2025 was a turning point: Being a billionaire is no longer cool
- Reeta Dhar
- 4 days ago
- 14 min read
The remedy to regain public trust is deceptively simple
The second coming
20th of January, 2025: On a freezing winter's day in Washington, Trump was sworn in as the President of the United States of America for the second time. The chill captured the mood of at least half the nation and perhaps, most of the world, as the mad king was once again handed the reins to the most armed nation in the world.
Michelle Obama broke tradition and did not attend the inauguration. She did not put forward some fake excuse either; her absence was a silent protest that spoke volumes. All other dignitaries, accepting of the machiavellian nature of politics took their allocated seats, dressed in the appropriate expression for the occasion.
Amongst them was a surprising new addition; a skulk of tech executives, sitting unabashedly in the front row. It set the tone for what was to come.
The dark art of lobbying
Lobbying politicians has long been considered a dark art. It is however, more mainstream than most realise.
All large corporations, no matter how sanctimonious, have a Public Relations (PR) function of some shape or form. It is these people who deal with the delicate task of cuddling and cajoling politicians, senior public servants and influential journalists. The aim is to sway them towards their side or at least garner some sympathies by bestowing choice favours.
A wide range of tactics is used to ‘build relationships’. Most are fairly innocuous such as donating to political campaigns or causes, sponsoring community events in select electorates or providing exclusive newsworthy content to a journalist. Then, there are the more lucrative enticements such as offering high paying speaking engagements, all-expense-paid junkets to exotic locations overseas, invitations to the corporate boxes for iconic sporting events, luxurious gifts and even the promise of a cushy consulting or board role on retirement.
All heads of PR understand that they exist solely to protect the company, the Executive and the Board from any reputational damage. Communication upwards is only done on a ‘need-to-know’ basis; when things go awry, CEOs and Chairmen like to have plausible deniability.
The access and influence garnered over time is rarely flaunted. When it does get discussed, it is along the shadowy corridors of the boardrooms where there is no fear of formal documentation.
Lobbying has always been ‘unofficial, official business’, done on the quiet – until recently.
The not so quiet one
Musk has never been one for doing anything quietly or indeed, following the ‘playbook’. He wasn’t going to let lobbying be an exception.
Whilst everyone was paying lobbyists to quietly wine and dine politicians and journalists, Musk went ahead and very publicly, bought himself a president. For a short while, the gamble paid off handsomely — the access he acquired was of a historic scale (as was the damage that he caused).
More critically – His forthright approach emboldened other tech bros to follow suit.
They attacked it with gusto; frothing at the mouth as they did the rounds on right-wing podcasts, decrying everything from DEI to censorship and AI safety — anything that seemed remotely 'woke' was immediately revoked from their offices and hallways.
They did not hold back on showering Trump with their gratitude either. The obsequious adulation that followed would have made even their sycophantic AI chatbots cringe …
Complicit in silence
Most other leaders in corporate America did not follow suit: They did not seek to publicly engage with or win the President's favour in the same shameless way as the 'broligarchy'.
However, they did not choose to protest either – not even when the administration rolled out a series of damaging economic policies that wreaked havoc on key industries like agriculture, retail, tourism and the clean energy sector.
When faced with the reality of dealing with a petty and vengeful president with a fragile ego, most chose the path of least resistance. Their best hope was to fly under the radar.
Regardless, not all traditional companies managed to escape the ire of the Trump administration. Law firms, universities and media companies were amongst the first to be targeted. For the most part, they too decided to capitulate, settle and cut their losses — even when it was clear that they had done nothing wrong and had a good chance of winning the lawsuit.
Presidents and politicians tend to have a shorter lifespan than corporations, so one could argue that this is the more pragmatic path to take. Assuming Trump does not upend the constitution, he’ll have no more than four years in office. Corporations on the other hand can live on forever. Four years of pain is something most can put up with.
Regardless, it’s hard to deny that corporate America’s silence makes them complicit. Although they may walk away with some dignity intact (for not behaving like sycophants), none of these Executives will be winning an award for courage anytime soon.
Sycophantic sheep
So why did the tech bros not stay out of the whole political mess and choose to maintain a dignified silence as well? Why come out so overtly about one’s political beliefs and leanings?
