Tickets for Web Summit, a splashy tech conference attended by roughly 70,000 people every year, have been on sale for months. But with just a few weeks to go until this year’s event in Lisbon, a number of high-profile tech industry figures vowed to boycott the event and excoriated Web Summit cofounder Paddy Cosgrave.
“You chose to support terrorists. As such I’ll never attend/sponsor/speak at any of your events again” tweeted David Marcus, a former Facebook executive. “I refuse to appear at Web Summit and am canceling my appearance,” Garry Tan, the president of startup incubator Y Combinator, said in a post.
Cosgrave had tweeted about the war between Israel and Hamas, saying that he was “shocked” by the actions and rhetoric of Western leaders in the face of “war crimes.” The comments, as well as Cosgrave’s liking of content on X that supported Palestine and chastised Israel, paired with a lack of condemnation of the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, infuriated many startup founders and VCs. After initially trying to stand his ground, Cosgrave published an apology a few days later—but that only seemed to generate more wrath from all sides.
“I created a car crash,” Cosgrave said in a tweet exchange with an Israeli VC on Tuesday, reflecting on the mess before announcing he was signing off from X: “Need some time off this platform.”
The firestorm that engulfed Cosgrave is a sobering reminder of the potential perils awaiting company leaders who choose to weigh in on divisive public issues. While the past few years have seen companies speak out on numerous social issues, from LGBTQ+ and abortion rights to the pandemic, the events of the past two weeks have underscored that there’s perhaps no bigger lightning rod than Israel and Palestine—and getting it wrong can be more than just a PR black eye.
“The nuances of [the Middle East conflict]—you just can’t compare,” says Anna Bradlee, a public relations and communications strategist who has previously advised clients like L’Oréal, Amazon Production Studios, and National Geographic. “But the last time we’ve seen something like this needing a response and call to action from CEO and executives was around responding to racial tensions in the US [in 2020], but I really don’t like relating the two.”
For many observers, the lesson from Cosgrave’s debacle may be that silence is the most prudent course of action. Indeed, as if to prove the point, when Fortune asked political communications professors at Stanford, Rutgers, Buffalo, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Columbia School of Business to comment on “what works and what does not” for corporate communications around the conflict, all declined to comment or did not respond.
Still, some experts warn that laying low and waiting for the storm to pass can also carry risks, particularly if it’s at odds with a company’s past values or actions.
Bradlee says if companies feel inclined to take sides, they should do so on a “case-by-case” basis.
“We’ve seen positive reactions when CEOs act with emotional intelligence and action condemning the slaughter of innocent civilians and terrorism in any form,” Bradlee said.
That’s the tack that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella appeared to take in a recent interview with German news organization Axel Springer. “There was a terrorist attack by Hamas on innocent citizens of Israel, and that has to be condemned in the strongest possible ways,” Nadella said, adding that “there should be no ambiguity, right? There is no room for violence of that form.”
The Web Summit founder tried to put out the fire with little success
For executives who opt to speak out, the fast pace and increasingly partisan nature of today’s news cycle mean bracing for a nonstop barrage of potential blowback, says Jordan Zaslav, a political communications expert who is the general manager at Axios HQ. “For folks who feel like their heads are spinning now, it’s a good time to take a breath and make sure that they feel comfortable in their approach—because it’s going to be tested frequently,” he says.
Zaslav pointed to the Republican Party’s troubles finding common ground on a speaker of the House of Representatives as an indication of how divisive and acrimonious public debate has become. “Looking ahead to an election year, you can look at what’s happening on the House floor even to just see within one party how much disagreement there is,” he says.
According to a list compiled by Yale School of Management professors and senior associate dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, nearly 100 major companies and law firms have publicly condemned the Hamas attack, including Apple, Walmart, Pfizer, and GM.
Starbucks, which is among the companies on Sonnenfeld’s list, has found itself embroiled in a dispute with the Workers United union after a union account tweeted “Solidarity with Palestine!” on Oct. 9. Starbucks sued the Workers United for trademark infringement for using its green logo in the tweet. Workers United, which said workers tweeted the message without union authorization, countersued Starbucks for defamation.
In the case of Web Summit’s Cosgrave, his attempts to recover from the controversy only added more fuel to the fire.
A few days after tweeting and retweeting content in support of Palestine, Cosgrave tweeted a statement condemning Hamas, while also saying that Israel does not “have a right to break international law.” Web Summit speakers continued to drop out (disclosure: This journalist is slated to speak at Web Summit). On Monday, Dor Shapira, Israel’s ambassador to Portugal, called Cosgrave’s statements “outrageous,” announced that he would not speak at the Summit, and “[encouraged] more to do so.”
First Round Capital founder Josh Kopelman shared a public Google Sheet that contains links to anti-Israel and pro-Palestine Tweets that Cosgrave had liked, saying on X that he found Cosgrave’s new statement “hard to take…at face value.”
When Fortune asked Web Summit to address Cosgrave’s statements, confirm the Summit was still happening, and share numbers of cancellations and registrations that followed the CEO’s tweets, a spokesperson said only: “We are looking forward to welcoming 70,000 attendees from around the world with a full program this November.”
