Activity

In May 2020, Chesky laid off 1,900 employees (25% of workforce) during COVID-19. Full-time workers received at least 14 weeks pay, 12 months health insurance via COBRA, equity access, and enrollment in 'alumni talent directory' for job placement. However, in late April, Airbnb laid off 500-600 contingent workers who received only 1 week severance and their laptop—no insurance, restricted equity, or directory access. Amy Silverman, affected contractor, publicly noted contractors were 'not invited to join the directory.' In 2024, Chesky walked back earlier 'family' language, saying 'you don't fire members of your family.'

By 2020, Proton had open-sourced all its client applications (iOS, Android, web, desktop) under GPLv3 and published results of independent security audits by SEC Consult. This enabled community verification of their privacy and encryption claims.

In 2020, it was discovered that Western Digital had secretly transitioned its WD Red NAS-rated hard drives from Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) to the slower Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology without informing customers. SMR drives perform poorly in NAS RAID arrays, the exact use case WD Red drives were marketed for. This led to a class action lawsuit and widespread industry criticism. WD eventually created a separate WD Red Plus line with CMR technology.

In an April 2020 CNBC interview that went viral, Palihapitiya argued that the U.S. should not bail out billionaires and hedge funds during the coronavirus pandemic, instead advocating for direct support to consumers and workers. He also called for universal basic income as a pandemic response, saying the U.S. had 'ripped the philosophical band-aid off' on direct payments. The interview was widely praised for challenging conventional Wall Street bailout narratives during a crisis.

Jack Dorsey announced he was transferring $1 billion of his equity stake in Square (about 28% of his wealth) to Start Small LLC, initially focused on global COVID-19 relief. He committed to public transparency by tracking all grants in a publicly accessible Google sheet. By September 2021, Start Small had awarded over $425 million across 243 donations.

In April 2020, CEO Hock Tan drew criticism when he forced employees to return to work for one week per month during the COVID-19 outbreak, while many tech companies maintained remote work policies.

In 2020, Brian Chesky personally donated $10 million to nonprofit organizations supporting frontline healthcare and essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of 2020 Sprint merger conditions, T-Mobile committed to cover 90% of rural Americans with 5G averaging 50 Mbps speeds within six years. The company invested $304M in spectrum auctions, $200M in West Virginia (377 new towers), and $2B in Florida network expansion. By 3-year milestone, T-Mobile achieved 66.7% of rural population at 50+ Mbps download speeds and 55% at 100+ Mbps, meeting FCC requirements. The company expanded 5G coverage to 325 million Americans including small towns and rural communities.

In March 2020, Stewart Butterfield and wife Jen Rubio pledged to match donations 5:1 up to $1 million for COVID relief, supporting No Kid Hungry ($250K for hungry children), One Fair Wage Emergency Fund ($250K for restaurant workers), and domestic violence organizations ($250K).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, DoorDash provided financial assistance of up to two weeks' pay to delivery workers in the US, Australia, and Canada who were diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed under quarantine. The company shipped more than 5.8 million sets of free hand sanitizer and masks to Dashers. DoorDash also expanded Project DASH to form partnerships with over a dozen local governments and nonprofits, with Dashers delivering over 150,000 meals to vulnerable communities in the first three weeks. This included a partnership with NYC Department of Education to deliver daily meals to up to 800 medically-fragile children.

Starting in 2020 and continuing through multiple reintroductions, the EFF led opposition to the EARN IT Act, which would have removed Section 230 protections from platforms that use end-to-end encryption. EFF organized public campaigns, testified before Congress, and built broad coalition opposition that prevented the bill from passing.

ASPI's 2020 report identified Xiaomi as one of 83 companies whose supply chains benefited from Uyghur forced labor transfer programs. KnowTheChain later scored Xiaomi 5 out of 100 on forced labor safeguards.

Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen created Fast Grants in March 2020, raising over $50 million from tech leaders including Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt. The program provided funding to scientists within days rather than months, dramatically accelerating COVID research.

From March 2020 to March 2022, Indonesia recorded 71 app-based driver protests, with 34 (47.9%) involving Grab drivers - the highest among gig platforms. Protests included mass street demonstrations (26 actions), strikes (22 actions), blockading Grab offices (2 actions), and government hearings (1 action). 58.8% of protests demanded proper payment. Drivers eventually won demands to increase ride-hailing fees and reduce platform charges from above 20% to 15% (though drivers demanded 10%). The protests revealed systematic income pressure forcing drivers to work excessive hours.

Anduril Industries deployed its Lattice AI-powered surveillance tower system along the US-Mexico border under contracts with Customs and Border Protection. The towers use AI to detect and track people crossing the border. Civil liberties groups raised concerns about the surveillance infrastructure's implications for privacy and immigration enforcement.

