- Scott Galloway, host of The Prof G Pod, ripped into tech CEOs during his SXSW talk on Saturday.
- Galloway said tech leaders are playing “dominos of cowardice,” each one following the other.
- He said he refused to normalize actions taken by Elon Musk.
Since Donald Trump’s victory, tech CEOs have graced the President’s inauguration, Jeff Bezos overhauled The Washington Post’s op-ed section, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino reportedly pressed one of the world’s biggest ad groups to increase spending on Elon Musk’s X.
What do these seemingly disparate events have in common?
Scott Galloway, NYU Stern marketing professor and host of The Prof G Pod, said business leaders — particularly tech CEOs — are complacently participating in America’s “slow road to fascism.”
During his SXSW talk on Saturday in Austin, Galloway said tech leaders enormously influence society and that their “character matters.”
But so far, Galloway said, “We have seen an extraordinary kind of what I call ‘cowardice domino,'” displaying a slide image of prominent tech leaders represented as said dominos, including Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Musk, Tim Cook, and Yaccarino.
Spokespeople for The Washington Post, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Galloway said examples of the “dominos of cowardice” included business leaders texting his co-host on the tech podcast Pivot, Kara Swisher, that they “hate to be at the inauguration, but I’m doing it for shareholders.”
He continued: “And this effectively emboldens the CEO of X to then demand that IPG advertise on her platform; otherwise, she will get her boss to block the merger. Which leads to one of the world’s wealthiest men, who owns one of the most important newspapers, to say, ‘We’re no longer going to talk about opinion.’ There is one kind of fascist domino following one after the other.”
Galloway appeared to be referring to a recent Wall Street Journal report that said Yaccarino and her associates had pushed Interpublic Group, a large advertising company, to advertise on X. The pressure comes as IPG seeks a deal to sell itself to its competitor Omnicom. The deal could need regulatory approval from the Trump administration, with which Musk works closely.
Musk and a spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Galloway took a moment to single out Musk and his recent gesture at Trump’s inauguration, which some have interpreted as a fascist salute.
“I had a running loop of Musk doing the Nazi salute, and I thought, ‘I refuse to normalize this bullshit,'” he said. “Think about what money has done to us.”
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