Some More News - SMN: The Crummy Behavior of Under-The-Radar Tech CEOs

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Hi. In today's episode, we look at some tech CEOs who may not make the headlines as much as your Musks and Zuckersberg, but who nonetheless have a huge (negative) impact on our society with their anti-worker, privacy-shattering decisions. Executive Producer - Katy Stoll Hosted by Cody Johnston Directed by Will Gordh Written by Katie Goldin Edited by John Conway Produced by Jonathan Harris Associate Producer - Quincy Tucker Post-Production Supervisor - John Conway Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales Graphics by Clint DeNisco Head Writer - David Christopher Bell Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11UfnIW-cUtYUR118HEEs4xzwpae9WvxSZGEeGOCs2CA/edit Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews Get hardware that fits your business. Take payments by smartphone, transform your tablet into a point-of-sale system, or use Shopify’s POS Go mobile device. Sign up for a $1/month trial period at https://shopify.com/morenews (all lowercase)

uh hello hello news welcome to more uh some of it i'm news cody gremlin johnston uh just hang on a second sorry i know it's totes unprofesh i'm just i'm writing a primo sheet you know they're called sheets now zeets get zeets or Who cares? I don't know. I mean, I love it, but it's whatever. Anyways, Hitler was not a nice guy. And hashtag, jitter, jitter, I don't know. Well, shucks with an X and darn with a needless apostrophe. I guess I won't do another deep dive into every tiny personal fault Elon Musk insists on making our problem,

which sucks because they're easy to write. They're plentiful. He's got that new hat thing. God, oh, every single day, the man has an abundance of culture-ruining personal problems. But if Musk won't let me shoot my shot, then I guess I'll talk about all the other guys instead.

Did you know there are other garbage tech CEOs? I just learned about this. Apparently, there's a bunch of terrible rich guys who hang out behind the media circus and don't go out of their way to constantly warn everyone that they should not be trusted. Like a bunch of Dilophosaurus with golden parachutes, which is my movie idea, back off!

Operation Dilophosaurus is drop. But first I guess we got to address the, sources drop. But first, I guess we got to address the, guys, guys, I'm not saying Elon font in the room. Terrible tech CEOs that aren't desperate for your attention. Nuts! I said it, didn't I?

You win God, for now. Okay, so here's some more news. Elon is good at getting the bad kind of attention, which is why we've already talked about him on the show before. Here, here, here, and also here. Specifically, he's good at doing dumb and reckless stunts that get him heckled to heck, like how he had a giant strobe X installed at Twitter HQ and then had to take it down, or how he recently reinstated an account that posted child sexual abuse imagery, presumably because it has a ton of followers and is conservative. And while I don't mean to diminish the more dangerous things he's said and done when it comes to Twitter, the anti-Semitism and attack of free speech, for example, too often do we overlook other aspects of Elon Musk.

For example, did you know that, along with him being a rich dork who is desperate for attention, Elon Musk is also a terrible CEO? It's true. Tesla is actually built on a foundation of workplace mistreatment and civil rights abuses and safety violations.

Musk has illegally fired union organizers and threatened to pull stock options for any workers who try to join them. Tesla has also had more OSHA safety violations than any other US automaker. Even the Explodo Crash-O-Matic, which is a car I made up in a dream about writing a comic book that sold really well

and was made into five award-winning films. Musk also likes to go death con three on whistleblowers. In one case, fabricating a reason to call the cops on an employee who spoke to a journalist. Meanwhile, SpaceX has had a few little pratfalls of its own. And of course by pratfall, I mean, spaceships going explodo crash-o-matic in ways that experts say Musk

should have easily predicted and avoided. In one case, the FAA refused to grant SpaceX permission to launch, so SpaceX therefore, they launched anyway. But don't worry, the rocket exploded. But it's hard to focus on every little labor violation or exploding spaceship when there's constantly big goofy stories about Elon in the news.

And that might be his media superpower. He's like a magician at a child's birthday party, distracting you with a spray of colorful scarves while he smacks one of the kids around with his other hand. And the same way he often distracts from his own genuinely insidious leadership, it really seems like Musk also distracts from the terrible actions of other CEOs.

Maybe he's a PSYOP, as Elon would put it when referring to literally anything. A good way to draw focus away from the many misdeeds of these other tech bosses. Of course, most of them just tend to be savvier, flying under the radar, so as to not scare off potential investors who might be hesitant to put their money in the hands of a cartoonish asshole, AKA cowards.

