A key factor in this calculus is that the current president holds a grudge whereas the vast majority of consumers, shareholders, and workers do not.

Unless a nontrivial number of the people who are outraged either boycott Apple, Alphabet/Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, or sell their shares, or stop applying to work there then it'll prove that these CEOs were indeed making the right (financial) decision.

The Western system has roots in the Norman conquest of England. After 1066, land wasn’t held communally or with meaningful checks on aristocracy, as under the Anglo-Saxons. Instead, William the Conqueror carved up the country and handed it to his allies, creating a feudal landlord class that had no attachment to 'their' conquered peasants/community and whose only mandate was to extract maximum rent, so long as the higher lords and the crown got their cut. Instead of vanishing that rentier system evolved. Over centuries, the same logic of conquest and extraction was repackaged as “the market,” and eventually exported to the world through finance, trade, and empire.

What began as feudal rent-seeking in England scaled into global capitalism, a system where those at the top still practice Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction with no care about those being extracted from. It's all Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction, stripped of any sense of community, obligation, or service.

If you're keeping score at home, that's one point for shareholders, and a big fat goose egg for any and all other stake-"holders".

The cray part is they're doing it by openly doing stuff that's clearly and unambiguously classified as illegal (eg the gifts in exchange for benefits)

This is routine; businesses don’t follow laws because they are laws, they follow laws to the extent that the perceived cost of violations exceed the perceived benefits. The whole reason the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act exist is to impose a domestic cost on foreign bribery by US entities to dissuade them from engaging in corruption abroad where enforcement is weak. But this President, who is explicit against that, is also very obviously, if less explicitly, also against enforcement of the laws against domestic corruption when it is him or his friends benefiting. So, there is literally no cost to weigh against the benefits.

As always, in business, if the penalty for breaking the law is less than the benefit you get out of the violation, then you have to go for it.

Or your competitors will. It’s the cost of doing business.

"I avoided a possible lawsuit, and all I had to do was help plunge my country in to fascism!"

>Frankly if you are a CEO in 2015 and you aren’t flattering this idiot to profit then you are violating your duties to your shareholders

It's all fun and games til his policies crash the economy.

Short-sighted perspectives yet again. Short term gains at the cost of long term viability.

> if you are a CEO in 2015 and you aren’t flattering this idiot to profit then you are violating your duties to your shareholders

Ah yes, because that's the only thing that matters. Nihilistic capitalism at its finest – there no morality beyond economics. Everything that makes economic sense is moral because it makes economic sense. Whether it actually does is rather dubious by the way, as all of this has the very real possibility of massively damage these businesses in the medium to long term – so also nihilistic short-termism at its finest.