Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
www.theverge.com
Once you’ve traded your principles for proximity to power, do you even run your own company?
  • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Could Elon buy them? Does he have that much wealth power?

    EDIT: to be clear, it’s not that I want him to.‘it’s just frightening that it even sounds plausible enough to question in ignorance

    • naom3 [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Google and apple? Absolutely zero chance of him doing that on his own. They each have a market capitalization of almost $4 trillion, and even though he’d only have to buy 51% of them that’s still way more than his net worth. And that’s not getting into how most of his wealth is in the form of tesla stock, which he can’t sell to much of without tanking the stock price. Plus corporations have ways to stop people who are trying to buy them out if they don’t want to be sold, like even though twitter was a publicly traded company musk still had to negotiate a deal with twitter’s management

      He might be able to buy a significant portion of one or both companies stocks and then be able to vote for board members and stuff and try to gain influence that way, but that’s not the same as owning a controlling stake in the company, and frankly I don’t see him politically out manoeuvring alphabet or apple’s existing boards of directors

      • calliope@retrolemmy.comEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        To put it into perspective, if he managed to sell all of his ownerships of companies for the most optimistic idea of his current net worth*, he could still buy less than 19% of Apple.

        He’d need several friends to chip in to even get to 50%. A trillion is a lot until inflation gets out of hand.

        * $717 billion; probably $100 billion too high at least.