Silicon Valley's Selective Silence

Tim Cook ate popcorn at the White House on Saturday night while Alex Pretti bled out on a Minneapolis sidewalk. The Apple CEO had flown to Washington for a black-tie screening of the Melania Trump documentary, produced by Amazon for a reported $40 million. Champagne flowed. Mike Tyson was there. So was Tony Robbins. In Minnesota, federal agents had just put bullets in a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Before his body was cold, they were calling him a domestic terrorist.

That split screen? It tells you where Silicon Valley's moral compass points now.

The CEOs who showed up anyway

Cook wasn't alone at the White House. Andy Jassy of Amazon had a business excuse, at least. His company bankrolled the documentary and reportedly paid the first lady $28 million for her participation. Lisa Su of AMD made the trip. Zoom's Eric Yuan showed up too. A full roster of executives who'd spent the past year cozying up to the administration, all in one room eating canapés.

Not one of them backed out after Pretti's death hit the news. The screening had been scheduled for months, sure. But reading a room is supposed to be a core executive competency.

"He could have said he had a cold," tech commentator M.G. Siegler wrote about Cook. "He could have said anything."

The optics were brutal enough that even venture capitalist M.G. Siegler, typically measured in his criticism of Apple, declared Cook "captured." His assessment: cowardice or catastrophic judgment. Pick one.

The workers pushing back

Back in San Francisco and Seattle, a different response was taking shape. More than 500 tech employees signed an open letter at ICEout.tech within 48 hours of Pretti's shooting. Google engineers signed. So did people from Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Salesforce. What did they want? Three things: CEOs pick up the phone and call the White House, companies drop their ICE contracts, and leadership stops pretending nothing is happening.

The letter pointed to a precedent. Last October, tech CEOs convinced Trump to call off a planned National Guard deployment in San Francisco. Jensen Huang of Nvidia made calls. So did Marc Benioff of Salesforce. The administration backed down.

"We know our industry leaders have leverage," the letter stated.

Galen Panger works as a researcher at YouTube. He signed the letter and asked a question nobody at the top seems willing to answer: "What future are they asking us to imagine now?"

A rift at Khosla Ventures

Fault lines didn't just run between companies and workers. They cracked open inside firms themselves. Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures, a loud Trump backer, spent the weekend defending ICE on X. His posts claimed "no law enforcement has shot an innocent person." The violence? Blame "illegals committing violent crimes everyday," he wrote. I'm just quoting the man.

Ethan Choi, who also works at Khosla, fired back on X. "Keith doesn't represent everyone's views here at Khosla Ventures, at least not mine. What happened in Minnesota is plain wrong."

Then Vinod Khosla himself weighed in. The firm's founder called out "macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscience-less administration."

So there you have it. Two partners and the founder of the same VC firm, contradicting each other in public, in real time, over whether federal agents executing an American citizen constitutes a problem.

Palantir employees ask uncomfortable questions

Inside Palantir, workers spent the weekend pressing leadership about their company's ICE contracts. The defense tech firm holds $30 million in agreements with immigration enforcement, including a platform called ImmigrationOS that provides "near real-time visibility" into deportation targets.

Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED showed employees questioning both the ethics and business logic of the work.

"In my opinion ICE are the bad guys," one worker wrote. "I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this."

Leadership's response had the same energy as the White House screening: the show must go on. Courtney Bowman, Palantir's global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, linked to an internal wiki defending the contracts. The document acknowledged "increasing reporting around U.S. Citizens being swept up in enforcement action" but argued the company's technology enables "more precise, informed decisions."

When an employee asked whether ICE could build workflows beyond the contract's scope, chief technology officer Akash Jain was blunt: "Yes, we do not take the position of policing the use of our platform for every workflow."

The few who spoke

Some executives broke ranks. Dario Amodei of Anthropic called Minnesota's events "a horror" and tied them to "the importance of preserving democratic values and rights at home." His co-founder Chris Olah, who said he normally avoids political commentary, felt compelled to say something: "A federal agent killing an ICU nurse for seemingly no reason and with no provocation shock the conscience."

Jeff Dean, Google DeepMind's chief scientist, called the shooting "absolutely shameful." He grew up in Minneapolis, he noted. This one hit close.

Yann LeCun ran AI at Meta until he quit late last year to launch his own startup. He posted a single word on X: "Murderers." No context needed.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn reposted criticism of tech leaders' silence and called for basic human decency. Paul Graham, Y Combinator's co-founder, amplified a post from OpenAI's head of global business that asked why executives generated more outrage over California's proposed wealth tax "than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets."

