She claims change of leadership was the catalyst.
Published Aug 12, 2026, 12:50 AM EDT
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Back in the early days of Google's history, the company was bound by one guiding rule: "Don't be evil."
Over time, that rule has slowly been relegated lower in the company's code of conduct until it hit the very bottom. Now, one Google ex-employee has given us insight into why that happened, and they believe it happened due to a change in leadership.
A shift in management caused "Don't be evil" to die out, claims a Google ex-employee It went from a mantra to a footnote
As reported by Ars Technica, this information comes to us via Claire Stapleton, who worked at Google from 2007 to 2019. She recently published a book titled Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech – A Biting Memoir of Twelve Years Inside Google, in which Stapleton writes personal accounts of her experiences working for the biggest search engine in the world.
She talked to Ars Technica about why she believes the tech giant downgraded its "Don't be evil" mantra that it had since 2004. Due to her position in communications, Stapleton says she had good insight into the company's shift and pins the turning point to Larry Page replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2011.
Stapleton says that while Schmidt was "the corporate guy," Page was "the pure tech guy" who had an "incredibly lofty rhetoric about the company's ambitions and his hopes that it would solve all the world's problems." This, Stapleton said, would cause a shift:
“I think it created a culture that was more corporate—the opposite of what Larry said he wanted to happen. The company became much more complex and inefficient. The irony was Larry was calling this out: ‘We’re going to become sclerotic, and we’re going to stop innovating if the company gets too bloated.’ But that’s exactly what happened: Google became a bloated Borg. And all of a sudden, Google wanted to do cool branding, like Apple.”
This then led to products such as Google Glass and Google+, which would eventually run out of steam and be left on the wayside. Google would eventually move the "Don't be evil" mantra from the top of the code of conduct to the bottom in May 2018.
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