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Apple this month started advertising on X for the first time in more than a year. The company had stopped advertising on the social media platform in November 2023 following controversial remarks made by its owner Elon Musk.
Tim Cook “personally” donated $1,000,000 to, and attended, Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then Apple complied with the Gulf of Mexico name-change nonsense, despite no legal requirement to do so. Now, they’ve restarted advertising on Elon Musk’s toxic social media service, just weeks after Musk gave a Nazi salute.
My only conclusion is that Tim Cook and Apple support this autocratic regime and its brazen, systematic destruction of American democracy.
This latest act of acquiescence is clearly meant to curry favor with Trump and co-President Musk[1] out of fear of retaliation—especially from Musk, who’s actively suing companies who stopped advertising on X/Twitter[2]. No doubt Cook and Co. are hoping to avoid that, making the resumption of ads a bribe to Musk—or, if you’d like to be more generous to Apple, a payoff coerced through blackmail and extortion.
At this point, if Trump demanded that Apple create a backdoor allowing access to every customer’s device, I have very little reason to believe they’ll refuse the request.
I’ve been following Apple for over four decades, first as a customer, then as an employee for twenty-two years. While I won’t claim any unique insight from this tenure, it forged in me a belief that Apple always tries to do the right thing, even when it doesn’t appear that way from the outside. Or, in human terms, their heart was always in the right place.
I can no longer confidently say I believe that.
Directed by Ridley Scott, the advertisement was designed to highlight the Macintosh as a groundbreaking computer that offers freedom and individuality in a market dominated by corporate conformity. It drew inspiration from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Apple positioning itself as a liberator from the homogenized control represented by the fictional “Big Brother,” a veiled allegory for IBM.
A lot has changed since this ad first aired. Foremost is that IBM is no longer the tech behemoth to be feared; Apple has indisputable taken on that role, and is now seen by many as the company we need to be “liberated from.” Meanwhile, in the politics sphere, every day feels more and more like Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And of course, the Super Bowl, which used to air in mid-to-late January, has crept later and later, with this year’s game being held on February 9.
George Orwell would be dismayed.