Silicon Valley CEO Says He'd Make Low-Income Vendors Lives 'Miserable,' Brags About Driving Out Family of Recyclers
Another tech CEO is in hot water after making insensitive comments about poor Bay Area residents. This time it's Mark Woodward, head of the software company Invoca, who made comments about local food vendors in a Facebook post.
After realtor Holly Barr shared a post from an anonymous resident who was concerned about the presence of fruit sellers near the resident's home, Woodward chimed in:
If that was my house, I would go out there and make their life miserable. I would do whatever it took to make them leave. If that meant destroying some of their produce, or standing out there with signs to chase everyone away, or just making them very uncomfortable, I would do that in a heartbeat.
The poster speculated that the fruit sellers were potentially connected to a recent robbery in the area and claimed one of them had urinated in a neighbor's yard. After some Facebook users criticized Woodward for his comments, he pushed back and explained how he had once fended off a group of recyclers:
“I had a family, not from our neighborhood who was constantly digging through the recycle bins in our neighborhood illegally,” Woodward wrote. “I confronted them rather aggressively and they have never been back.”
The comments have been deleted, but you can look at the post in the tweet below.
