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And again, that's the core of what we're doing. And that is Reed Hastings, who is the CEO of Netflix, saying, I'm going to double and triple down with Dave Chappelle, even after what he did on SNL, which I thought was a great standup. It certainly wasn't a guy who's timid or worried about being canceled.
I don't think it's possible to cancel him. Vivek Ramaswamy would know about it, Strive Asset Management founder, author of Nation of Victims, who has a great knowledge of business, as well as what's happening digitally in this world. Trying to make heads or tails out of what's happening with Apple and possibly what is and is not happening when it comes to Twitter. Hey, Vivek, welcome back. Good to talk to you, Brian.
How are you? So you must have been heartened to hear something like a non-politically correct CEO with a powerful company not looking to back down. Could this be the trend?
We watch Bob Iger also say stop with the culture wars. Could this be a new trend? I think it could be a new trend, Brian. And as you know, I've been working on it and continue to work on it through the private sector, through shareholder voice via Strive and otherwise to drive this cultural change.
And I think we're seeing it. I think it's interesting in the Netflix case, though, Brian, to sort of really understand what's going on there. Netflix did change their position earlier this year, but it was only after they reported a disastrous quarterly earnings report. OK, their subscriber growth was down. Revenue was down. Profits were down. And then they responded by sending a message to their employees to say that we're putting excellence at the top of our cultural document. Artistic merit comes first.
And if you don't like working on a project, then you can show yourself the door and work at a different company. But it took the economic consequence of seeing a business threat before they actually reversed course. And I will remind you, this is the same company. This is the same CEO of Netflix, right, who fired just a couple of years ago, a guy by the name of Jonathan Friedland, who was, I believe, their chief communications officer who had been at the company for a long time.
Who descriptively, not using it as an epithet, but descriptively used a word that you're not supposed to say, the N-word, in describing, as I understood it, the words that they did not want to say on their shows. And yet that was a different environment, right, back in 2018, 2019, 2020, a different cultural environment in this country, which caused him to fire that guy back then. Things have changed, largely in part to, I think, the efforts of great people in the public and private sector to change the cultural ties. So that punishes Netflix economically if they become too politically correct. And now I'm happy to see that very company do a 180 in the other direction. So a couple of things.
I hope we see more of that. Just like the All-Star Game because of Jim Crow 2.0, the president, he coined that phrase. Really? We just had the largest turnout in Georgia that they've had, the largest early voting turnout that they've ever had.
Nobody's passed out because they couldn't get water from a stranger online. All that stuff resulted in movies pulling out of Georgia and the All-Star Game leaving Georgia. And then I think that Ron DeSantis helped everybody as governor when he made Disney pay the price for coming out politically against their educational program. So now all of a sudden they have to turn around and say, I have a responsibility to my shareholders not to blow relationships with one party or the other.
I can't do what you idealistically think I should do. End of story, correct? You know what? Absolutely correct. And I would say that every company should probably put in its corporate charter that they will not take positions on controversial political questions. So that way when the activists, the 5% of people who work at a company, by the way, whenever they say the employees are demanding it, it's not the employees, Brian. It's like 5% or less of the employees who happen to be the most vocal. When those activists crop up and say, this is the statement you must issue.
This is the position you must take. It puts the CEO in the position of saying, you know what? No, it's in our corporate charter. We by mandate cannot take positions publicly on controversial political or social questions because our focus has to be on our product. That's what more companies need to do.
It's to sort of borrow the expression from our longtime friend in the Odyssey, our old poet Homer, tying ourselves to the mast. Part of the reason you have stated principles as a nation, as an institution, as a company, is that in the time of need, those principles give you a North Star. That is something that I would advise every major CEO and shareholder base of a company to do in this country is put it in your charter, say that you don't take positions on controversial social or political questions, and then in your hour of need when the activist employees show up at your office crying on your shoulder, you have something to point to. Am I a hypocrite if I say Apple should stand up to the Chinese government or because they go to the company for their share holders, they should stay and make their $74 billion a year? So it's a great point.
Let's get into that. So one point I would make, Brian, is that hypocrisy is something you're allowed to call out of Apple without being a hypocrite. Because what Apple does is they make $100 million, nine-figure commitments to racial equity here in the United States, critiquing alleged social injustice in America, which it has no business doing, which then opens the door to saying, well, you're actually not commenting on human rights atrocities abroad, period. So that's, I think, Apple's hypocrisy of their own, and I don't think you're a hypocrite if you point that out. But then what if you say that, okay, well, we live in a world in which Apple just does what's best for its shareholders, focusing on making products.
Well, that's how I believe companies should actually behave, but this is where it comes to the job of U.S. policymakers, okay? China is playing a different game than America. America operates today under the illusion of global free market capitalism, when, in fact, China is operating a mercantilist system that uses companies and the threat of losing access to the Chinese market as a way of getting companies to advance their own geopolitical agenda. That is why Tim Cook is a circus monkey who jumps when Xi Jinping tells him to jump.
He asks how high. That is something that U.S. policymakers need to deal with. We cannot operate under the illusion that we live in the 1990s democratic capitalism, the world is flat Thomas Friedman view of what global capitalism looks like. China does not play by those rules today. They're using companies as vehicles to advance geopolitical and even increasingly military agendas, and that's something for U.S. policymakers, for the U.S. president to evaluate how we address those. And I have views on that, Brian, but that's not at that point Apple's job anymore. Apple's job is to not be hypocritical and not wade into social justice issues here in the United States. And if they do, we absolutely ought to call them out for their hypocrisy in China because consumer demand can actually drive their behavior, too. But assuming that they then move up the chain to behave in the proper way, there is still a sleeping giant of a problem that needs to be addressed.
That's in the realm of people who are responsible for looking after U.S. national security to do it. I want to get some questions about Elon Musk real quick, got a couple of minutes. Do you think he knows what he's doing when he went in there and got it and told everyone, if you don't get an email, you're fired, and if you have a problem with it, you should quit?
We haven't really seen much change on the product. Does he have a method to the madness? I hope he does. We will see. I mean, I think a couple things I want to say about that, just as a joinder to the last topic. I mean, look, I love Elon's vision for Twitter, and I would love to see him execute on it.
I hope he does, and I think there's a good chance he does. I have some concerns about Elon, just as I do about Tim Cook. I think that China is using America's most powerful capitalists in part to advance their geopolitical agendas. Definitely true for Tim Cook. I hope it's not true for Elon Musk, though I was bothered by some of the comments he's been making about Taiwan annexing itself as a special administrative region to China.
So that's one Elon concern. But broadly speaking, what he's doing with the employees, I think, is great. I think this company needed to downsize.
It was carrying a lot of dead weight on its back, not only from a cost structure perspective, but from a cultural perspective. The company now has a clearly stated mission and vision, and employees who are not aligned with that vision do not belong at that company. So I think that I'm 100% behind him also in terms of the hard work culture.
Silicon Valley has been coddled by this culture of laziness. Absolutely. I'm 100% behind him. I think he's on the right track. Whether or not he takes the right approach to content moderation, we'll see. He's been a little all over the place, saying things like, you know, we don't want the 10% on the far left or the far right on the platform. My opinion is if it's a free speech platform, being politically centrist as the means of censorship isn't really quite doing that, so I think time will tell. Vivek Swami, thanks so much. Pick up his book, Nation of Victims. It is encouraging and also defining. Thanks, Vivek.