And so we're gonna talk about them all today, or more accurately, a handful that we felt like talking about. And while he's nowhere close to under the radar, let's start with Zuck, just to warm up. Mark Zuckerberg. Taking just one small step away from the center of the spotlight,

Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly and passively benefiting from Musk's antics for a long time now. Like how after Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match, Zuckerberg said, send me location, and seemed to genuinely try to set up an official fight. Musk resisted attempts to pin down both Zuckerberg and an official location or date, citing the fact that he's going to need an MRI and possibly surgery beforehand

and that he'd first like to do a practice round to which Zuckerberg publicly wrote, I think we can all agree Elon isn't serious and it's time to move on. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Zuck almost sounds like the cooler dude in that situation until you remember he's trying to get another tech CEO

to follow through on their promise of a public cage match for publicity for them. Mark has never really charmed any segment of a public cage match for publicity. For them. Mark has never really charmed any segment of the public or any real life acquaintance for that matter, or the assistant he pays specifically to be charmed by him. I'm pretty sure he's part corn cream, which yes, I still haven't cleaned up since that episode we did and it's rippling.

Rippling. But by simply listening to his PR team, Zuck can often come across as normal or even likable next to Musk. But, and I can't stress this enough, Mark Zuckerberg is not cool and has his own misanthropic Emperor of Mars type tendencies. Long ago, before your aunt started posting image macros

of minions next to quotes from Mein Kampf, young Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg created a website called Face Mash. It grabbed photos of unconsenting female students from Harvard and asked the user to rank which was hotter. In a blog post, young master Zuck wrote, "'Some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces

next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. Fucked up stuff, Mark. Hey Mark, which animal do you look like? Zuckerberg has abused his power repeatedly over his time as a CEO. Back in the early days of Facebook, his business card stated,

I'm CEO, bitch, because these dudes fucking love that one Dave Chappelle sketch. In 2004, he had this text conversation with a friend, Zuckerberg. Yeah, so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. Friend, what?

How do you manage that one? Zuckerberg, people just submitted it. I don't know why. They, trust me, dumb fucks. No doubt you know some of this stuff. I mean, they made a whole movie about it and he was the villain. He screwed over Spider-Man.

You love Spider-Man. In the 2010s, Zuck helmed plans to offer up user data to companies as a way to reward them for spending money on Facebook. And yet at the same time, Facebook was publicly claiming it took concerns about user privacy seriously. So yeah, he sucks.

And his recent facelift as a normal dude compared to Elon Musk is largely opportunistic. In reality, Zuckerberg has been throwing everything at the wall to see what will stick in terms of building a likable exterior and placing himself next to an even weirder, eviler dork is the best plan he could come up with. That includes his previous plan

of cultivating a manosphere persona by going on Joe Rogan to talk about how much he loves UFC and jujitsu, wrestling friends, and how he thinks that watching television is beta specifically as opposed to the apparently more alpha social media. So wait, who said it? Oh, Zuckerberg.

Wait, so like the alpha thing to do is to use social media websites, which he owns, unlike beta television. What a weird thing to say. So yeah, it's the exact same please like me shit that Elon does. Surely, Mark's decision to finally bro down with his good bud Joe Rogan is not a cynical attempt to rebrand himself after the Cambridge Analytica

data collection scandal, or the Facebook propaganda and disinformation scandal, or the antitrust lawsuits due to flagrant attempts at monopolization, or Meta laying off thousands of employees, or the recent embarrassing flop of the Metaverse and loss of millions of users. He's just a normal guy with a family and a son that isn't named F-22 Raptor Jet Asimov or some shit like that.

Boy, that bar is low and disturbing. Like the corn cream at my feet, melting my shoes, tickling my toes. Ow, ow. Okay, so those are like the two main dudes, the easy mode of the guitar hero that is this episode. Now it's time to do some advanced fingering. Guitar fingering, not the sex kind.

Both are cool though, and both can help the other. So it's just finger town, we're in finger town right now. Okay, pop quiz hotshot. Do you know who the CEO of Snapchat is? It's this guy, hotshot. God, you're such a hotshot. His name is Evan Spiegel, yet he is somehow not

a youth pastor. He seems like a cool, hip guy. He's not. That's kind of the theme of this episode. Hey, speaking of themes! Evan Spiegel! That classic theme. Generic filler music. Evan grew up in a very wealthy family and then used that wealth to take control of the idea for Snapchat from his Stanford classmate, Reggie Brown.

