Tech CEOs attend Amazon-funded "Melania" screening at White House

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/white-house-vip-melania-screening-mike-tyson-tim-cook-1236484037/

by camillomiller • 6 months ago

150 63 6 months ago

On the night of Alex Pretti's execution by Border Patrol, big tech CEOs think it's a great idea to show up at the preview of the most pathetic movie in existence. This goes beyond "having to seat at the table" to change things, like Tim Cook often said. This is high level simping. I am so disgusted. These are the people y'all work for.

Trasmatta• 6 months ago

So many apologists for Tim Apple over the past year, but I think this is just who he is. Gladly embracing fascism and authoritarianism.

iJohnDoe• 6 months ago

Very true. This is why Hitler was surrounded by so many people. They went where the power was. Even if it’s not “who he is”, it is who he became.

The nazis were prosecuted decades later. Tim Cook’s actions shouldn’t be magically forgotten once Trump is out of office.

This pattern has historical precedent. Adolf Hitler’s inner circle included people like Albert Speer, a trained architect who was not an early ideologue but aligned himself with power as the regime consolidated control. Speer benefited professionally, became Minister of Armaments, and later claimed political detachment. These claims were rejected at Nuremberg, where he was convicted for his role in the Nazi state.

The fact that alignment can be opportunistic rather than ideological did not absolve responsibility then, and it should not automatically do so now. Accountability is not erased simply because a political era ends.

dissent4• 6 months ago

There's a big difference between being a party member actually in a government position (war related, no less), and being a businessman surviving under that regime. You're not only making an absurd comparison, you're calling for punishment for somebody who hasn't even remotely broken any laws. Can't you see you're being authoritarian?

JohnFen2• 6 months ago

Even if it’s not “who he is”

We are what we do.

codyb4• 6 months ago

Yea, Apple's decision to have its CEO embrace fascism has really destroyed a ton of my goodwill towards the company and I'm actively looking for alternatives, delaying further purchases, and encouraging others to do the same.

Doesn't help that they appear to have shot all of their UX designers into the sun judging by the most recent iOS and MacOS upgrades.

bigyabai2• 6 months ago

Don't forget that he did it for Trump's first admin too. Cooperation with the government seems to be an imperative beyond the CEO's control.

deepfriedchokes• 6 months ago

Capitalists only care about capital. Witness how fast the DEI stuff was jettisoned once it was determined to be unprofitable under the current administration.

JuniperMesos3• 6 months ago

DEI programs were (largely) incentivized by one political faction in the United States primarily via legal rather than market mechanisms, and in response to this a rival political faction explicitly ran on undoing those legal mechanisms to disincentivize DEI programs.

Of course one of the ways the government can enact policy is by making something cheap or expensive for firms participating in capitalism to do, which incentivizes their behavior; but characterizing DEI programs as something that corporations jettisoned because it was determined to be "unprofitable under the current administration" ignores the fact that the current administration explicitly promised to end DEI programs in a political campaign in a democracy and then won an election.

nicbou• 6 months ago

Here’s to the crazy ones

smrtinsert• 6 months ago

It's pathetic on many levels but I cant shake the most obvious one to me, the nerds are being forced to worship the school bully and his girl

tecoholic• 6 months ago

Wow. That’s a breakdown I will remember for a long time.

greyface-• 6 months ago

being forced to

Choosing to.

mikeyouse3• 6 months ago

Forced means something else when you’re among the most rich and powerful people on earth - they chose to do this. It’s far more demeaning and should haunt them to their graves.

CamperBob2• 6 months ago

Bezos can afford anything on Earth, but he can't afford to alienate Trump. Tariffs could end Amazon overnight.

Same is true for Musk, whose fortune hinges on government largesse and regulatory collegiality.

But Apple? Screw those asshats, they have no such excuses.

JuniperMesos3• 6 months ago

I'm honestly pretty tired of the 80s-movie-derived cultural memeplex of nerds getting oppressed by jocks with girlfriends in a high school context. This never accurately characterized any social environment I've been in, and I'm definitely a nerd by disposition. I'm not sure this ever really existed outside the imaginations of hollywood screenwriters. The Breakfast Club is mid, Weird Science is an actively terrible movie, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off is entertaining enough but looms way too large in the American pop culture imagination.

Tim Cook was the salutatorian of his Alabama public high school, majored in industrial engineering in college, and later got an MBA. He sold IBM computers for years and joined Apple in its late 90s doldrums because he was won over by Steve Jobs' charisma within several minutes of his first interview with Jobs. He's an openly-gay fitness nut - meaning he's had a lot of opportunity to have sex in his life (and being famously private, he's not talking about it one way or the other, as is his right).

I frankly don't think Tim Cook is much of a nerd. He's a smart, driven, ambitious business guy who's done a good job at making the gigantic electronics company he's the CEO of sell more products and navigate the political environment it operates in. He's not some underdog hero, and people who actually care about technology for its own sake or who care about computational sovereignty shouldn't attach their sense of identity to anything Apple does.

Supermancho• 6 months ago

Adam from Adam Does Movies can't wait to do a recrap of Melania and my family is excited to see THAT.

treetalker• 6 months ago

Please, God, let Mel Brooks make one more film after Spaceballs 2.

