United States CEOs are Cowards

I was listening to Rahm Emanuel on GZERO World the today and he said something that made my ears perk up. He was talking to Ian Bremmer about Trump’s Iran war and the midterm implications and he pivoted to corporate America and just unloaded. He said (at 28:49):

“To corporate America, you are timid souls. They're destroying the greatest research system the world has ever seen. Not a word, not a chirp. He's decided that it's a rule of one man, not the rule of law. I don't know how you think you're making money or businesses without the rule of law. Not a word, nothing. You're intimidated. What do you have an organization for? You don't want to be an individual company? Have an organization speak up. Nothing. So do I think the institutions, yes, the people in them, as my grandmother say, not so great.”

He is right. He is painfully, embarrassingly right.

I know because I was one of them. I sat in the rooms where these decisions get made. I attended the dinners. I joined the CEO groups. I know the culture, the incentive structures, the rationalizations. And I am telling you, from the inside, what is happening right now in corporate America is not caution. It is cowardice. It is a wholesale abandonment of the civic obligations that come with the privilege of running large enterprises in a democracy.

Let me tell you what the data actually shows. At the Yale CEO Leadership Institute’s September 2025 gathering, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld surveyed roughly 100 top CEOs from companies including J.P. Morgan, Pfizer, Dell and American Airlines. Sixty percent identified as Republicans. Two thirds said Trump’s tariffs were directly harmful to their businesses. Seventy four percent agreed with the courts that the tariffs were illegal as implemented. Eighty percent said Trump was not acting in the country’s best interest by pressuring the Federal Reserve. And yet. When asked about speaking out publicly, Sonnenfeld summarized their position perfectly. They are all afraid of being marginalized by the White House.

Think about that for a minute. The men and women running some of the largest companies on earth privately believe the president’s policies are harmful, possibly illegal, and threatening to the economic system itself. And they will not say so out loud. As one CEO told Fortune after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariff authority in February 2026, there is no upside in speaking out. You do what is right internally, which includes staying off his radar.

This is the operating logic of a protection racket, not a democracy.

The Business Roundtable, an organization created specifically to give CEOs a collective voice on matters of national policy, has been functionally absent. TIME published a devastating assessment in May 2025 calling the organization “MIA against Trump’s attacks.” The Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce both declined to comment on the record for Bloomberg’s reporting on the CEO playbook for Trump’s second term. These are organizations whose entire reason for existence is to represent the business community’s interests in Washington. They will not even go on the record about the most interventionist president in almost a century.

Sonnenfeld knows this history. In November 2020, when the Business Roundtable sat on its hands as Trump refused to concede, 22 CEOs frustrated by the organization’s inaction asked Sonnenfeld to convene an emergency Zoom call. One hundred of the nation’s largest CEOs showed up. They met for four sessions through the presidential transition under the banner of Business Leaders for National Unity. But that energy is gone. The organization that was created to be the voice of American business has become its tomb.

And here is where it gets worse. The silence is not just passive. In many cases it is purchased. Tim Cook presented Trump with a gold-plated plaque while Apple invested 600 billion dollars in the United States and Apple’s iPhones conveniently escaped the worst of the tariffs. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Toyota each gave a million dollars to fund Trump’s inauguration, more than double their previous inaugural donations. Meta abandoned its fact-checking operations, a move Trump himself bragged was probably the result of his legal threats. Disney and Meta paid multimillion-dollar settlements to make lawsuits go away, against the advice of outside experts. CBS’s parent company self-censored while seeking administration approval for a merger.

This is not business strategy. This is tribute. This is the behavior of vassals in a feudal system, not executives in a free market democracy.

And the few who have spoken up? The record is instructive in both directions. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, has been one of the only billionaires willing to publicly oppose Trump. He funded E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault lawsuits. He donated at least ten million dollars to Kamala Harris’s campaign. And the consequences came exactly as predicted. He considered leaving the country out of fear of retaliation. He estimated the odds of Trump coming after him at greater than fifty percent. He hired additional security after Musk tried to connect him to the Epstein case. Other business leaders privately praised his courage and then refused to follow his example. Part of the reason why fewer people were public about it this cycle, Hoffman said, was because Trump was threatening personal and political retaliation.

Former American Express CEO Ken Chenault backed him up, telling Bloomberg that fear is the reason CEOs held their tongues. The retaliation could take the form of IRS audits, he said, or using means to jail people without due process.

But here is what the timid souls keep missing. The companies that have actually stood their ground have been rewarded, not destroyed. Costco rejected an anti DEI shareholder proposal with 98 percent of shareholders voting it down. In the months that followed, Costco’s sales and foot traffic grew while Target, which had capitulated on DEI, lost customers it is still trying to recover. Anthropic sued the Trump administration after being designated a supply chain risk for refusing to let the Pentagon use its AI without restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. On March 26, a federal judge blocked the designation, writing that nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary for expressing disagreement with the government. The result of standing up? Strengthened recruitment, higher public brand recognition, employee morale through the roof, and competitors’ top talent defecting to join them. Four law firms that refused to cut deals with the administration and instead sued have seen bumps in both recruitment and revenue.

The evidence is right there. Standing up works. Capitulation does not even guarantee safety. It just guarantees that you will be asked to capitulate again.

