SAN FRANCISCO — As news about President Trump’s temporary ban on immigrants and visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries filtered through Silicon Valley on Saturday, tech leaders from Apple to Tesla began condemning the move.

But in anguished phone calls, late-night text messages and emails over the weekend, Silicon Valley executives were struggling to figure out whether they would – or should – take bigger and more coordinated actions to condemn the executive order, which also suspended the nation’s refugee program, according to people who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There was even discussion in some circles of finding ways to pressure Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist who was Trump’s highest-profile supporter in Silicon Valley and was mocked by critics over the weekend for predicting that Trump wouldn’t follow through on his campaign proposal to ban Muslims. (Thiel said this weekend that the executive order falls short of a Muslim ban.)

But by Sunday evening, it wasn’t clear whether Silicon Valley planned to go beyond statements and a few other isolated actions to counter Trump’s move to restrict immigration.

“Right now, everyone is facing different levels of conflict between what they know would be right, to stand up for American values, versus what they might have to lose,” said Ali Partovi, an entrepreneur and early investor in Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox and Facebook. “Leaders of tech companies have been talking for a year about when to take a stand or draw the line, and I think last week was sort of an awakening that the time is now.”

Technology leaders have previously pinballed as they weighed the benefits of a Trump relationship against the potential costs to the bottom line. For Silicon Valley, the weekend represented a watershed moment in those deliberations, said Sam Altman, president of the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator.

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During the presidential campaign, tech executives were sharply critical of Trump. But after he was elected, industry leaders, including Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and Tesla Motors chief executive Elon Musk, met with him in an attempt to gain the good graces of the administration. During the meeting, the executives raised many issues where the government could help their businesses, including cutting the corporate tax rate, navigating the Chinese market, improving the contracting and bidding process for startups, and supporting development of cloud computing.

Then over the weekend, dozens of technology leaders, including those who attended the Trump Tower meeting, denounced the immigration ban. In strongly worded, companywide emails, open letters, and on Twitter, Apple chief executive Tim Cook quoted Martin Luther King Jr., while Google chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote that it was “painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues.”

“Any fairly elected president deserves an open-mind,” Altman said of the initial meetings. “But clearly something has happened here that people feel is important and that it is time to stand up and object.”

Altman was among the thousands who gathered at San Francisco International Airport this weekend to protest, as was Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google (Brin, a refugee, was careful to say he was not attending as a Google official).

But Oracle Corp., whose chief executive, Safra Catz, was a Trump ally and attended the tech summit at Trump Tower, didn’t make a statement. Intel did not make one. Amazon.com sent a companywide email advising employees who were from the seven banned countries to avoid traveling outside the United States, but chief executive Jeff Bezos did not personally speak out against the policy.


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