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Corporate Responsibility · Political Engagement · Reputational Risk · Tech Activism
Top tech executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, and AMD CEO Lisa Su, remained notably silent on the recent fatal shootings of ICU nurse Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents in Minneapolis, contrasting sharply with their vocal condemnation of the George Floyd killing five years prior.
Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and nurse, was shot and killed by federal agents on Saturday. Cook, Jassy, and Su attended a White House screening of "Melania," produced by Amazon MGM Studios, that same evening.
The Trump administration, through Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, blamed Pretti, accusing her of being a domestic terrorist, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed she brought a semiautomatic weapon to a protest, despite no evidence. Minnesota's Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Senator Amy Klobuchar called for federal immigration officers to leave Minneapolis, noting three killings in the city this year, two by federal agents.
Smaller tech leaders, including former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Google AI leader Jeff Dean, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, OpenAI's James Dyett, and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, have publicly criticized the silence. A petition signed by over 400 tech workers from Google, Meta, and Amazon demands CEOs speak out, call the White House to demand ICE leave cities, and cancel company contracts with ICE.
CEOs of over 60 Minnesota-based companies, including Target and UnitedHealth, also called for "immediate deescalation of tensions."
