Most U.S. corporate business reporters revere America’s CEOs and view them as having risen to the top because they were the best and the brightest in their organizations. The CEOs of many major publicly traded corporations love and embrace the admiration, gladly mugging for magazine and newspaper photo shoots and pontificating about their visions and world views.
My contrarian perception is that many CEOs of publicly traded companies achieved their career successes because they knew how to navigate corporate politics to get ahead. I make a distinction between CEOs of publicly traded companies and those overseeing private enterprises because the latter is where the top executives I most admire are invariably found, including SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell and Fidelity’s Abigail Johnson, who I’ve previously profiled (see here and here).
Reading about the parade of CEOs who made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to president-elect Donald Trump and offered him gifts reaffirmed my view that many CEOs are Olympic caliber corporate toadies excelling at identifying and kissing the right tushies to advance their careers and agendas. I imagine these CEOs surround themselves with other deft tushy kissers who profess a delight to work for such great leaders, so no one would ever dare tell our corporate leaders they weren’t wearing any clothes.
The CEO attention lavished on Trump wasn’t lost on the president-elect.
“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump boasted on social media after having dinner with Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
This was the same Jeff Bezos whose corporate media supporters suggested that the National Enquirer threatened to publish photos of Bezos’s penis because the publication’s owner, David Pecker, was a longtime friend of Trump’s. Federal prosecutors blabbed to the New York Times that Pecker was a key witness in their months long investigation into payments during the 2016 campaign to two women who said they had affairs with Trump.
After Trump won the 2024 election, Bezos posted on X: “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities,” Bezos posted on X. “Wishing [Donald Trump] all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
The more than dozen CEOs who reportedly genuflected before Trump were among the Who’s Who of corporate America, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Many CEOs contributed to Trump’s inauguration with the minimum tithe seemingly $1 million.
The shameless behaviors weren’t lost on former Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who submitted a cartoon mocking media and tech titans abasing themselves before President-elect Donald Trump.
Unfortunately for Telnaes, the cartoon included a caricature of Post owner Jeff Bezos and was rejected by editorial page editor David Shipley, supposedly on the grounds that the Post had already run a story on CEOs paying homage to Trump and was planning a satirical one as well.
Telnaes resigned without first lining up a job because she wouldn’t tolerate being censored.
“While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon,” Telnaes wrote on her Substack page. “To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.”
Suffice to say, Telnaes is no corporate toady, which is why I admire her so. I’ll let you form your own views about Shipley.
GM is among the companies that contributed $1 million to Trump’s campaign, and also is supplying its vehicles overwhelmingly made with foreign parts or manufactured in Mexico to shuttle VIPs around the capital. GM CEO Mary Barra is the poster child for America’s current crop of CEOs, particularly as she chaired The Business Roundtable from 2022 to 2024. The Business Roundtable is an association of CEOs from America’s leading companies getting paid the biggest bucks.
Barra is decidedly among the most anti-MAGA CEOs. Within months of Joe Biden assuming office in 2021, Barra announced plans to invest $1 billion to electrify one of GM’s plants in Mexico, a move that outraged United Auto Workers former Vice President Terry Dittes, then head of the union’s GM department.
“At a time when General Motors is asking for a significant investment by the U.S. government in subsidizing electric vehicles, this is a slap in the face for not only UAW members and their families but also for U.S. taxpayers and the American workforce,” Dittes railed.
Politico reported that Barra was tight with Biden, and that one of Biden’s key advisors was a former GM lobbyist whose brother is a GM lobbyist. Biden’s niece, Missy Owens, joined GM one year after the president took office. It seems reasonable to speculate that Barra’s relationship with Biden was why the Inflation Reduction Act included substantial tax credits even for electric vehicles built in Mexico, where Barra is that country’s biggest vehicle manufacturer.
Barra last year fired some 1,600 employees as part of a corporate downsizing. GM insiders contributed considerably more to Kamala Harris’s campaign than they did to Trump’s.
Yet after Trump’s election, Barra declared that she and Trump shared the same objectives.
“We’re very goal-aligned,” Barra said. “We want a strong economy. We want a strong manufacturing base in this country. We agree automotive jobs are important.”
As for the sorts of PR and HR executives Barra surrounds herself with, here’s what Lin-Hua Wu, GM’s California-based chief communications officer, had to say about Barra.
And here’s what Arden Hoffman, GM’s chief people officer who Barra plucked from her troubled Cruise subsidiary, had to say about Barra.
Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is the runner-up recipient of the Starkman Approved “CEO Toady of the Year” award. In addition to contributing the obligatory $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago the day before Thanksgiving. At one point, Zuckerberg and other attendees stood, hand over heart, as the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned defendants who are accused of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol unrest.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook had suspended Trump’s account following the unrest.
Facebook later removed tampons from the men’s bathrooms and shelved its DEI initiatives. Zuckerberg went so far as to praise what Gillette and other wokester companies once denounced as “toxic masculinity.”
“Having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive,” Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan.
Still, the Starkman Approved award for the most shameless CEO toady goes to Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey, who presented Trump with a bottle that replaces the Diet Coke logo with a label showing an image of the White House and text that says: “The Inauguration of the President of the United States.”
Trump famously loves Diet Coke, and had a red button installed in the oval office so someone could fetch him the drink when he wanted one.
I suspect that when Quincey was attending grade school in his native England, he brought apples for his teachers. His principles are seemingly dictated by the prevailing political and cultural winds.
In the aftermath of the 2021 unrest at the U.S. Capitol, Coca-Cola condemned the events, calling them “an offense to the ideals of American democracy.” Quincy in April 2021 garnered favorable corporate media coverage for his opposition to voting laws in Georgia where Coke is based.
I’m typically not a betting man, but I’d wager that when Quincy was sucking up to Trump, he made no mention of his concerns about Georgia’s voting laws.