What the Minnesota executives did

Compare the national tech response to Minnesota's own corporate leaders. On Sunday, CEOs from more than 60 local companies, including Target, Best Buy, General Mills, Cargill, and UnitedHealth, signed a letter through the state Chamber of Commerce calling for "immediate de-escalation of tensions."

The letter was careful. It didn't condemn the shooting directly. It didn't name the administration. You could feel the lawyers hovering over every word. But sixty-plus executives signed the thing, which puts them ahead of their San Francisco and Seattle counterparts who couldn't manage even that much. You could tell nobody wanted to be there. Grudging doesn't begin to cover it. Still, they showed up.

Target had particular reason for caution. Two of its Minneapolis store workers, both American citizens, had been detained by ICE earlier this month. The company updated internal guidelines on handling "unannounced immigration-related contacts" and told managers that only senior leadership should interact with federal agents.

Hilton faced its own crisis. The hotel chain removed a Hampton Inn from its system after it refused service to ICE agents. Days later, Hilton backed another property's decision to close temporarily after receiving bomb threats related to officers allegedly booking rooms there.

"A safety and security issue is a different issue," CEO Chris Nassetta said. "It's closed to all."

The calculation that failed

The tech industry's playbook for the second Trump term was supposed to be different from the first. In 2017, engineers organized openly inside Google. Workers protested immigration policies. Companies issued statements.

This time, executives decided silence was safer. Remember the Bud Light mess in 2023? That scared corporate America half to death. Executives figured they'd stick to AI policy wins and regulatory relief. Anything that smells like culture war? Run the other direction. You can follow that logic, even if you find it repellent now.

That calculation assumed a certain stability. It assumed federal agents wouldn't shoot American citizens in the street. It assumed the ask would remain transactional: attend an inauguration, make a donation, keep quiet on social issues.

Minneapolis changed the math. Or should have.

"They helped get this administration elected and then they helped this administration to decimate the norms of the U.S. democratic government," venture capitalist David Hornik said of tech's billionaire class. "Frankly, we're in a situation caused by them."

The documentary that couldn't read the room

The Melania screening proceeded as planned. Guests received commemorative popcorn boxes in black and white. Framed tickets as keepsakes. Cookies bearing the first lady's name. A military band played movie themes. They also performed "Melania's Waltz," a piece composed for this specific film. Swear to God.

Two thousand theaters get the documentary this Friday after Amazon dumped $35 million into advertising. Brett Ratner directed. You probably remember him: sexual misconduct allegations torched his Hollywood career nearly a decade ago. He also shows up in photos from the Epstein files. He appears in photos from the Epstein files. Amazon's offer for distribution rights was reportedly three times the nearest competitor.

Letterboxd users got there first. One-star reviews piled up before anyone outside the White House had even seen the thing. "I really don't care, do u?" posted one reviewer. Melania wore those words on a jacket back in 2018, heading to see detained children. The internet remembers.

That jacket has aged into prophecy. The tech executives at Saturday's screening, smiling for photographs while Minneapolis burned, seemed to adopt its message as corporate policy.

Where this leaves everyone

The Business Roundtable endorsed the Minnesota CEOs' letter. That's something. The Minnesota letter itself called for de-escalation without specifying what that would look like. That's almost nothing. Moral clarity from corporate America? Not here. Not now.

Conversations are happening inside tech companies, though nobody knows where they lead. Workers at Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI have talked about pushing leadership to review defense contracts. Maybe those conversations turn into something. Maybe they die in Slack threads like so many before them.

Trump ordered border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis on Monday to "manage the situation." The administration maintains Pretti was a domestic terrorist. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed on television that the victim brought a semiautomatic weapon "to what was supposed to be a peaceful protest." No evidence supports this.

The facts on the ground: Two people shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis this month. Protests spreading. Over in Congress, Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for homeland security funding. If they don't blink, the government closes. Natural gas above $6 as a winter storm buries half the country.

And somewhere, Tim Cook is probably refreshing his browser, wondering if Apple's tariff exemptions will make it through another news cycle.

Tech built its mythology on disruption. Moving fast. Changing the world. Now its leaders are learning that silence is also a choice. That eating popcorn at a White House screening while someone bleeds out in Minneapolis sends its own message.

People notice who shows up. People notice who stays home. All those executives wanted a seat at the table when big things happened. Now they have it. For whatever that's worth.

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