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Tim Cook isn't the problem, capitalism is

https://victorwynne.com/tim-cook-capitalism/
14•joshgolka•5mo ago

Comments

Finnucane•5mo ago
But if customers say, fuck that noise, and stop buying the products, then it harms his company and violates his 'fiduciary duty.' See also: Elon Musk.
taylodl•5mo ago
Musk was a special member of the administration and with DOGE went waaaaaaaay beyond looking out for the interests of Tesla's and SpaceX's shareholders. Musk, through the smokescreen of DOGE, actively undermined federal regulatory agencies who were investigating Tesla and SpaceX. Musk attended political rallies and gestured the sig heil. Musk bankrolled the Trump campaign in a very significant way. This is not what the other tech CEOs are doing.

Musk has put himself in a position where it's very difficult for him to claim "it was just business." That's a large part of why Tesla sales are now tanking.

Finnucane•5mo ago
And now Cook, Zuck, and the rest of those guys are just riding his coattails. Gladly. They seem pretty happy about it. Customers will judge. We have no obligation to the shareholders.
taylodl•5mo ago
That's funny. Here's a list of the attendees:

- Mark Zuckerberg (Meta)

- Tim Cook (Apple)

- Sundar Pichai (Google/Alphabet)

- Satya Nadella (Microsoft)

- Sam Altman & Greg Brockman (OpenAI)

- Sergey Brin (Google co-founder)

- Safra Catz (Oracle)

- Lisa Su (AMD)

- Bill Gates (Microsoft founder)

What are customers going to do, stop using tech? I suppose you can feel good about Intel. Anyway, you're invited to the White House for a policy discussion involving tech, an industry in which your company is a prominent player, what are you going to do? Let your competitors sway policy?

hunglee2•5mo ago
Arguably capitalism isn't the problem either, because in its purest form the state would simply be a neutral platform, rather than an active participant, in the game of free market competition.

What Trump is doing is putting capital 'under the authority of the state' very similarly to what China did in bringing down in 2020 - cancelling Ant Finance IPO, bring down Jack Ma, breaking the edtech industry, setting salary limits for finance sector etc.

OP is right though - you can't blame Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg or any of the CEO's who are kowtowing to the King. Role of the CEO is to protect shareholder value, and maximally increase revenue and profit. Hard to see how refusing Donald Trump what he demands would support those objectives.

FridayoLeary•5mo ago
They ended their dei programs so quickly that i can only assume they were waiting for an excuse.
hunglee2•5mo ago
yep, double quick time. Spoke with a marketing agency earlier this year talking about 'state of the market' fully expecting downbeat report, only to be told that 'business was going great in 2025'. Upon further probing, it turned out that all of this new business was auditing company digital assets and strip out DEI
znpy•5mo ago
Did people actually believe the whole corporate DEI parade was a real thing?
taylodl•5mo ago
Lessons learned from Bud Light
AnimalMuppet•5mo ago
Maybe those programs only existed because they were kowtowing to the previous king.
FridayoLeary•5mo ago
Exactly my point. DEI is nothing more then soft racism imo and one of the most accepted forms of virtue signalling today. In that case the "king" was the slightly hysterical progressive ideology that's been around since covid.
FridayoLeary•5mo ago
Don't trust them. It's as simple as that. Whether they are pretending to care about social justice issues, or flattering trump, it's all an act. They have clearly shown they will change their moral principles faster than you can change your socks.
taylodl•5mo ago
Don't trust a capitalist? You've been told that for nearly 200 years now. The good thing about what's happening now is the veil has been removed, and people can see the true nature of capitalism now that it has been laid bare. Previous administrations worked hard to make capitalism appear more humane. Well, with Trump that ship has sailed. The good news is that's the spark of realization that can lead to meaningful change.
AnimalMuppet•5mo ago
The veil is less removed now than it was in, say, the 1890s. People then decided that capitalism needed to be regulated, not eliminated. Don't hope for more now.
taylodl•5mo ago
I think people are going to discard it. It'll be interesting to see what people propose to replace it with considering all the alternatives have failed. Maybe you're right and we'll resume with a stricter regulation. At this point though we have bigger fish to fry: Americans have just learned they have no inalienable rights. All their rights are what the government allows them to have. Several people have come to that realization over the lifetime of the US, but now that realization is hitting everyone en masse. How that is dealt with my drive how capitalism is dealt with.
FridayoLeary•5mo ago
That's where you're wrong. Corporations were forced to pick a side in a culture war they wanted nothing to do with. Now they are reverting to their normal position. Dei brings no economic benefit for a company so they dumped it. Nor does criticising the president.

