Apple and Microsoft’s CEOs were pictured at dinner with Brazil’s far-right president in Davos
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella were seen at the same dinner table as Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in a picture that surfaced on Twitter.
The unlikely group convened at an event on Tuesday for politicians and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, according to Business Insider. The dinner was reportedly meant to honor Bolsonaro, who officially took office this month, BI wrote. The photo of the dinner table was widely shared after Axios reporter Felix Salmon posted it to Twitter, likely due to the seemingly conflicting views Bolsonaro holds to those of Cook and Nadella.
Apple and Microsoft did not immediately return requests for comment on the image.
As he rose to become the county’s new leader, Bolsonaro made a number of derogatory statements about women, minorities and the LGBTQ community. According to The New York Times, which compiled several of Bolsonaro’s most inflammatory statements, the Brazilian president said in 2013 he would “rather have a son who is an addict than a son who is gay,” and was “proud to be homophobic.” Hours after his inauguration, Bolsonaro issued an executive order that would not allow the concerns of the LGBTQ community to be considered by the new human rights ministry, according to The Associated Press.
Cook, who came out as gay in 2014 in an essay published by Bloomberg, has been a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights and equity in the workplace.
“As I look at the world, many of the problems of the world come down to the lack of equality,” Cook said in a June interview on Bloomberg’s “David Rubenstein Show.” “It’s the fact that the kid that’s born in one ZIP code who doesn’t have a good education because they happen to be born in that ZIP code. It’s someone that is maybe an LGBT community that is fired because of that. It’s someone that has a different religion than the majority and therefore they’re ostracized in some way.”
Nadella has also taken a stance for workplace equity, saying at an event hosted by the Times in 2017 that progress toward gender equity in tech was “good, but not sufficient.” “We always had equal pay for equal work, but it’s more about equal opportunity for equal work,” he said at the event.
Bolsonaro, by contrast, has said he would not employ or pay women equally to men in the workplace, although “there are a lot of competent women out there,” according to the Times. He also reportedly said that having a female child is a “weakness.”
In 2017, Bolsonaro used a word historically used to describe the weight of cattle and agricultural products when describing the weight of Afro-Brazilian residents. According to the Times, he said: “They don’t do anything. They are not even good for procreation.”
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