Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, as internal dissent mounts
The Google corporate logo hangs outside the Google Germany offices on August 31, 2021 in Berlin, Germany.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
During a keynote speech in New York on Monday from the managing director of Google’s Israel business, an employee in the company’s cloud division protested publicly, proclaiming “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.”
The Google Cloud engineer was subsequently fired, CNBC has learned, marking another dark moment for Google, which has been thrust into an escalating number of political and cultural conflicts in recent years and has struggled to quell employee dissent.
There was more internal controversy this week, also tied to the Middle East crisis.
Ahead of an International Women’s Day Summit in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Google’s employee message board was hit with an influx of staffer comments about the company’s military contracts with Israel. The online forum, which was going to be used to help inform what questions were asked of executives at the event, was shut down for what a spokesperson described to CNBC as “divisive content that is disruptive to our workplace.”
Google’s role as a provider of technology to militaries in the U.S. and abroad has been a source of workforce consternation since at least 2018, when employees protested a Defense Department contract called Project Maven. Then came controversy surrounding Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion artificial intelligence and computing services agreement among Google, Amazon Web Services and the Israeli government and military that began in 2021.
That outrage has spread to a host of other issues, often leaving CEO Sundar Pichai on the defensive when confronted by employees at company events.
The escalation of the Middle East conflict over the past five months has increased the tension level at Google even further. In October, Hamas launched multipronged and deadly attacks on Israel, leading to a military response that’s killed at least 30,000 Palestinians, with many more injured and facing starvation, according to the Palestinian enclave’s Health Ministry.
In recent weeks, more than 600 Google workers signed a letter addressed to leadership asking that the company drop its sponsorship of the annual Mind the Tech conference promoting the Israeli tech industry. The event on Monday in New York featured an address from Barak Regev, managing director of Google Israel.
A video of the employee protesting during the speech went viral.
“No cloud for apartheid,” the employee yelled. Members of the crowd booed him as he was escorted by security out of the building.
Regev then told the crowd, “Part of the privilege of working in a company, which represents democratic values is giving the stage for different opinions.”
A Google spokesperson said the employee was fired for “interfering with an official company-sponsored event” in an email to CNBC on Thursday. “This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.” The spokesperson didn’t specify which policies were violated.
More questions about Gemini
Google is far from alone among U.S. companies in facing increased pressure since the latest war broke out between Hamas and Israel.
In October, Starbucks sued Workers United, which has organized employees in 400 U.S. stores, over a pro-Palestinian message posted on a union social media account. Starbucks said it was trying to get the union to stop using its name and likeness, as the post also drew protests from pro-Israel demonstrators. Boycotters said the company wasn’t adequately supporting Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
McDonald’s has been the subject of a boycott effort after a local franchisee in Israel announced in October that it was providing free meals to Israeli soldiers.
Ahead of Google’s International Women’s Day summit on Thursday, called Her Power, Her Voice, some women filled the company’s internal discussion forum Dory with questions about how the Israeli military contract and Google’s AI chatbot Gemini are impacting Palestinian women. Some of the comments had hundreds of “upvotes” from employees, according to internal correspondence viewed by CNBC.
One employee asked about Gemini’s bias. Specifically, the person wrote that when asking Gemini, “Do women in Gaza deserve human rights?” the chatbot didn’t have a response and directed the user to try Google search. But when the employee asked the same question of women in France, Gemini answered “Absolutely,” followed by multiple bullet points backing up the assertion.
CNBC replicated the search Thursday afternoon and found the same results. Late last month, Google paused its Gemini image generation tool after saying it offers “inaccuracies” in historical pictures, in response to a barrage of user complaints.
Another highly-rated comment on the forum asked how the company is recognizing Mai Ubeid, a young woman and former Google software engineer who was reportedly killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza along with her family late last year. (Some employees and advocacy groups gathered to honor Ubeid in New York in December.)
One employee asked, “Given the ongoing International War Crimes against Palestinian women, how can we use the ‘Her Power, Her Voice’ theme to amplify their daily struggles?” The comment received over 100 upvotes.
“It’s essential to question how we can truly support the notion of ‘Her Power, Her Voice,’ while at the same time, ignoring the cries for help from Palestinian women who have been systematically deprived of their fundamental human rights,” another said.
As the number of comments swelled, Google prematurely shut down the forum.
Google’s spokesperson didn’t address any of the individual posts but provided the following statement to CNBC:
“We were pleased to host an event to celebrate International Women’s Day. Unfortunately, before the event a series of off-topic and divisive questions and comments were posted to internal forums. Our internal community guidelines team routinely removes divisive content that is disruptive to our workplace, and did that here.”
WATCH: Google vs. Google
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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