Amicus brief on behalf of 97 tech companies

If nothing more, this brief is very informative for those wanting to understand the issues at play here - a good jumping off point to case law, historical context, and current news.

Makes sense as Elon is a Trump advisor. Also interestingly missing: Amazon.

i believe amazon and expedia were part of the suit https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/yet-another-judg...

I believe Elon Musk is playing (once again) the ultra-long game.

He is betting that the court system as well as Congress will limit Donald Trump and his cronies from doing something that is grounds for impeachment - and so Donald Trump will be in office for the entire term. Given this, it makes sense to be in a position that has at least a tiny bit of influence on Trump.

Amazon has a similar position: they need large amounts of (immigrant) labor for their warehouses, but also are extremely dependent on free trade, especially import tariffs. So, they're likely afraid of openly defying Donald Trump, because they fear that Trump could retaliate against them.

The other companies which are on the list (except Apple!) are a hard target for Trump as they do not depend on overseas goods import and thus cannot be hit by import tariffs - the only way to hit them is by deporting the foreign workers they already have, and the courts have shown they won't let pass deportations of legal immigrants. So, for these companies it's relatively easy to sign.

I did a run at the (amateur) math off Google Finance and Crunchbase. With some companies I couldn't find's numbers outright omitted, and using old valuations, I totaled those corps filing as valued at $2.58 trillion in market cap., at least $131 billion of valuation and another $8 billion in investments in un-valuated companies. Assuming those investments hold value at least equal to the total worth of those companies in sum, we can reasonably assume the companies party to this brief represent value of at least 16% of US GDP.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y0VtAf9OpjwU7Haf4dHY...

in case anyone else was wondering

EDIT: indeed it is > 15% even including only the publicly traded companies, for which the numbers of can be considered less speculative