Spiegel developed it into a company, ousted Brown, and then used his vast legal resources to keep him out of the picture. The worst part is, Reggie couldn't even take screenshots as evidence without Evan being notified. That's not true, it's just how Snapchat works. A little Snapchat for you. It's a textbook CEO double-cross,

the old Zuckerberg shuffle. I mean, who among us hasn't screwed a friend out of equity in a company conceived solely off that friend's idea? Maybe that sort of betrayal just isn't flamboyant enough to be worth our national interest. Are there any other naughty things Evan Spiegel's been up to? Well, in 2014, we got a series of leaked emails by Spiegel

when he was in a fraternity at Stanford, but I'm sure that's not totally fucked up stuff, but rather the kind of wise words you have come to expect from a future CEO, such as, "'Hope at least six girls sucked your dicks last night "'cause that didn't happen for me.'" Oh, it didn't happen for him. And, "'Fuck bitches get laid,' as well as,

"'I thought the whole point was to shoot lasers "'at fat girls.'" And that last one was in reference to an anniversary screening of Saving Private Ryan. That's the worst part. But maybe it's a bit unfair to judge Evan Spiegel for some bawdy, youthful emails. Again, I implore you, what college kid hasn't repeatedly,

and in writing, espoused a wanton disrespect for women if six or more of them failed to suck their dicks last night? I mean, a lot, I hope. But the point is that Evan could easily have evolved as he took on the mantle of CEO of a company he stole from his friend. He could have, easily, but he didn't. Instead of juvenile, sexist, frat bro behavior,

Spiegel graduated to mature, sexist, tech company behavior, at least according to former employees who, in 2018, alleged that he'd fostered a sexist and toxic workplace. At the time, only 13% of Snapchat's technical workforce and only 22% of upper management were women. Shannon Lubatic, a software engineer who left the company, described a pervading sexist vibe, including company parties that featured female dancers

in skimpy outfits, presumably wearing lays and getting lasers shot at them for reasons I will never understand. Fortunately, here at Some More News Systems Incorporated, our parties just feature Wormbo who pops out of a cake nude with a little top hat on his puppet dick. And yes, I do mean that his dick is another little Wormbo puppet.

It's very tasteful. We also have just mountains, mountains of Coke. Coke Zero. Cane. I was gonna say cane. Mountains of cocaine. But despite the toxic, sexist, awesome work culture under Evan Spiegel, at least Snap Inc.

has created a beloved app that is also one of the worst social media platforms when it comes to contributing to feelings of depression, according to a survey conducted in the UK. I guess the beauty of Snapchat is the impermanence of the photos. You can post without worrying that you're leaving a digital footprint. Well, except for the time

that Vice's motherboard investigated and found that multiple Snap employees abused their positions and tools to spy on user data, including location, email addresses, and phone numbers, and private or even deleted photos. But hey, maybe slapping an AI bandaid on it will make things better. Evan Spiegel is currently promoting a new My AI feature

that lets users chat with an AI bot concerning sensitive issues. And of course, all the private conversations that bot is privy to are going to be saved and stored by Snap Inc to be used by advertisers. Lest you're worried this sounds kind of sus, fear not. Snapchat is a classy app according to Evan, who said in 2017 that,

"'This app is only for rich people. I don't want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain, at least as quoted in a legal filing by a former employee. So racist, but also bad business? Snapchat is extremely popular in India. Like this popular. It's the top bar.

Okay, so he sucks. We can check that off, all right? Inform the corn cream of our findings. Hey, we have information for you. We found it. See, it hears all. The corn cream hears all and says all. One, three.

Sees all. So it seems like our first undercover CEO is just as dorky and evil as Zusk and Muk without even needing the incentive of national notoriety. And now we've done the big three, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Yep, there are no other big tech companies to speak of. Honestly, I have no idea what we're gonna talk about

after these ads. What are we gonna, oh my God, you better watch the ads to find out. I will be watching too, so that I too can find out after these ads. Hey there, sport. Nice business you got going over there, selling your wares and whatnot. Maybe you got some rings or potions or something.

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Because, once again, you can use Shopify to keep track of your in-person and online sales and even use their plug and play tools for online marketing campaigns. Also, you're of draconic ancestry that gives you resistance to fire damage. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash more news, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash more news to take your retail business to the next level today. Shopify.com slash more news. Welcome back to some more news to take your retail business to the next level today. Shopify.com slash more news. Welcome back to some more news, dareers. It's the news quiz show that puts hot shots in their place, always has been. So we talked about the big three tech companies, but what about the smaller,

more grown up tech companies like Amazon? Yeah, what's the deal with that cat Jeff Bezos? Nope, no, ha, not anymore, hot shot. Pop quiz retroactively failed. You die, you fucked it up so bad, hot shot. More like snot shot, you hot snot, you fucking piece of snot. Bezos, the more public face of Amazon, stepped down as CEO in 2021,

following decades of bad press for various little goofs, like forcing delivery drivers to piss in bottles and offering facial recognition tech to ICE. But don't worry, he's no longer boss man. Now he's simply Jeff, the humble, mild-mannered executive chairman of the largest retailer in the history of the human race. I'm Jeff.

The CEO whose name you should be screaming at your screen is a guy named Andy Jassy. So who's this Andy Jassy guy, huh? He sounds fun, wait. He's not. He will not be getting an intro title actually. No more intro titles, they don't deserve them, none. All right, Andy, Andy, all right.