Most mysteries involving human behaviour can be solved by following the money …
The rest of the tech bros copied Musk because it was incredibly profitable to do so — and they are already reaping the benefits (more on that later).
Seeing other folks from Musk’s generation, whether it be Altman, Zuckerberg or Huang turn into obsequious toadies was no surprise; these are incredibly opportunistic people who will do what it takes to achieve their business objectives – that is why their shareholders love them.
But when respected industry veteran, Tim Cook, turned, it felt like a decidedly dark chapter in corporate America’s history.
Original sin
Valued at approximately $4 trillion dollars, Apple is amongst the four most valuable companies in the world. This valuation is not driven by raw economic value of its iPhone or Mac or any other product per se, but by the premium the brand is able to command.
Apple stands for more than tech — at least it used to.
When Steve Job returned to Apple in 1997, he launched one of the most iconic branding campaigns of all time: ‘Think Different’.
At the time, Apple overtly celebrated the ‘crazies, radicals and rule breakers’, people who changed our world. The sort of people they profiled in the campaign was Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and Einstein — Visionaries, scientists and peaceful warriors.
It sent a clear message about what the company believed in and stood for — and it was inspiring.
Not only did this spur innovation within Apple but helped it become the standard device for the creative industry, a status symbol right across the world and perhaps, the first cult like following for a corporation. People were willing to pay whatever Apple charged, because it was Apple.
Jobs remained the driving force in Apple until he stepped away due to ill health in 2011. He handpicked Cook to replace him, mentoring him for years before recommending him to the Board. So, seeing Tim Cook turn into yet another obsequious toady was dismaying to many.
As I read about Tim Cook handing Trump a gold trophy, I could not help but think that Jobs would be turning in his grave ... Or would he?
Why did Cook turn?
Cook’s turn to the dark side comes down to one thing: Tariffs. In particular, the punitive tariffs imposed on China (that changed over 15 times through the course of 2025).
Apple makes a lot of stuff in China. A punitive tariff on goods manufactured there would have forced Apple to relocate. With India and rest of Southeast Asia also caught up in Trump’s ever changing trade war, Apple would have had little choice but to relocate to the US – at enormous expense.
Even if Apple, out of some nationalistic sense of pride or responsibility, had been willing to make such an investment, it would have taken decades to execute.
In a 2017 interview with Fortune Magazine, which has since gone viral on social media, Tim Cook was justifying the decision to manufacture in China by highlighting the difference in availability of skill labour. The specific example he gave regarded tooling (and I am paraphrasing):
‘In US one would struggle to fill a room with tooling engineers. In China one could fill multiple football stadiums.’
What he conveniently left out was the part that Apple had played in creating this skilled workforce in China, and indeed their electronics manufacturing industry …
Made in China, thanks to Apple
In his book, Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee lays out the story of how Apple single handedly stood up the advanced electronic manufacturing industry in China. The extent of investment they made in capital and labour in China since moving operations there in the early 2000s is staggering.
In an interview with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, McGee explained that by 2015 Apple was investing $55bn a year in China with the spend including investment in machinery (for factories manufacturing their products) as well as training workers. In total, they have trained a total of 28 million workers in China.
According to McGee, the vocational school in China is Apple.
The suppliers and workers that Apple spent the past two decades training, now power China’s high tech manufacturing sector. Encouraged by Apple itself, these factories have now diversified and service other home grown Chinese mobile companies like Huawei (that directly compete with Apple) and high tech verticals like EV, drones and potentially weapons industries.
(There is a lot more to this fascinating saga so do read the book.)
Imagine being Apple — and having to walk away from all that investment and being expected to repeat the feat in the US, where everything is not only more expensive but also comes with tighter labour laws. Then there is the reality that most Americans don’t want to work in factory jobs either.
Even if it were possible to overcome all these difficulties, it would still take a decade to replicate the manufacturing capacity they currently have in China.
Furthermore, if the tariffs applied to them (like it does to every other business in the US), whilst they are making all these investments, they’d still have to pay punitive tariffs to access the lucrative American market to sell their iPhones and MacBooks which are made in China.
The premium margin they enjoy on their products today would have all but evaporated.
The Chinese government would also not sit quietly if Apple started staging an exit. They would probably face some sort of retaliation and lose access to the larger and more lucrative Chinese consumer market, where owning Apple products is also a status symbol.