7e• 6 months ago

What could possibly be in this movie other than Melania constantly suing news outlets who ran reports she was a sex worker?

jsbisviewtiful• 6 months ago

and she’s an immigrant.

codyb4• 6 months ago

Boycott all these goobers.

deaux2• 6 months ago

Would be easier if half of HN didn't work for them. There's a reason why these posts get maybe 20 comments on here whereas ones showing similar allegiance to the Party by companies half of HN doesn't work at get 600.

But hey, vests too juicy.

llbbdd3• 6 months ago

and/or come up with some kind of civil disobedience that isn't some antiquated waste of time. boycott? why not just pray about it and see if that works?

marcuschong2• 6 months ago

It's interesting how people I know wouldn't work for my small startup if I, as the boss, aligned myself with such people, but are happy to work for big tech companies that do that. It's amazing what 100 levels of abstraction and money can make you do.

duxup• 6 months ago

I was on a website and got a “sign Melania’s birthday card” advertisement. Super creepy.

zmmmmm• 6 months ago

All I can say is remember. Remember the hypocrisy, the spineless lack of values, the willingness to engage, effectively, in corruption. That should be the permanent understanding you now have of these people.

Next time they are up on stage telling you how great their new product or service is - make sure your first thought is, the person selling me this put corruptly pandering to an authoritarian wannabe dictator ahead of their own integrity. If they have no integrity, why should I trust anything they say about this product they are now pitching to me?

sillyfluke• 6 months ago

It's kind of wild that the founder of this venerable company shared the same stage with Khashoggi's fiance pre-Covid.

It's like attending a memorial of an assasinated Belarus activist and then following it up by attending the premiere of a propaganda movie about Putin's wife.

Someone inside Amazon should keep tabs on the actual non-inflated viewing numbers of this amazing blockbuster for posterity's sake.

Edit: Bezos is not listed as attending (elsewhere Tony Robbins and Mike Tyson are)

defrost• 6 months ago

I'm amazed that Klemen Slakonja's First Lady Melania Trump documentary made it out of Slovenia.

It's certainly a beautiful country.

troyvit• 6 months ago

Oh is this the schlock they can get to play at the Trump Kennedy Center now?

Gud2• 6 months ago

A friendly reminder that the western world too is ruled by oligarchs and is democratic in name only.

It is time to take control over the means of production.

gdubs• 6 months ago

Long way from the "Think Different" era Apple. Been thinking about that campaign this week. Posters of people like MLK, which Jobs had to get permission for from each and every estate for the campaign. When Apple was solidly, unambiguously positioned as the computer for the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones.

If nothing else, there was an opportunity to simply say that given the day's events, a movie screening didn't feel right. Or – "hey there's a gigantic winter storm covering half the country, and I have a lot of logistical stuff to take care of."

bigyabai2• 6 months ago

I dunno. I also think about how Jobs swindled and mistreated Woz time after time, many of the nerds who cut their teeth on the Apple IIc were appalled by the road he took. By the time the Macintosh released, Apple had cemented themselves as a capricious OEM with no interest in serving every minority niche.

Actions like this feel fully contiguous with Jobs' personality, to me. He wasn't afraid to mistreat large swathes of customers, fans or employees if it meant that Apple could cosmetically pull ahead of it's competitors. He didn't feel obligated to fight fair or defend his moral righteousness, and neither does Cook. This is the exact same Apple you always knew, they've just quit virtue signalling.

JuniperMesos3• 6 months ago

Long way from the "Think Different" era Apple. Been thinking about that campaign this week. Posters of people like MLK, which Jobs had to get permission for from each and every estate for the campaign. When Apple was solidly, unambiguously positioned as the computer for the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones.

"Think Different" was an advertising slogan that Apple Computers, a publicly-traded corporation with thousands of employees, paid an advertising company to create in the late 90s in order to promote a certain image of the company, because the leadership at the time thought it would help them sell more computers. And it clearly worked (or at least didn't abjectly fail) because Apple Computers is still around today and is an even larger corporate entity with a much larger market cap.

Whether a marketing campaign succeeds in appealing to you emotionally has nothing to do with whether rebels, misfits, crazy people, or any other category of person would be better off buying and using computer products made by Apple. I've personally never liked Apple products, I've always felt like they took a lot of practical control away from the end user in order to facilitate what Apple leadership thinks the end user _ought_ to want. So I avoid using their products, and I think other people should to, although I respect that the walled garden Apple provides is a computing product some people do find it useful to pay for.

Leadership at Apple computer was probably engaging in political activities some people at the time objected to when those ads were made, just as they are today.

1attice• 6 months ago

Wild that this post is flagged despite explicitly being about the tech industry

mindslight2• 6 months ago

Does anybody else just tacitly hash to "melanoma" ? I'm sure it's a beautiful name in the original Slovenian context, but in the US the only time he hear it is talking about someone who is in a bunch of photographs with Epstein, so it's natural to form some negative associations.

jnaina• 6 months ago

Not sure why such an interest in this poor remake of "Pretty Woman". I'd rather wait for SpaceBalls 2.

Tech CEOs attend Amazon-funded "Melania" screening at White House

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