In the wake of Alex Pretti\u2019s death at the hands of federal officers in Minneapolis, a growing number of corporate leaders, employees and Minnesota-based companies are speaking out. Some are condemning the fatal shooting and President Donald Trump\u2019s broader immigration enforcement in the state.<\/p>\n
But the response has also exposed a familiar tension in corporate America: Powerful executives and public-facing companies often stay quiet until internal and external pressures converge \u2014 and until they believe speaking out together matters more than speaking loudly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s really interesting is that the CEOs do engage when they get to a tipping point, and we\u2019re at one again,\u201d said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor and author of the book \u201cTrump\u2019s Ten Commandments.\u201d<\/p>\n
He pointed to moments such as the deadly 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 as examples of crises that forced high-profile executives to move collectively.<\/p>\n
\u201cCEOs have to periodically speak out not on every issue but when there are watershed moments where there is a tipping point where the fabric of society is put at risk,\u201d Sonnenfeld said in a phone interview.<\/p>\n
Following the killing of Pretti in Minnesota, a small number of tech and financial industry leaders moved quickly. Hemant Taneja, CEO of the venture capital giant General Catalyst, appealed to his colleagues \u201cto come together to preserve our democracy,\u201d writing on X<\/a> that \u201cwhat we are seeing in Minnesota is a threat to those core tenets and to the promise of America.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic co-founder and leading AI researcher Chris Olah wrote<\/a> on his personal X account, \u201cI try to not talk about politics … but recent events \u2014 a federal agent killing an ICU nurse for seemingly no reason and with no provocation \u2014 shock the conscience.\u201d <\/p>\n