Apple fires a star employee for book

Left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi writes:

Garcia-Martinez is a brilliant, funny, multi-talented Cuban-American whose confessional memoir Chaos Monkeys is to big tech what Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker was to finance. A onetime high-level Facebook executive — he ran Facebook Ads — Antonio’s book shows the House of Zuckerberg to be a cult full of on-the-spectrum zealots who talked like justice activists while possessing the business ethics of Vlad the Impaler:

Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo.

He goes on to explain that Apple has just fired Garcia-Martinez because some employees complained about that 2016 book.

The book had been a bestseller, so Apple was happy with the book when it hired him.

Apple is run by evil men.

Many other companies are just as bad. Newsweek reports:

Leaked documents from The Walt Disney Company ask employees to complete a "white privilege checklist" and to "pivot away from "white dominant culture." ...

The document ends with a 21-day challenge for employees to reflect on the effects of being "raised in a society that elevates white culture over others." ...

In February, leaked documents from Coca-Cola showed diversity training materials from the professional networking site LinkedIn that encouraged staff to "try to be less white, less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant and more humble."

So why does Apple behave like this? I see three explanations.

(1) It is profitable.

(2) Apple employees are sincerely so offended by this book, that the author's presence in the company would cause a lot of unnecessary stress and conflict.

(3) No one is really offended, but SJWs are just carrying out a power play against someone they don't like.

I am inclined to believe (3). It is hard to believe that Apple snowflakes are really so fragile that they would be bothered by this book. It is more plausible that they are simply lying to promote their political goals.

Dr. Dre is a Black rapper on the Apple board of directors, and he has said much more offensive things. I do not see an employee petition to fire him.

Update: Stewart Baker explains:

Nick and I cross swords over Apple's firing of Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys, in my view one of the funniest and most insightful Silicon Valley books of the last decade. Part of its appeal is Garcia Martinez's relentless burning of every bridge in his past business and personal life. How, you keep asking, can he recover from telling all those truths about Morgan Stanley, Facebook, Y Combinator, and the adtech business? Turns out, he can't. But it wasn't any of those supposedly potent institutions that nailed him. Instead, it was his claim that the women of Silicon Valley are mostly "soft and weak, cosseted and naïve" and possessed of a "self-regarding entitlement feminism."

That's all it took. Apple employees demanded that they be protected from anyone with those views, and he was summarily fired. Way to go, Apple employees! Nothing rebuts a stereotype of female soft weakness and entitlement like demanding to be protected from someone who doesn't share your feminist entitlement.