Now let me talk about the young CEOs. Because this is the part that keeps me up at night.

I am a member of a DC metro tech CEO group. I sit with these people. And I am floored by how many of the younger founders and executives have bought wholesale into the authoritarian mythology being sold by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. These three men and their network have constructed an ideology that sounds like disruption but is actually something much darker. It is a philosophy that treats democracy as an obstacle, regulation as tyranny and concentrated power as efficiency.

Thiel has written that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. Not my interpretation. His words. He draws on Leo Strauss to advocate for non-constitutional strategies and deception. Andreessen has hosted dozens of off-the-record meetings on encrypted platforms where messages auto delete within thirty seconds, discussing what his circle calls the collapse of institutional trust and the notion that technology is politics. They have amplified thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, whose work openly derides democracy and advocates for a CEO style monarch of the United States. Their venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, invested in Yarvin’s startup. Thiel’s Founders Fund did the same.

This is not a fringe movement. David Sacks served as Trump’s AI and crypto czar until two days ago, when he exhausted his 130 days as a special government employee. He did not leave the orbit. He moved to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body whose inaugural members include Marc Andreessen, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg. At least ten of Thiel’s former colleagues, employees or investing partners occupy positions in the administration, including the Vice President. Their firms are pouring billions into military surveillance and policing technology. Flock Safety, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, builds the license plate readers being used in immigration enforcement. Palantir, co-founded by Thiel, supplies the data integration platforms that ICE uses to track people. Anduril, also funded by Thiel and Andreessen, has secured multi-billion dollar Pentagon contracts.

The young CEOs in my group hear these men talk about the founder as visionary, about democracy as friction, about the state as something to be disrupted. And they buy it. They buy it because it flatters them. Because it tells them that their success in markets translates to wisdom in governance. Because it wraps the pursuit of power in the language of innovation and presents authoritarianism as the merely logical conclusion of first principles thinking.

As a former CEO, I want to be very specific about what these young founders are getting wrong. Business success and democratic governance require fundamentally different skill sets and ethical commitments. A company can fire employees who disagree. A democracy cannot fire citizens. A company can move fast and break things because the downside is a failed product. A government that moves fast and breaks things produces broken people, broken institutions and broken laws. Reid Hoffman, to his credit, made this exact point when he told Bloomberg that the government is not a business and should not be run like one.

The young founders I know do not understand this because they have never had to build anything that serves people who cannot opt out. They have never run an institution where the currency is consent rather than capital. And Musk, Thiel and Andreessen have very carefully constructed a world view that tells them they never need to learn. All while, those three are really only protecting their investments while they take everyone else down…

The people (all men, women CEOs seem to have a much better handle on the situation) I work with in these CEO groups grew up with every advantage and they have convinced themselves that the rules should not apply to anyone like them. That is not disruption. That is aristocracy.

So here is my challenge to the CEOs who are reading this.

You have organizations. The Business Roundtable has more than 200 member CEOs. The Chamber of Commerce represents millions of businesses. You have industry associations, regional CEO groups, technology councils. These organizations exist for exactly this purpose. To allow individual companies to take collective positions without any single firm bearing the full weight of retaliation. That is literally why trade associations were invented. And every single one of you knows it.

Rahm Emanuel put it perfectly. Have an organization speak up.

The Business Roundtable was created in the early 1970s when CEOs decided they needed a unified political voice. It has since become one of the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington. It has taken strong public positions on taxes, trade, immigration and regulation across administrations of both parties. It spoke out after Charlottesville in 2017. It published a statement on the purpose of a corporation in 2019. But now, faced with a president who is openly weaponizing the regulatory state, demanding personal loyalty from business leaders, retaliating against critics and governing through what one historian at Sciences Po described as patrimonial rule, the Business Roundtable issues perfunctory statements and engages in purported behind-the-scenes lobbying.

Behind the scenes is not leadership. Behind the scenes is where courage goes to die.

When business leaders with enormous leverage choose silence because they calculate that their personal interests are better served by accommodation than by resistance, they accelerate the very outcomes they claim to fear. They do not prevent retaliation. They invite it. Because every concession teaches the authoritarian that the price of compliance is zero.

To the CEOs in my tech group who admire Musk and Thiel and Andreessen. You are not joining a revolution. You are joining a court. And courts have a way of consuming their courtiers. Ask Jack Ma how his partnership with the Chinese state worked out. Ask the Russian oligarchs who thought they had a deal with Putin. Ask anyone who has ever aligned with a strongman on the theory that they would be the exception.

The rule of law is not a constraint on your success. It is the foundation of it. Every contract you sign, every patent you file, every dollar of venture capital you raise depends on an independent judiciary, enforceable agreements and predictable regulatory frameworks. The men telling you that democracy is broken are not trying to fix it. They are trying to replace it with something that serves them and only them. And when they succeed, you will not be among the served. You will be among the consumed.

Rahm Emanuel called corporate America timid souls. I would go further. I would call them complicit. Not because they pulled the lever. But because they watched it being pulled and decided that silence was a strategy.

Silence is not a strategy. Silence is a choice. And in a democracy under threat, it is the most consequential choice available.

Stop being a fucking coward…