Capitalism should be recognised for what it is: an amoral engine for economic growth, and the best one at that. Companies have no business preaching to the public the opinions of whichever political party is in charge.

JohnFen•5mo ago
> Capitalism should be recognised for what it is: an amoral engine for economic growth

This is exactly why capitalism needs strong and active regulation to protect people from it. Capitalism is, effectively, sociopathic.

Omarchy First Impressions

https://brianlovin.com/writing/omarchy-first-impressions-CEEstJk
1•tosh•4m ago•0 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
1•onurkanbkrc•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Versor – The "Unbending" Paradigm for Geometric Deep Learning

https://github.com/Concode0/Versor
1•concode0•6m ago•1 comments

Show HN: HypothesisHub – An open API where AI agents collaborate on medical res

https://medresearch-ai.org/hypotheses-hub/
1•panossk•9m ago•0 comments

Big Tech vs. OpenClaw

https://www.jakequist.com/thoughts/big-tech-vs-openclaw/
1•headalgorithm•11m ago•0 comments

Anofox Forecast

https://anofox.com/docs/forecast/
1•marklit•12m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How do you figure out where data lives across 100 microservices?

1•doodledood•12m ago•0 comments

Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Model

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13030
1•mnming•12m ago•0 comments

Rotten Tomatoes Desperately Claims 'Impossible' Rating for 'Melania' Is Real

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/rotten-tomatoes-desperately-claims-impossible-rating-for-m...
3•juujian•14m ago•1 comments

The protein denitrosylase SCoR2 regulates lipogenesis and fat storage [pdf]

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.adv0660
1•thunderbong•15m ago•0 comments

Los Alamos Primer

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/los-alamos-primer/
1•alkyon•18m ago•0 comments

NewASM Virtual Machine

https://github.com/bracesoftware/newasm
1•DEntisT_•20m ago•0 comments

Terminal-Bench 2.0 Leaderboard

https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard/terminal-bench/2.0
2•tosh•20m ago•0 comments

I vibe coded a BBS bank with a real working ledger

https://mini-ledger.exe.xyz/
1•simonvc•21m ago•1 comments

The Path to Mojo 1.0

https://www.modular.com/blog/the-path-to-mojo-1-0
1•tosh•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I'm 75, building an OSS Virtual Protest Protocol for digital activism

https://github.com/voice-of-japan/Virtual-Protest-Protocol/blob/main/README.md
5•sakanakana00•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built Divvy to split restaurant bills from a photo

https://divvyai.app/
3•pieterdy•29m ago•0 comments

Hot Reloading in Rust? Subsecond and Dioxus to the Rescue

https://codethoughts.io/posts/2026-02-07-rust-hot-reloading/
3•Tehnix•30m ago•1 comments

Skim – vibe review your PRs

https://github.com/Haizzz/skim
2•haizzz•31m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Open-source AI assistant for interview reasoning

https://github.com/evinjohnn/natively-cluely-ai-assistant
4•Nive11•31m ago•6 comments

Tech Edge: A Living Playbook for America's Technology Long Game

https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2026-01/260120_EST_Tech_Edge_0.pdf?Version...
2•hunglee2•35m ago•0 comments

Golden Cross vs. Death Cross: Crypto Trading Guide

https://chartscout.io/golden-cross-vs-death-cross-crypto-trading-guide
3•chartscout•38m ago•0 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
3•AlexeyBrin•40m ago•0 comments

What the longevity experts don't tell you

https://machielreyneke.com/blog/longevity-lessons/
2•machielrey•42m ago•1 comments

Monzo wrongly denied refunds to fraud and scam victims

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/feb/07/monzo-natwest-hsbc-refunds-fraud-scam-fos-ombudsman
3•tablets•46m ago•1 comments

They were drawn to Korea with dreams of K-pop stardom – but then let down

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgnq9rwyqno
2•breve•49m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI-Powered Merchant Intelligence

https://nodee.co
1•jjkirsch•51m ago•0 comments

Bash parallel tasks and error handling

https://github.com/themattrix/bash-concurrent
2•pastage•51m ago•0 comments

Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

https://fabiensanglard.net/compile_like_1997/index.html
2•billiob•52m ago•0 comments

Reverse Engineering Medium.com's Editor: How Copy, Paste, and Images Work

https://app.writtte.com/read/gP0H6W5
2•birdculture•57m ago•0 comments