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Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario has had a busy few months: After her company sued President Trump in late 2017, she also turned her sights on Silicon Valley, calling tech execs “weenies” for how they’ve responded to Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
On the latest episode of Recode Decode, recorded live in April at TechFest NW in Portland, Ore., Marcario gave Recode’s Kara Swisher the longer version of her tech critique. She implied that people like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Larry Page are unpatriotic for not developing and communicating solutions to foreign interference.
(Note: This interview was recorded a week before Zuckerberg testified before Congress about data privacy and other political issues.)
“What’s Zuckerberg worth, $60 billion?” Marcario asked. “What’s Larry Page worth, $100 billion? ... I have family in the military that fight for this country and it’s our democracy that’s at stake. We got attacked on their platforms and they haven’t done anything about it.”
“They won’t step up and explain the problem,” she added. “They won’t come out and, in plain English, say what they’re doing about it. And it’s pathetic! That’s why I say they’re weenies.”
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On the new podcast, Marcario also answered the same question Swisher had posed to Apple CEO Tim Cook on her MSNBC show, “Revolution”: If you were in Mark Zuckerberg’s shoes, what would you do? Cook said he “wouldn’t be in that situation” to begin with, because Apple makes money in a different way, but Marcario leaned into the hypothetical.
“If I was Mark, I wouldn’t have come out and said, ‘This is all crazy’ the day after the election, and then not come out for months,” she said.
And although most of her critiques were around better communication, she said the nuclear option should be on the table, too: Shut down the site, or parts of it, while you fix the problem.
“I would not be afraid to shut down things that I felt were out of control, even if it was going to cost us money or ad revenue or whatever,” Marcario said. “I would clamp down if we didn’t have control over something. The community, your customers, would’ve understood that. After this huge thing happens — our country gets attacked — I think the customers would have been like, ‘Okay! That makes me feel like you’ve got it!’”
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
