I’d have agreed with you in 2024 but there’s enough of a difference in active support to be significant. Not many of those CEOs have direct personal involvement killing millions of people, for example, but DOGE appears to have managed that without really even understanding what they were cutting.

Exactly why I stopped supporting petroleum companies causing wars, terrorism and regional instability to keep up with world’s appetite for cheap crude oil.

There is an enormous difference between holding unpleasant views in private and actively, publicly, working to dismantle the country and take away the rights of its citizens and celebrating it.

> I imagine many of their privately held beliefs are just as horrible but they’re not dumb enough to say them publicly.

That's correct. And therefore I don't boycott their companies.

Yes when possible and feasible to know. And it's super easy to avoid everything Musk touches. Nothing he helms is without easy alternatives.

Hard to think of other CEOs who took time off from running the company to play in DC for a while. I'm sure there are some, but none come to mind.

Only one I can recall is Dave Packard, who served as assistant undersecretary of defense for a few years in the early 1970s.

I don't recall that he brought a mob of script kiddies with him to sack the government, threw any Nazi salutes at Nixon's inauguration, or slunk out of town with a literal black eye, though.

Pretty sure there are plenty but non that have done so so brazenly

Not the CEOs of any significant companies, no. Most boards would not tolerate this; being a CEO is generally a full-time job, and the conflicts of interest don’t bear thinking about.

Most of the others have jobs I think

I used to ask the same questions, but then I've realized: this line of argument tries to justify non-action on known known because there are also known unknowns and maybe even unknown unknowns. Now what? Smoke a cigarette because we know that unknown carcinogens exist that are not included in cigarette smoke?

Any of them would run me over to make the line go up, but some of them are loudly putting their foot on the accelerator.

Publicly signalling that you support awful shit is more likely to make that world a reality than quiet private support.

Why financially support an ardent, unabashed white nationalist who eagerly funnels money to a party that *he himself claims* protects pedophiles?

What other CEOs are this level of pure garbage? I can't think of a single one. (And that's before we even bring up the people his policies have directly killed: https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-f...)

Yes, at least for the CEOs going out of their way to get into politics like Musk and Larry Ellison. The way Ellison is using Bari Weiss to censor 60 Minutes is evil.

Hiding abhorrent beliefs is a good thing and we should heavily encourage it.

I'm honestly baffled that this isn't completely obvious to everyone.

People act like "bad but hiding it" is no different from "bad and not hiding it," but the former is literally identical to being decent. The only scenarios in which it's not identical are those in which they failed to hide their badness!

I don't give a fuck how evil someone is in the dark little corners of their mind, so long as they show up as a decent person in all their interactions with the outside world.

I didn’t plan on examining Elon’s ideology. He shoved it in my face. If other CEOs want to to be coy with Nazi salutes and post the types of things he does on X then let me know. I’ll happily treat them the same way.

> I imagine many of their privately held beliefs are just as horrible but they’re not dumb enough to say them publicly.

Why would you support a company run by someone stupid enough to say their polarising beliefs publicly? It doesn't inspire confidence in their judgment. Even if you personally agree with their polarising beliefs, you have to question their decision making process in why they chose to deliberately make them public, damaging the company. If they're stupid like that, maybe they've made stupid decisions with their products (which in Elon's case, yes, he has, and not just at Tesla).