we engage in to preserve our mental models. The facts are the facts.
At which point does the ordinary MAGA hat realize Trump isn't working for them?
Also, with everything being written down nowadays (on your social media), changing your opinion means inviting mockery of past comments being dug up to be flung at you. Then again, the idiots in power seem to have developed a thick skin for this.
A little over a month ago: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/g-s1-50605/conspiracy-theorie... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194910
This has to be one of the most damaging things about social media, in my opinion. I never really understood why changing your mind about something as you get new information is looked down on and mocked, but it is.
Or, "I do my own research".
It's a concerning vision for the country.
May I ask, how do you know this? Does she say that about her own motivation? If not, why would she say she does it?
I've spent decades having to deal with this person. I assure you that I am not misrepresenting her.
They never changed their mind.
A huge amount of our current law was built by segregationists.
The tyranny of being forced to treat black people equally.
Countless communities across the US chose to destroy their infrastructure and amenities (specifically community pools) rather than allow their families to mingle with black people. There's an entire, well documented era of "white flight".
It's a common refrain by conservative voters that "The democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", but note they've been saying this for decades, so the ones that claim "identity politics" are the reason are wrong. Meanwhile they adored Reagan's fiscal policy, which was adopted wholesale by democrats after Reagan's landslide election proved any other fiscal policy was unacceptable to Americans. So nope, that also can't be what people mean by "abandon blue collar workers".
If you follow those claims back, they are from the civil rights era.
When people say "Democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", whether they realize it or not, they are saying "Democrats abandoned the WHITE blue collar worker by supporting black equality and integration".
This is evident if you look at the Democrat politicians who moved to the Republican party between the civil rights era and Reagan, and why they did so. They specify the civil rights act. Strom Thurmond openly switched to the republican party claiming that the Democrat's support and passing of the civil rights act and voting rights act meant they "no longer represented people like him"
This is also clear if you understand the history of black people in the south. It was a core part of southern "heritage" and history that white people were inherently superior to black people. It was a common topic of Sunday sermons during the civil war era for pastors to remind their congregation that it was God's Will that the black man be enslaved by the white, since they were barbarians and the White man was supposed to guide them. This is not an exaggeration.
"History not hate" is a contradiction, because the history WAS hate. Casual, institutional, systemic hate.
Republicans and conservative states have endeavored to not teach this, for decades. People in the south are genuinely taught that the North started the Civil War (outright false), that slavery wasn't the issue (False, several states explicitly submitted documents saying their reasoning for secession was to protect the institution of slavery), and that it was a "state's rights" issue (False, the slave states did not care about states rights, as they attempted to enforce Slave Catching laws in Free states by using federal authority, ie the exact thing they were critiquing the north for, and more importantly, the Confederate government openly talked about dropping the Facade of "states rights" now that they had their own government and could just install an authoritarian system that guaranteed slavery as an institution).
You can read all these Confederate government documents yourself. They were not shy about their intentions because it was a genuinely held belief that the white man was better than the black man.
“They know what they’re doing.” Is all I get from this baloney.
With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.
I was also at the gun range last week and overheard a conversation between two Trump supporters. They were outraged by his behavior since taking office, and said outright "if we had to vote again right now, half of us wouldn't vote for him".
Trying to say "I was wrong" after years of making your whole life, social circle, etc. about whatever thing you were wrong about is incredibly hard. It takes a very strong mental to do that. And, I wager for some/most people who fall deep into any cult-like movement (whatever it may be: conspiracies, etc.), they didn't start with a super strong mental fortitude in the first place, making it even more difficult.
It's almost as if the scope of the corruption and incompetence is so extensive that there isn't enough time to reflect on the misinformation process that everyone was so focused on for so long.
Obviously not everyone succumbed to it but even today the coverage in major outlets is completely distorted. Media just accept what the administration is saying as if it still has some kind of verdicality by virtue of power, a historically unprecedented example of the fallacy of appeal to authority. People constantly arguing that the Trump administration won't actually do this or that, that it's all a bluff, and so forth, are similarly misleading.
The discussions about mandates is bizarre to me for this reason, not just because of the tiny magnitude and minority nature of the electoral win, but because Trump and his administration vehemently denied doing exactly what they are currently doing. They dismissed it as insane paranoid ramblings of a deficient left. It's not just that they are failing to keep an electoral promise, they are doing the exact things they denied that they would do, and criticized their opponents for claiming they would do.
I guess I bring this up because it seems to me a lot of people have basically been lied to. Being a victim has its own shame and reluctance but it seems like a more tractable — and accurate in many cases — way to engage with some people than them being wrong.
So, never.
Everything bad is blamed on the "others", and the solution is more Trump.
We can only hope enough of the rest of people who supported him will figure it out eventually.
I hope Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple. Looks like we'll be trusting their judgement quite a bit going forwards.
It's a $3T company. It got there by extracting the maximum possible from customers, app developers, and labor. They are well known for exploiting offshore workers [1] many times over. They force customers to upgrade off working hardware. They force customers to buy multiple devices when one could do the job. There are monopoly complaints world over. Customers who are happy with this have Stockholm Syndrome.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/china-ap...