In fact, Andy's had a long history with Amazon, starting there in 1997 as marketing manager. He then became an advisor to Bezos and was one of Bezos's top executives. Since he's taken the helm, he's overseen the layoffs of 27,000 employees and has done his damnedest to quash the growing labor movement inside Amazon.

After the Staten Island Amazon warehouse voted to unionize, Jassy's Amazon, probably illegally, fired some of the labor organizers and has barreled ahead simply choosing not to recognize the union. The official plan appears to be pretending unions don't exist until they go away. Very similar to how I'm handling the corn cream

and the many eggs it appears to be sprouting. Oh. Oh. Many eggs was an understatement. Courts have upheld Amazon's unions legitimacy, a ruling the company is expected to fight. When asked about unionization, here's how low profile CEO, Andy Jassy responded.

Well, I mean, I'd say a few things. First of all, of course, it's employee's choice whether or not they wanna join a union. Ah, sorry to interrupt the Andy Jassy, but is it really their choice when you fire organizers and try to fight tooth and nail not to recognize the union? And when you spend over $14 million in anti-union consultation in response

to the one warehouse that's successfully unionized? That's like saying Tom Hanks chose to eat raw fish and drink his own piss in the movie Castaway. Just because they didn't show him drink his piss doesn't mean he didn't. He loves piss, or at least too piss. Anyway, sorry for interrupting Mr. Andy Jassy, a man who lives every day hoping people forget his name. Do go on. employees, if they see something they can do better for customers or for themselves,

they can go meet in a room, decide how to change it and change it. That type of empowerment doesn't happen when you have unions. It's much more bureaucratic, it's much slower. Oh, I see. Unions make it harder for workers to improve things for customers.

Oh, and I guess for themselves too. So it's apparently super easy for workers to change things around Amazon without even needing a union, which must be why Amazon fired the employees who tried to advocate for safer working conditions, you know, given the many OSHA violations and high workplace accident rates at Amazon warehouses,

and then lied about it by hiding data on injuries. It's all, it's all airtight, baby. Astute news perverts may recognize those as all the exact same things Zuck and Musk do, but Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is doing it quietly. So it's kind of a dignified oppression. I also think people are better off having direct connections with their managers. You know, you think about work differently, you have relationships that are different. We get to hear from a lot of people as opposed to it all being filtered through one voice.

Oh yes, having closer, more personal relationships with management. So management can use nearly constant surveillance to track how many minutes workers spend in the bathroom or to issue citations for talking to another Amazon associate or going to the wrong floor of the warehouse. These aren't bits by the way,

these are all documented citations issued by Amazon management against their own workers. You gotta, you gotta love the healthy team building activity of banning asking Brian if he caught the game last night and timing how long your shits are and getting written up if your poop breaks the five minute rule. Cody's average, seven minutes, 38 seconds.

Dang it! I had Katie time that with a stopwatch in confidence. Anyway, unlike Musk, Andy Jassy at least knows how to curate his social media presence to blend in as human. For example, he tweet-exted about relevant social justice issues of the day, stating his sincerely held view

that police murdering black people is wrong, and that America throwing everybody, especially minorities, in prison might be bad. Good stuff, Mr. Jassy. Very normal, basic, but much better than openly courting Nazis like Elon Musk. Of course, despite tweaksing things that sound compassionate, when it actually comes to making the world a better place, you know, given Jassy's immense power as the CEO

of one of the biggest companies in the world, he goes ahead and does the typical evil corporation stuff you probably could have predicted if you've seen any episode of Captain Planet or political cartoon drawn after the woke 1880s, like how Amazon's lowest paid employees are disproportionately black, Latino, Native American, and women. And while Mr. Jassy likes to talk about Amazon's lowest paid employees are disproportionately black, Latino, Native American, and women.

And while Mr. Jassy likes to talk about Amazon's commitment to renewables, before he was CEO, he openly courted the oil and gas industries and stopped pursuing renewables during Trump's term as president. No surprise, of course. Whatever the CEO says, he's actually gonna make the choices that best serve Amazon's immediate bottom line

and please the shareholders in the short term. Because a CEO is just a robot made of flesh and some sawdust hired to make money without any moral or philosophical hangups. It's like that fable with the scorpion who fucks the frog to death in the pool. Wild things, I think it was. So do CEOs ever face consequences for being ghouls?

Well, if by consequences, you mean being allowed to resign and sell off shares, thereby earning $2.5 billion for fostering a workplace culture where sexual harassment ran rampant, ignoring the claims of victims, and being at the wheel when Uber executives tried to smear a victim of sexual assault

committed by an Uber driver, then yes, obviously they face consequences in those cases. Travis Kalanick, the ex-CEO of Uber and ex-Uber board member stepped down in 2017 and severed his ties with the company in 2019, following all these scandals and more, including the time he berated an Uber driver who was complaining about low wages. You know what?

What? Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. I take responsibility. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. But why you sending an email for town card? Good luck. Good luck to you too, but I know you don't gonna go far.

Quote, some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck. Cool guy. Anyway, Travis Kalanick resigned and took $2.5 billion and sold shares with him, which I guess is the CEO version

of taking responsibility for your own shit. Kalanick was replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi in 2017, who wanted to give Uber a facelift. And so instead of a sneering company that openly exploits its workers, it became a friendly, smiling company that quietly exploits its workers. He's the cool dad of Silicon Valley,

according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. And I assume by dad, she means he requires the drivers he fucks over to call him car daddy in all official company communications. Under Daddy Khosrowshahi's leadership, Uber spent millions in ad campaigns to successfully promote a 2020 California proposition which exempted them from a new law

that would have forced rideshare companies to recognize their drivers as employees and offer them benefits. The ads were purposefully designed to trick voters into thinking they were voting for drivers to receive benefits. So wait, wait, you're saying if you spend enough money, you can say voting for a thing is voting against the thing?

That's neat, that's neat for America. America is so neat for itself. CEO Khashoggi said that it was necessary for Uber to get an exemption from the workers' rights law, claiming that the law would have caused a million drivers to lose their jobs, nothing to be done. But last year, he reassured analysts and shareholders that Uber isn't worried about proposed EU regulations

requiring the same thing, to recognize their contractors as employees with benefits. Khasr Shahi said, "'We can make any model work, we really can, "'because our marketplace is incredibly flexible. "'So any model can work economically for us. "'This is about what our drivers want "'and what couriers want, and they want flexibility. So we would very much prefer it because they prefer it.

So in America, this would have devastated their drivers, but in the EU, it's fine. And by day, it's Europe. So it seems like a liar, I guess, is my point. But at least he wasn't caught on camera telling a disgruntled, bankrupt, not legally an employee. Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. So, progress.

Speaking of exploiting contract workers, you should Google Google exploits contract workers. Or maybe Bing it due to the conflict of interest. Or you know what, actually, just don't do anything since I'm gonna talk about it right now. P quiz, hot S. Do you know who Google's CEO is? Hint, he's a lot less notorious than Musk or Bezos, but no less dickish to his employees.

His name is Sundar Pichai, and he's been involved with Google since 2004, when he was the VP of product development. In 2015, Sundar became the CEO of Google, and then he became CEO of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company in 2019. What you need to know is that Google has a huge army of shadow workers, which sounds cool and spooky,

like they're sexy vampires, but really, it's a bunch of contract workers who don't get benefits and are paid poorly and treated poorly and strung along indefinitely as a matter of company policy. I don't know, maybe some of them are vampires. We just don't have all the information. Around half of Google's workforce are shadow workers

who do not receive benefits, paid time off, or wages competitive with full-time workers, possibly vampires. These contract workers are literally made to wear red badges like they're throwaway Star Trek characters about to get eaten by a rampaging Snard Garlax. That's right, Snard, we're watching you too, pal.

Eyes on Snard. Anyway, these red badge shadow workers are actually treated worse than red shirts because in 2018, they were excluded from the real-time security updates during a freaking mass shooting at YouTube headquarters, as well as excluded from the real time security updates during a freaking mass shooting at YouTube headquarters, as well as excluded from the town hall meeting afterward during a mass shooting.

You know, just in case the contractors hadn't yet received the message that Google does not see them as people, they literally refuse to send them a message or see them as people. Shooting updates are for closers. Always be cowering waiting for a security update. Alphabet also systematically underpays female workers

despite violating federal law and has illegally tried to avoid paying their workers required minimum wages in dozens of countries. How can they get away with treating workers like disposable handy wipes? Well, Sundar Pichai's Google is also working hard at maintaining a monopoly in the tech field, and has basically become the singularly dominant company in the digital ad market through anti-competitive strategies and mergers. This allows Google to own one of the few remaining

avenues to making money on the internet, which poses a bit of a problem. Like if you want to be able to freely post content and not worry about having to go through Google for your ads, you'd have to do something wild like chug a green frothy drink every week. Delicious thick froth, might I add. Ha ha ha, glug glug, slurp slurp. Fun fact, I am in no way required to drink anything during the ads, but I do for you.

But mainly for the corn cream, actually. The corn cream demands it and it's demanding it now. No, not this week. There's no ad for that this week. Anywho, the US and EU have been tentatively trying to break up Google's monopoly power for a while. US regulators are currently trying to force Google to sell off some of their digital advertising business,

given that the acquisition or elimination of their competitors violated antitrust laws. In response, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, respectively headed by our good friends, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Andy Jassy, have spent millions to lobby against antitrust legislation and have successfully killed the two main anti-monopoly bills,

each of which were decades in the making. Sundar even personally met with the lawmakers to discourage them from passing the bill. Know who else was there? That's right, our next profile in pathology, CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, who prefers you think of him as Timmy Apples, so please always do.

