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Apple Fires ‘Misogynistic’ Employee Hours After Petition Circulates Over His Silicon Valley Memoir

Staffers cited raised questions in a petition over the hiring of Antonio García Martínez, who wrote “Chaos Monkeys.”

Just hours after Apple employees called for an investigation into a new hire on their advertising-platforms team, the company fired him, The Verge reports. Employees cited their concern in a petition after the hiring of Antonio García Martínez, who formerly worked at Facebook. Word got around that his 2016 memoir about Silicon Valley, Chaos Monkeys, expressed offensive sexist perspectives about women, and the petition drew more than 2,000 signatures within hours, according to The Verge. “We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez,” the petition reads. “His misogynistic statements in his autobiography—such as ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit’ —directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity.”

Soon after the petition reached higher-ups at Apple, Martínez’s Slack account was deactivated, and the ad-platforms team was told that he would no longer be employed. A company spokesperson told The Verge, “At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”