The west should copy this, nets are known to prevent a lot of suicide, in general people don't immediately go and try again.
2) the suicide rate at the foxconn factory was, even before the nets, lower per capita than the province in which it is situated. using your logic, the foxconn factory simply existing prevents deaths that would have otherwise happened if it did not.
i’m all for calling apple on their shit when warranted, but the suicide nets meme needs to die.
That only holds if the foxconn employees were randomly selected from the general population.
Calling out unspoken assumptions can be useful, but it's not a refutation unless the assumptions are unreasonable or demonstrably wrong.
I hope the opposite. Faith is exploitable and leads to complacency and accepting excuses. I hope Americans do not have faith in Apple and that will either make them work harder to earn and keep that trust, or that it’ll lead to the mask coming down. Having trust in someone covertly deceiving you looks like the worst possible outcome.
With stuff like this, why should we extend them trust?
Faith is a good word to use when discussing the true believers following the fruit factory. The company has been very successful in turning commercial transactions into quasi-religious ceremonies and managed to convince people that they can trust their judgement. Well, yes, you can certainly trust their judgement as long as you realise that their judgement revolves around profit maximisation. While this in itself does not need to be a problem is does become a problem when one half goes into the transaction based on faith with the other half being aware of this.
Don't be deluded, you can trust them just as much/little as you can trust other large vendors. If you like their products you can buy them but it does not make sense to 'trust their judgement' once supervision is lifted since it is not a question if they will abuse this trust but when and the answer is they already have, many times over. Every time they claim their products do not offer freedom of choice because of ${reasons} they abuse this trust because they fail to state that ${reasons} is a constant which is initialised as follows:
const reasons=profit_maximisationOf course
And Hacker News gestalt generally thinks politics is off topic - guess what happens to "disruptors" in a crony capitalistic system?
Hacker News and YCombinator, more than anyone, should be at the vanguard of stopping this. It will set innovation back by a decade by the end of the current administration's term.
The most reluctant or the least vocal to comply, maybe, but far from antagonistic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/apple-ceo-tim-cook-and-preid...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-ceo-tim-cook-meet-w...
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-don...
I was also under the impression we're also entering a regulatory climate where amount of regulation isn't so much decreasing (TikTok ban for example is heavy handed), but that big tech has much more involvement in forming that regulation, which is useful for moat-building.
I'm not too knowledgeable on these, it's just the general gist I've been picking up so far this year, looking for correction if I got the wrong idea.
Not op, but yes.
>>>Seems like a forced sale is beneficial to them.
Short term. Long term you are establishing a precedent that you can intervene and take away the power of any large tech player. If it can happen to tiktok it can happen to others.
Im not against tikton ban, but im against it in its current form , since its not for the right reason. (China plays unfair with us corps, we should reciprocate our treatment of their own in our borders. The law instead claims some US patriot act natsec prerogative bs)
The government stepping in and eliminating one of (American) big tech's biggest competitors is an extremely pro-(American)-big-tech move.
> The policies are more anti-regulation, which big-tech wants right now.
Well, yeah. Exactly. They're all on the same team. They want fewer barriers in the way of their quest for more personal power.
The USG forcing a sale of the 3rd largest social media platform to FAANG from China is extremely pro-big-tech.
Also, the most recent administration is seeped with VCs. The Vice President JD Vance is a Peter Thiel protege.
Capital has always sided with populists and always will, because populists reinforce the status quo capital benefits from. You'll see the same thing with ostensibly liberal establishment media organizations. Like their presenters may hate Trump and his administration on the outside, but their owners love the fact that they have millions of viewers re-glued to their televisions for the latest stupid bullshit the White House is pulling, and no matter what they may ideologically disagree on, Ellen DeGeneres and Donald Trump have INFINITELY more in common with one another than either do with any working class person.
To put it short: It's the MONEY son, the MONEY. Oh they'll bicker and spat at one another in public, sure, but most of these folks are perfectly fine with one another when the cameras aren't rolling. They don't give a shit. Rightly or wrongly, wealthy minority folk think they don't need to worry about the reactionary Right, and honestly, they're probably correct given how fixated said reactionaries are on Drag Queens supposedly being a threat to children when it feels like we have daily news stories of cops, clergy, and teachers diddling kids.
https://youtu.be/XI0MUoW28VE?feature=shared
As for apple, their serfdom labor practice during Covid was shockingly public
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/04/04/trump-a...?
(I call it serfdom labor because people were not allowed freedom of movement without threat of imprisonment.)
I see arguments about "this is the way it always has been" as essentially normalizing rampant authoritarian corruption. To me, it's taking projection and accepting it as fact without evidence.
Also, regardless, it seems two wrongs don't make a right, and the appropriate response is to reject it when it it exists.
Because they will insist that "I don't like the guy" right before they participate in a "Trump vs generic democrat" poll where they vote for Trump.