Last month’s shooting death of Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers has created a split in Silicon Valley. The Pretti incident has become the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back: The tech industry is finally speaking out against the actions of President Donald Trump, a rebuke to the billionaires who have supported him.

More than 500 tech investors, executives and workers have signed a petition calling for the removal of ICE agents from American cities. “We all witnessed ICE brutally kill a US citizen . . .then, the Trump administration brazenly lied about what happened. . . we’ve seen armed and masked thugs bring reckless violence, kidnapping, terror and cruelty with no end in sight.” Reid Hoffman, a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia, wrote an opinion piece in the San Francisco Standard, urging fellow tech executives to “speak out against the administration’s excesses.”

Meanwhile, many of Trump’s billionaire supporters have remained conspicuously silent. One exception was Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook who released a tepid statement on Pretti’s killing. In a statement first sent to Apple employees and then released publicly, Cook said he was “heartbroken” and had called for “de-escalation” during a subsequent phone call with Trump.

The longtime Apple Chief has been sharply criticized for attending a screening of First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary at the White House the very night of the Pretti killing. Cook was joined by Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy and Advanced Micro Devices Chief Executive Lisa Su.

Cook was among the tech executives who donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, contributing a generous $1 million to the festivities. Apple has also donated to the yet-to-be completed White House Ballroom, a Trump pet project.

Like Cook, OpenAI cofounder and Chief Executive Sam Altman straddled the line between telegraphing his concern about ICE’s activities while remaining loyal to the President. In a message sent to employees, Altman said ICE has gone “too far.” But he refused to denounce the President. “President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country,” he wrote. “I am encouraged by the last few hours of response and hope to see trust rebuilt with transparent investigations.”

Altman, too, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Not to be outdone, OpenAI’s cofounder and President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna contributed $25 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., become its largest donors.

For his part, Elon Musk, who gave $250 million to Trump’s presidential campaign before having a well-publicized spat with the President last year, took to Twitter/X to post support for ICE and mass deportations, and to promote the Melania Trump documentary. In a X/Twitter post, Keith Rabois, managing partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, went a step further, saying “no law enforcement has shot an innocent person” and that “illegals are committing violent crimes everyday.” He was publicly denounced by firm founder Vinod Khosla. “Macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration,” Khosla posted on X/Twitter. “The video was sickening to watch.” 

It remains to be seen whether pressure from anti-Trump employees and peers will have its intended effect. Tech billionaires have been drawn to Trump by self-interest. “They helped get this administration elected and then they helped this administration to decimate the norms of the U.S. democratic government,” David Hornik, a partner at venture capital firm Lobby Capital told the New York Times. “Frankly, we’re in a situation caused by them.”

The transaction between Trump and his tech billionaire friends has been lucrative for both sides. The richest 15 billionaires, which include Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, saw their wealth soar by $1 trillion during the first year of the Trump administration. The country’s 935 billionaires account for $8.1 trillion in wealth.

Billionaire tech investor David Sacks, Trump’s AI and Crypto Czar, has led the charge to prevent states from regulating these controversial technologies. Firms like Palantir, which received financial backing from early Trump supporter Peter Thiel, have benefitted from lucrative government contracts. On the company’s messaging board, Palantir employees questioned the ethics of continuing to work with ICE after the Pretti killing. Chief Technology Officer Akash Jain told employees, “We do not take the position of policing our platform for every workflow.”

Last April, Palantir was awarded a $30 million federal contract to supply ICE with technology to conduct deportations. It is a fraction of the $900 million the company has secured from the federal government under the Trump administration. 

With their silence and muted criticism of the horrific events of the last month, the President’s Silicon Valley supporters have signaled that profits will always trump morality. The rising backlash has shown that many of their employees and peers have found their complicity unacceptable.