Because again, the cream demands. It speaks clearly and constantly to me as it grows around my feet. We are becoming one? No, it's simply swelling and pulsing with life. And it devours. Chilling, but that's just work stuff. We all got our masters, be them a clueless CEO or a puddle of mysterious fluids

that appears to be evolving into a complex organism or these next sponsors. So after a quick break, we will peel back yet another layer of paint to get a fix on some more CEOs of some more famous companies doing some more worse stuff. It's a Russian nesting doll of anonymous monsters, which is a toy idea that I've copyrighted.

Thank you very much. Operation Russian nesting doll of anonymous monsters drop. It's not as catchy, but it's a little catchy. Enjoy the ads. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Settle down, everyone. Settle down. It's Katie Stoll. settle down. It's Katie Stoll. I don't want any sass or guff or capering. You hear? I just want to tell you about patreon.com slash some more news. It's our Patreon, you see? And if you sign up for our $5 tier, you can get access to episodes of some more news and even more news completely ad-free and early. You see why I didn't want any tomfoolery? I bet you feel like a real jerk right now.

Well, now that I've humbled you, I should also inform you that we have other tiers on our Patreon as well. Tiers that can get your name in the credits and even have a virtual hangout with myself and the rest of the Some More News crew. So why don't you take a look now, why don't you? And look over there at Patreon.com

slash Some More News. That's the web address. You type it in the thing, you know, the thing that you might be watching this thing on, you know, you type it in there. Patreon.com slash SomeMoreNews. You go there. I'm Katie.

And I don't take kindly to shenanigans. Hi again. It's me, Cody. Johnston. From the news and your dreams. Before the break, we were just chatting amiably about how a cadre of invisible CEOs are busily trying to crowdsource every industry to the point that no one on the planet

qualifies for health benefits while simultaneously playing Batman against anti-monopoly measures. This of course led us to Apple, then Tim Cook, AKA Timothy Apples. Mr. Apples has been with Apple since 1998 and became CEO in 2011 following Steve Jobs' death. Tim has made himself much less of an icon than Steve,

probably because he went with a black polo and jeans rather than a black mock turtleneck and jeans. You biffed it, Timmy Apps. Ah, you're biffing it everywhere. turtleneck and jeans. You biffed it, Timmy Apps. Ah, you biffing it everywhere. Him, Apple. But don't let that polo fool you, folks.

Him's not as boring as he seems. At least when it comes to the zany world of tax evasion. The secret is stashing Apple's huge profits into overseas tax havens to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars in US taxes. Of course. Why didn't we do that? Wait, why didn't we do that? Wait, wait, do we do that?

Well, we should look into, we'll look into doing that. Obviously Tim Cook isn't the only CEO doing this. Like we are eventually going to, we're all CEOs here. But he is especially good at this. And can you blame a man for excelling at his craft? In 2013, Cook was dragged before Congress over the tax scheme and viciously complimented by lawmakers who took turns praising him for the iPhone as if that was the

purpose of the meeting. Former Democratic Michigan Senator Carl Levin said, we love the iPhone and the iPad. And former Republican Senator John McCain told Tim Cook, you have to be a pretty smart guy and a pretty tough guy too. And I say that in a complimentary way. Good, because that almost sounded like an insult. Oh no, wait, at no moment did that veer anywhere near being an insult. You're tough and you're smart and I love you and I wanna kiss you, but like as a compliment. Also, do these people think that Cook designed the iPhone?

I mean, I get it, white people look the same, but like that's not the word of events. Then there's Senator Rand Paul who dropped to his knees, gargled Tim Cook's apples and said aloud as it was simultaneously tattooed across his forehead, I'm offended by the spectacle of dragging in Apple executives. What we need to do is apologize to Apple

and compliment them for the job creation they're doing. So yeah, that all turned out fine for Tim Cook, who doesn't feel bad about not paying taxes because he thinks the corporate tax rate for companies is unfair anyway, and swears he won't bring the money he stashed overseas back to the US until tax rates are slashed. So that'll teach us for daring to tax the wealthy.

Okay, Tim Cook's apple has also engaged in typical corporate skullduggery, such as discouraging unions, punishing unionized workers by withholding benefits, retaliating against labor organizers, and allowing their suppliers to defy laws protecting laborers in China. Tim Cook addressed concerns about labor exploitation in China by saying, I think that we have a responsibility as a business "'to do business with as many places as we can.'" I believe in what former IBM CEO, Tom Watson said, "'World peace through world trade.'"