It’s not difficult to see why putting one’s pride aside and capitulating to Trump became necessary: Apple needed a blanket exemption from the tariff and Cook was willing to make a deal with the devil to get it.
Profit before country
Trump had sold tariffs to his base with the promise that they would bring manufacturing jobs back to America.
Apple being one of the largest companies in the world, with more spare cash than they know what to do with (except buy back shares), is a US born and bred company that is in the best position possible to deliver on this promise – Even if they did not have the corporate will to do so, the tariffs would have forced their hand.
Had Trump been sincere, Apple would have been the last company he would have exempted from the tariffs.
By giving Apple a free pass, Trump sold out the very people who had voted for him – and all it seemingly took was a pathetic golden statue and an empty promise for investment.
Tim Cook’s pledge to invest $500bn in the US to create a meagre 20,000 jobs has been widely criticised as being dubious. It is unclear where such an investment would be made (if at all) but if the low job count is anything to go by, it would probably be in data centres. Another guess proffered by McGee is that it includes money spent on share buybacks in the US.
After all these years, it appears that Apple still supports the crazy ones, the radicals and the rule breakers that want to change the world … just not the ones that want to change it for the better.
Band of grifters
Apple is not the only beneficiary in this saga.
Every tech executive gathered at the inauguration has walked away with some lucrative contract and/or favourable policy decision that have delivered their companies (and by extension, them) an incredible windfall.
Take the forced sale of TikTok at an eye-watering discount to the Ellison and other Trump cronies, for example. Or the removal of restrictions on the sale of AI chips to China, which directly benefits Nvidia while potentially risking America’s national security. Palantir, SpaceX and Blue Origin have also benefited from lucrative government contracts and access to Americans' sensitive personal data.
Ever since the tariff policies were announced, rumors of dubious trades, market manipulation and insider trading have also been milling about. It is unlikely that the Trump-appointed head of SEC will pursue any of these allegations any time soon.
Finally, there is the double dealing by the Trumps. The meme coin has made Trump billions in profits. We will never know who is buying into this dubious financial instrument but the obvious conflicts it creates should be worrying Americans.
The grifts involving the rich getting a lot richer does not bother me as much: These people already have more money than they will be able to spend in their lifetimes – and it is abundantly clear that no amount of money will fill whatever holes they are trying to fill ...
What irks me is when their grifts start to impinge on public safety.
Most dangerous grift of them all
One of the most consequential policies the tech sector has been lobbying for is a ban on regulating AI.
Multiple pieces of legislations have been drafted, passed, challenged and failed. States started taking charge of the matter themselves only to be met with an Executive Order not to.
Whilst these efforts are being justified in terms of preventing a patchwork of inconsistent state based legislation, it is amply clear that the tech industry would prefer an open slate to do what they want with AI.
Legislating emerging technology is no doubt a tricky business. The aim with any legislation would be to leave room for the potential upsides of AI to be realised whilst managing for the risks and downsides.
Given how polarised the upside and downside of AI is — create heaven on earth versus an apocalyptic end to all of humanity — regulating it appropriately is going to be a massive challenge.
This is precisely why government, industry as well as the brightest mind across all fields in academia need to collaborate closely as the world moves towards developing smarter and smarter AI:
There needs to be absolute transparency on how AI is being developed.
There needs to be a global effort to collaborate around the development.
Safety testing needs to be part and parcel of the development.
Key design parameters need to be developed with the best minds, not just in AI but also in philosophy, ethics and science.
This should not be an operation that is undertaken in secret labs that exist purely for commercial gain — that is not how it started anyway.
Silicon Valley did not invent AI: The underlying technological breakthroughs that enabled AI like neural networks, machine learning as well as training on large datasets were all made in publicly funded university labs, by publicly funded scientists and academics.
The reason why a given LLM is able to produce a half sensible answer to a given question is because some human, at some point in time, noted it down somewhere: In a book or a magazine or newspaper or since the internet, in a blog, social post or YouTube video.
All Silicon Valley has done is scale the design, data sets (most of which is stolen), training and slapped a business model on it.
The idea that this gives them the exclusive rights to determine the future of this very consequential tech is ludicrous. Yet this is what the tech billionaires are kissing Trump’s bloated ass for.
Why is this important?
We are at a fairly benign stage of AI development and deployment.
Most of us have played with AI chatbots and tested them out in our respective professional arenas by now. We know that they cannot replace us – yet.
