📈 Internal political activism degrades big-tech operating results (Apple)

“not only are they going to lose essentially a fiefdom inside of Florida, but it's going to have repercussions with respect to taxes, with respect to debt, with respect to the quality of the service they can deploy. And that will eventually flow through the business and that will be measurable by investors. ... in the next few quarters, I think CEOs will actually be better equipped to numerically point to why taking Brian's path is the value creating path for shareholders and for stakeholders.”

“Bob Chapek. I don't think he's going to survive the year after what just happened at Disney. ... I think every company eventually is going to have to either be Coinbase or be Apple. You're going to have to be Coinbase or be Disney.”

“But long term, I think it turned out to be an incredibly positive decision for the company. I do think there's a lot of companies in Silicon Valley right now and probably elsewhere, is that, you know, the CEOs and the management team almost feel like they're being held hostage by employees.”

“Yeah, you could fire half those people or more. There'd be absolutely no impact to the business. In fact, they'd probably run better because right now, they probably got too many meetings happening with too many people. We all know this. That company culturally has been broken for a long time.”

“2021 revenue was $5 billion. They have 8,000 employees back of the envelope, $625,000 per employee in revenue.”

“I don't think he'll care what employees kind of gripe about. I don't think he'll care what regulators gripe about. ... He'll talk about the long-term opportunity, the philosophical alignment with mission and plow forward. And I think that that level of leadership is what separates some, you know, great businesses from others.”

“The fact of the matter is that this whole woke mob thing, it's a paper tiger. They don't have the support of most of the population. ... And all it takes is one strong person to stand up to the mob, as we saw Brian Armstrong do at Coinbase. And the mob dissipated.”

“at some point, Netflix was like, listen, you don't have to agree with every comedian on our platform. ... And then, of course, we know Coinbase did it. ... And Toby from Shopify did it. And now you have Twitter doing it. ... I think at some point Apple is going to have to say, you know what?”

“If you put all of that stuff together, I think the thing that that drives is decaying morale. And when you have decaying morale, you have human capital flight. ... I think that this is sort of peak big tech market cap is probably within the next year or two.”

“this is exactly the rough version of what happened to Microsoft in their DOJ settlement. Their antitrust settlement was effectively an oversight where lawyers at the DOJ were the product managers and had not effectively veto right, but you had to approve product features before you could push them for 10 years. ... This is essentially what caused Bomber's reign to be so ignominious. It's like he couldn't do anything”

“And you know, this is a road to nowhere for Apple. ... Ergo, Apple supports slavery. And that's what the employees will eventually get to. And that will cause chaos.”

“And eventually that'll show up in the operating results of the business. It's just a matter of time.”