My experience could not be more different. I’ve made life long friends at work, especially when I was working for smaller firms. I don’t think those relationships are transactional.
If you follow his logic and believe that the ultra-wealthy pay too little tax (as e.g. Warren Buffett does), then a balanced approach is to set the tax rate to: "37% of income or 1.85% of wealth, whichever is higher".
This would close the gap between Buffett's tax rate and that of his secretary, but would not be the "highest taxes in the world" that PG decries.
Gross margin doesn't tell you much about their level of investment. Gross margin is only revenue minus COGS (i.e. hosting, support, potentially infra teams). To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share).
SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here.
In practice, I don’t think tax policy is the primary driver for where people chose to live. Even very wealthy people.
If I were very wealthy the first thing I would want to buy is proximity to the people I love, the food I like, the culture I’m excited about. For many people that means being close to home.
I can’t imagine how shallow my life would have to be for me to optimize it around taxes.
Extremely impressive that they were able to ship inside-out tracking, pancake lenses, and eye tracking + foveated rendering. Each of these is a serious engineering challenge. Very few organizations could pull this off.
This is a glib, but important insight. If the split between founders and early employees is fundamentally off, then we should see many more early employee types start companies and take the other side of that bargain. In fact, they do not!