And also, that's part of the complexity and part of the beauty of the world is that everybody has their own laws and customs. You see, Apple has to exploit labor in China because the world is beautiful. He's like the kid in American Beauty, you know? And hey, hey, you know, you don't wanna be culturally insensitive

and not exploit labor, do you? Exploiting people in different countries in the manner by which they are used to being exploited is just part of the whole global respect thing. It's for world peace. We are the world. Are you against world peace? Along with solving world peace,

Tim Cook has also personally written to his employees, discouraging them from leaking information about harassment within the company. After over 500 employees submitted complaints of sexual harassment, verbal abuse, discrimination, and retaliation, there was an all-hands meeting during which few of the workers' concerns were addressed, and after which Applejacks wrote an email warning employees that Apple would not tolerate disclosures of confidential information, whether it's product IP

or the details of a confidential meeting. It's a form of intimidation that probably violated the National Labor Relations Act. Maybe T Cookie will be dragged before Congress again and get publicly fellated by senators from both sides of the aisle. That'll learn them. A congressional investigation.

So that's Apple. We defeated Apple. They're out of business now because of what we just said. Good luck out there without a phone or a computer with $700 wheels on it. Now I'm gonna talk about a tech company that you will be truly shocked to hear may sometimes be less than totally ethical.

The telecommunications company, Comcast. The CEO of Comcast, William Johns, is a nepo baby. You didn't know that though, because his name is so generic, I actually just made it up. His real name is Brian Roberts, or is it? It is. And in 2004, Roberts was handed the reins of Comcast from the founder, his papa,

then spent his entire tenure trying to consume other companies while shouting, "'Are you looking? "'Are you looking, Dad? "'I'm about to do it! "'Papa!' Roberts tried to do a hostile takeover of Disney, it didn't work.

He tried to acquire Time Warner Cable, also didn't work, and tried to buy NBC Universal. And that one worked. Ha ha! Far from being a fail son. He's managed to consolidate power and make Comcast the largest internet provider and cable company in the United States.

Not satisfied with this level of dominance, Brian William Johns Roberts successfully lobbied to end net neutrality. Net neutrality means that internet service providers like Comcast aren't allowed to throttle internet speed based on the website, platform, application, or device being used. So for instance, if Comcast got mad at us because we started calling them Comcrust, net neutrality laws would prevent them from retaliating by slowing down our website, tpublic.com slash stores slash some more news,

where we sell our famous cum crust t-shirts, or rather where we will be selling the cum crust t-shirts that we obviously now have to design and make available for you. Our second cum-based t-shirt. Congratulations to us for that milestone. What a fascinating, incredible, historical moment that we're all part of this now. You saw it. You remember because I dropped the pen during it, and I never do that. Despite the overwhelming popularity of net neutrality,

Cumcrust lobbied Congress during the Trump administration to end it entirely, hoping Trump's Federal Communications Commission would be more likely to repeal Obama-era net neutrality regulation. And they were right. After spending upwards of $30 million on lobbying in 2017 and 2018, Trump's FCC under Ajit Pai rolled back net neutrality and allowed internet service providers

to create separate slow and fast lanes on the internet, prioritizing preferred websites over those of competitors. Immediately after their lobbying paid off, Comcast deleted a pro-net neutrality pledge on their website. It's just the kind of class you've come to expect from Comcrust. But alas, Biden would later issue an executive order

urging the FCC to reinstate net neutrality. But for most of his presidency, his FCC appointments have been blocked, defanging the order. Recently, his appointee, Ana Gomez, was confirmed, giving him a Democratic majority at the FCC. This means net neutrality may come back soon, and a certain crusty company

may have to undelete a certain pledge. We're still making the shirts even if they do though. We're still making the shirts. The thing with Brian Roberts is, despite how he's personally tried to make the internet worse in the name of profit, you, a person watching a news show that only exists on the internet, still may not have heard of him.

He keeps a very low profile and often impresses reporters with his appealing earnestness and lack of pretense. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, described him as an amazingly self-effacing guy who didn't mind riding in coach on the train. It's as if you can throw in a gosh here and a shucks there and everyone will forget you're a union busting plutocrat. The sly CEOs like Brian Roberts

may be less obviously villainous than the exuberantly idiotic Elon Musk's of the world, but appealing earnestness doesn't really change the underlying awful. Case in point, Roberts' compensation at over $32 million a year is 385 times that of the median white collar Comcast employee. I'd be as fucking earnest as you want me to be

if I was paid that much for essentially doing my best to make the internet shittier for everybody that uses it. So buy my cum crust t-shirts to make that beautiful dream a reality. Demand fair compensation. Just the fact that CEOs like Brian Roberts really believe they're worth 385 times their employees should tell you they're not good folks.