But given the investment that is pouring into the sector, it is safe to say that the technology will keep getting better. It is only a matter of time that the potential is realised and AI, especially when combined with robotics, may become capable of replacing majority of the mundane physical and intellectual work that employs the vast majority of humans today.
This is unlikely to transpire in the short to medium term: The more scientifically oriented AI founders, Ilya Sutskever and Demis Hassabis, have all but dismissed the idea that scaling LLMs alone will lead to general intelligence (1) (2). They think a few more breakthroughs are required and that will probably take another five to ten years.
Unlike Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, Sutskever and Hassabis don't have to keep raising insane amounts of capital to keep their enterprises going. One is backed by Google and another is working on the next iteration of the technology in a scaled down environment so does not need massive amounts of capital. This alone makes their pronouncements infinitely more reliable than that of Altman and Amodei, who not only chose to build-up the hype around AI, but are doing what they can to keep it going.
In the lead-up to this stage, there are many choices that will need to be made around the design and development of the technology that will pose very real ethical and moral quandaries.
Consider for example, what will happen when AI becomes capable of replacing large portions of the labour force:
How and when should that be deployed, if at all?
What of the human workers? How will they cope with loss of jobs, meaning and income?
Is it OK for a handful of companies to own the value of all productive human capital? What about the concentration of human knowledge, skills and experience?
What are the risks of relying solely on proprietary AI models for productive labour and knowledge? Will the cost savings corporations make on labour be lasting? Or will the AI oligopolies jack up subscriptions over time?
How will the economic, social and political power of AI oligopolies be managed?
How will governments make up for the revenue shortfalls from taking workers' wages? How will they fund public service and social security?
What support will be provided to displaced workers? Can the jobs be replaced? Can workers be retrained? What will replace work?
How will the multi-generational impacts of things like social welfare be managed?
What will determine whether we end up in utopia or dystopia?
As smart as the folks leading AI companies today may be, say in their given domain, none of them has the knowledge, education or experience to handle the intellectual, ethical and moral dilemmas that are yet to come.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that these men don’t have the character or moral fibre to deal with these questions either …
Left to their own devices they will do what all executives are legally obliged to do - maximise shareholder value — regardless of the cost to society.
It’s a shame really
I’m not a hater of tech.
My entire corporate career as a Strategist involved driving technology enabled change and innovation. I spent my final three years in the corporate world, creating a specialised banking service that specifically catered for the needs of tech founders in Australia.
Even though I never fully drank the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid, like many others I found the world of technology inspiring: VCs were cool. Jobs was a hero. Musk was a genius. Zuckerberg always seemed a bit shifty but at least he had a youthful idealism about ‘bringing the world closer together’. Never heard of Altman…
Being a successful tech founder used to bestow instant credibility. It elevated one’s social standing. Unlike the rest of us plebs, they weren’t slaves to their salaries. They were taking on enormous personal and financial risks to change the world — The implicit assumption was for the better.
So witnessing the self-interested (and at times unhinged) behaviour of veterans of the tech world in the past year has been, to say the least, dispiriting.
Seeing the shift in public sentiment towards these folks in the US has been especially telling as entrepreneurship, innovation, wealth and success had historically been celebrated in the US at levels akin to idolatry.
The silent complicity with which the rest of the corporate world went along with the mayhem unleashed by Trump has also felt dismaying.
It all but confirmed that mission statements and corporate values mean nothing. What matters at the end of the day is maximising shareholder value. Everything else is just there for decoration.
It’s a shame really as there is much good that corporations and in particular, tech companies can still do. Indeed they are best positioned to address some of the entrenched problems in our world.
The only thing that gives me hope is that it’s never too late to change...
Even the sullied reputations of tech bros can be redeemed — The remedy to regain public trust is deceptively simple:
Take accountability for your products and invest in product safety
Follow basic business ethics such as:
Pay workers fair wages
Don’t steal other people’s IP
Don’t engage in predatory pricing
Don’t bribe corrupt politicians
Pay your fair share of taxes
One can only hope that they don’t take too long to pivot.
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Written by Reeta Dhar. Cover Art by Darren Pryce.
Revised edition produced at the historic Lanificio Cazzola in Schio, Italy
Revised edition first published by the Vitalis Magazine in September 2026
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