Former Twitter chief likens Trump meeting to 'waterboarding'
Let's just say former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had a really unpleasant visit with President Donald Trump.
Costolo dramatically likened Trump's meetings with Silicon Valley leaders to alcohol poisoning and extreme water torture.
"If you don't get invited to this meeting and want to know what it was like, just drink a bottle of gin and then waterboard yourself," Costolo tweeted.
Costolo, who ran Twitter from 2010 to 2015, issued this hyperbolic tweet in response to a BuzzFeed report that Trump will meet soon with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to discuss emerging technology, such as drones and the Internet of Things.
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The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy is organizing the technology meeting, which is slated for June 22. The event arrives three days after Trump is expected to meet with tech executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz to discuss topics like immigration and modernizing government operations, according to BuzzFeed.
Silicon Valley leaders have had an uneasy relationship with the Trump administration so far.
Executives are facing rising public pressure to break ties to the White House or risk appearing to condone Trump's controversial policies, including travel bans that target immigrants from majority Muslim countries, or calls for a wall spanning the U.S.-Mexico border. Tech leaders maintain that without access to the White House, they can't be a moderating voice in the president's ear.
Some execs, however, appear to have reached their limit.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently said he intends to leave Trump's economic advisory council after the president announced he would withdraw the U.S. from the landmark Paris Climate Agreement.
Topics X/Twitter Donald Trump Elon Musk
Maria Gallucci was a Science Reporter at Mashable. She was previously the energy and environment reporter at International Business Times; features editor of Makeshift magazine; clean economy reporter for InsideClimate News; and a correspondent in Mexico City until 2011. Maria holds degrees in journalism and Spanish from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.