And Captain Cum Crust isn't alone. In 2017, Snap CEO, Evan Spiegel earned $638 million. Currently the average employee salary 2017, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel earned $638 million. Currently, the average employee salary is about 90K per year. So even without adjusting for inflation, Spiegel made, can I get my fucking pen back please? Spiegel made over 7,000 times that of his average employee. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi earned over $24 million in 2022, while the median Uber driver makes under $40,000,

meaning the CEO earns over 600 times that of the workers that make the lifeblood of the company. So if you were afraid that Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg were the only CEOs capable of throwing their shit around like a dead, tortured monkey neural link to the brain of Jackson Pollock, don't. And of course, ghoulish statements by low key CEOs are certainly not confined to just the tech sector.

We sort of just picked tech as a theme, so this video wasn't 12 hours long. Take property developer and CEO of Gurner Group, Tim Gurner, who spoke at a property summit and said this out loud in front of a camera to people. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. I mean, there is a there's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely the other way around. I mean, there's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky

to have them as opposed to the other way around. Very cool and normal non-villain stuff. By the way, Tim Gurner's the original avocado toast guy. You know, the guy, he went viral saying millennials can't afford housing because they eat too much avocado toast. So maybe he's not simply saying out loud what our capitalist class really thinks.

Maybe he's just acting like an idiot for attention, which would also explain the hair, very Musk of him if that's the case, masterful gambit. Then there are those anonymous studio execs who said they're fine with writers being on strike until they're homeless. And last but certainly not least, don't forget airline Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary who said, you're not getting a refund, so fuck off. We don't want to hear your sob stories. What part of no refund

don't you understand? He needs that non-refundable ticket money though, you guys, as he's also gone on the record saying, I'm Europe's most underpaid and underappreciated boss. "'I'm paid about 20 times more "'than the average Ryanair employee, "'and I think the gap should be wider.'" Hey, bud, so do we. Of course, I'm referring to the gap that opens in the earth under evil tech CEOs and sucks them all down to hell

when the rapture happens, and it will happen. The corn cream has told me so. But until then, we can at least shine some light on these insufferable turds. After all, just because you don't know the name of the person ruining your life doesn't mean they don't exist. Keeping at least a little public pressure

on these lesser known villains is a filthy, disgusting job, but someone has to do it. And I guess, I guess that someone is me. Honestly, if I'm being real now, I'm probably the internet's most underpaid and underappreciated news host. I'm paid about 20 times more than the average title monkey. And I think the gap should be wider.

I mean, if anything, I should be compensated for my shoes, which are currently melting into the corn cream, which is congealing? Looks like... Oh, I really hope those are tadpoles and not giant sperm. Oh, they look a little like giant sperm. But maybe they're weird tadpoles. Great, cool, cool, cool.

All right, I should sheet about this. There's no, like, follow-up bit. I'm just, I'm like, I'm really focusing really hard on this sheet. It's gonna be a good one. What's your opinion on stuff? And that reply ad revenue is gonna come rolling in. Engagement. and then engagement.

The giant Wormbo sperm set up a net and they're playing badminton in my kitchen? I don't have a badminton net. Where'd they get that? Anyway, thanks for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. That'd really help us out. Also leave a nice comment. That'd really make us feel good, I guess.

We've got patreon.com slash some more news. Check us out, add free stuff, early access videos, things of that nature. We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to this show, Some More News, as a podcast. Both of those are where the podcasts live. So go knock on that door and say, Hi, can Some More News and Even More News

come and hang out and play? And they will in turn say, why yes, download. Oh, what are we talking about? We got merch I mentioned in the episode and now here. I guess we're gonna do that cum crust thing. And there's other stuff there available that's a little more appropriate for public. But uh you know what's not appropriate for the public? This sexy game of sperm badminton going on over there. Hey guys! Gross! Hey guys! Gross! not content to let the world's critical insights pass you by. Like, for example, the fact that toads need way, way, way more space than you would think. Yes, that's right. And I think that an

inquisitive person such as yourself should definitely check out the Jordan Harbinger Show, which features in-depth interviews with some of the world's most fascinating minds like Bill Nye, Terry Crews, and Annie Duke. They've also got Feedback Friday episodes to respond to listener questions about everything from asking for a raise at work to helping a family member escape a cult. A toad cult? Who's to say? Anyway, the Jordan Harbinger Show is a great complement to this podcast. Here you might hear the latest news about America's toxic food system. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, you can listen to a Skeptical Sunday segment about why some foods

that are available in the U.S. are banned in other parts of the world. Whether Jordan is conducting an interview or giving advice to a listener, you'll find something useful that you can apply to your own life in every single episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show. That could mean learning how to ask advice the right way, or it could just be discovering a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world. Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show. That's H-A-R-B, as in boy, I-N, as in Nancy, G-E-R, as in really really gotta read the Wikipedia page on Toads through to the end next time. Available on Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Good day.