In March 2020, Palantir received an emergency NHS contract at a nominal £1 to build the NHS COVID-19 Data Store. The contract was extended in December 2020 to a two-year £23.5M deal reaching beyond COVID to Brexit planning and general business operations. Investigations revealed Palantir had been lobbying NHS leaders since at least July 2019, before the pandemic, raising concerns the emergency was used to secure a strategic foothold in NHS data infrastructure.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison hosted a Trump fundraiser at his Rancho Mirage, California estate in February 2020. Tickets reportedly cost up to $250,000 for a 'roundtable' with the president. Ellison has been a close Trump ally and is one of the few major tech executives with a long-standing relationship with Trump.

In February 2020, Jeff Bezos announced a personal $10 billion commitment to the Bezos Earth Fund to fight climate change and protect nature by 2030. The fund has awarded grants to organizations including WWF ($100M), Environmental Defense Fund ($100M), and supports emissions reduction, ocean conservation, food system transformation, and climate justice. By late 2024, approximately $3 billion had been disbursed. Critics note the pace of distribution and potential greenwashing of Amazon's own environmental record.

In January 2020, Microsoft launched AI for Health, a philanthropic program providing AI tools, cloud computing, and grants to nonprofits, researchers, and organizations tackling global health challenges. Over 200 organizations have partnered through the program. Notable projects include AI-powered pancreatic cancer detection with Fred Hutch (potentially saving 30,000 lives annually by catching tumors missed in ~40% of CT scans), AI4HealthyCities cardiovascular risk assessment with the Novartis Foundation, and DAX Copilot clinical note automation freeing physicians to focus on patients.

Multiple academic studies found YouTube's recommendation algorithm directed users toward increasingly extreme content. A systematic review found 14 of 23 studies implicated YouTube's recommender system in facilitating problematic content pathways. Research from UC Davis and PNAS showed the algorithm was more likely to recommend extremist and conspiracy content to right-leaning users. Over 70% of content watched on YouTube is recommended by its proprietary, opaque algorithm. While some studies produced contradictory findings, the lack of algorithmic transparency prevented definitive conclusions.

As co-founder and CEO of Clearview AI, Hoan Ton-That led the development of a facial recognition system that scraped over 10 billion (later 50+ billion) images from public internet sources including social media, news sites, and other platforms without individuals' knowledge or consent. The system operated in near-secrecy from 2017 until exposed by a January 2020 New York Times investigation. The database grew to become the largest known facial recognition database at 60+ billion images.

Clearview AI built a facial recognition database of over 60 billion facial images by scraping photographs from social media platforms, news websites, Venmo, and other publicly accessible online sources — all without the knowledge or consent of the people depicted. The database grows by approximately 75 million images daily. Users can upload a photo and receive links to everywhere that face appears online, enabling identification of virtually anyone from a single photograph.

David Heinemeier Hansson testified before the House Antitrust Subcommittee and Senate about Apple and Google's monopoly power over app distribution. He stated the internet had been 'colonized by a handful of big tech companies that wield their monopoly power without restraint.' He also submitted documentation to EU member states and spoke with EU regulators about App Store competition.

In January 2020, Microsoft announced plans to become carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 to remove all carbon the company has emitted since its founding in 1975. Committed $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund and extended internal carbon tax to all operations including Scope 3. By 2025, contracted 34 GW of carbon-free electricity across 24 countries (18x increase since 2020) and nearly 30 million metric tons of carbon removal, though total emissions rose 23.4% vs 2020 baseline due to AI/cloud growth.

On January 16, 2020, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, and Amy Hood announced Microsoft's commitment to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove all emissions since the company's 1975 founding by 2050. Microsoft pledged to reduce carbon emissions by more than half by 2030 and remove the rest. The company created a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund to invest over four years into new technologies. Progress on sustainability goals was included in executive compensation determination starting FY2021. During the first year, Microsoft reduced emissions by 6%, from 11.6 million to 10.9 million metric tons.

After nearly 3 years of being banned in Turkey, the Wikimedia Foundation won a constitutional court case with a 10-6 vote ruling that the block violated freedom of expression. Wikipedia access was restored on January 15, 2020, establishing an important press freedom precedent.

In January 2020, Nadella spoke out against India's Citizenship Amendment Act, which fast-tracks citizenship for immigrants from most major South Asian religions except Islam. He told BuzzFeed News 'I think what is happening is sad... It's just bad,' drawing on his heritage growing up in multicultural Hyderabad.

Clearview AI's facial recognition technology was linked to wrongful arrests where police relied on erroneous facial matches with minimal additional investigation. Robert Williams of Detroit was arrested for larceny in January 2020 despite never having stolen anything — identified solely by the facial recognition system. NYT reporter Kashmir Hill documented multiple cases of flawed results leading to privacy-eroding and false arrests by law enforcement agencies. The cases disproportionately affected people of color due to documented racial bias in facial recognition technology.

DJI drones were procured by Chinese public security bureaus in Xinjiang for surveillance of Uyghur population, with over $300,000 in documented procurement records linking DJI equipment to the region's mass surveillance infrastructure.

Research and complaints showed HireVue's AI facial analysis system systematically disadvantaged deaf candidates, non-native English speakers, and people with darker skin tones in hiring assessments between 2014-2020.