Apple parted ways with a new employee this week after thousands of workers petitioned the company to investigate how it hired the man, who had previously published an autobiography they said contains misogynistic statements.
Antonio García Martínez, formerly a product manager for ad targeting at Facebook as well as the author of the 2016 autobiography “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” joined Apple’s ads team in April, according to his LinkedIn profile.
García Martínez’s book chronicles his life in the San Francisco Bay Area’s tech scene from 2010 to 2014. He began his career as a quantitative strategist for Goldman Sachs before leaving for Silicon Valley, where he eventually started an ad-tech startup, AdGrok, which he later sold to Twitter. He worked as a product manager at Facebook between 2011 and 2013. In addition to his book, García Martínez has written for publications including Wired.
On Monday, Business Insider noted García Martínez’s new position, citing his LinkedIn profile. By Tuesday evening, some Apple employees began circulating an internal “letter of concern,” citing several of García Martínez’s passages in “Chaos Monkeys” as problematic. The employees argued, in a letter viewed by CNN Business, that the passages are in direct opposition to Apple’s commitment to inclusion.
To illustrate their point, the letter — which was first reported on by tech news site The Verge on Wednesday after it accumulated more than 2,000 employees’ signatures — included excerpts from his writing.
“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of s**t,” read a sentence in one passage from “Chaos Monkeys.” It continued, “They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”
