Tech titans like having their own way. Recently Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, declared that he would not let his workers bully the company into refusing some US military contracts.

He was  explicitly criticising my former employer Google, which decided last month  not to bid for a $10bn Department of Defense computing contract because it conflicted with ethical guidelines it adopted after employee protests over earlier military work. “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” he said. 

Fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg has also lashed out, saying that Google “bowed to pressure” when it decided to discontinue Project Maven, an effort to automate drone surveillance for the DoD, calling the decision “a defeat for US national security [and] patriotism”.