Are CEOs Out of Touch? Three Recent Headlines Say Yes

A CEO called privacy activists “terrorists.” Another CEO couldn’t bring himself to call his own burger a “burger.” A third called a $9 coffee “affordable.” Three different companies. Same energy.

Corporate leadership loves to talk about “authenticity” and “connecting with the customer.” But these three headlines say something else entirely: the people running America’s biggest companies are speaking a different language than the rest of us. One where regular people become threats, food becomes inventory, and $9 becomes a bargain.

The CEO Who Called Privacy Advocates “Terrorists”

Garrett Langley is the founder and CEO of Flock Safety, a surveillance company valued at roughly $8.3 billion that operates a network of more than 100,000 automated license plate reader cameras across thousands of U.S. communities. Most people know the cameras themselves simply as “Flock cameras.” But there’s a separate group worth knowing about here: DeFlock, a volunteer-run project not affiliated with Flock Safety, whose name is a play on the company’s own. Its purpose is to map the public locations of Flock’s cameras so citizens can see where they’re being tracked. In an interview with Forbes last year, Langley described DeFlock as a “terroristic organization,” and said its “primary motivation is chaos.”

To be clear about what DeFlock actually does: it’s an open-source mapping project that crowdsources the locations of cameras that are already sitting in plain view on public poles. It doesn’t damage property, dox individuals, or organize violence. Its stated purpose is transparency about where government-linked surveillance infrastructure is being installed.

As backlash against Flock has intensified this year, including lawsuits from residents alleging unconstitutional mass tracking, Langley walked the comment back. He told Forbes his remark “was a mistake” and that he apologizes for it, adding that groups critical of his business “have real valid criticisms.”

The CEO Who Couldn’t Say “Burger”

Chris Kempczinski, CEO and president of McDonald’s, posted an Instagram video this year meant to hype the company’s new Big Arch burger ahead of its launch. It did not go the way he hoped.

In the clip, Kempczinski took a visibly small bite, called the burger “distinctively McDonald’s,” and repeatedly referred to it not as a burger, not as food, but as a “product,” at one point calling it a “delicious product.” He used the word “burger” only a couple of times in the entire video.

The internet noticed immediately. The clip racked up millions of views, largely for the wrong reasons. One tracking firm found that over a third of the online reaction was mocking or humorous in tone. Rival executives piled on: Burger King’s president posted his own video taking an enormous bite of a Whopper, seemingly as a dig at Kempczinski’s hesitance. A comedian’s parody of the video, playing Kempczinski as stiff and robotic, pulled in more than 17 million views on its own.

Kempczinski later addressed the fallout in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying one of his kids called to tell him he’d “gone viral and not in a good way.”

Nobody’s accusing the man of a crime. But when the head of the world’s biggest fast-food chain can’t bring himself to call his own burger a “burger,” it’s a pretty good encapsulation of a broader disconnect between the people who run these companies and the people who actually eat, drive past, or live under the products they’re selling.

The CEO Who Called a $9 Coffee “Affordable”

Brian Niccol, CEO of Starbucks, was asked on the Wall Street Journal’s “What’s News AM” podcast this spring whether a widening gap between wealthier and lower-income consumers, sometimes called a “K-shaped economy,” was hurting Starbucks. He said it wasn’t. Then he explained why: “Regardless of what your income level is, in some cases, a $9 experience does feel like you’re splurging,” he said, describing it elsewhere as an “affordable premium experience.”

The timing didn’t help. The comments landed just after Starbucks posted record quarterly revenue, and around the same time as reports that Niccol has permission to use company aircraft for personal travel. Online reaction was swift: one X post calling him “out of touch” was reshared more than 5,000 times, and an Instagram commenter who called him “disconnected” picked up over 2,000 likes.

Nobody’s disputing that Starbucks can price its drinks however it wants. But telling people already stretching their grocery budgets that a $9 coffee is “affordable” is its own kind of tone-deaf, the same vocabulary gap showing up again, just priced in dollars instead of quotation marks.

The Common Thread

None of these moments is a scandal in the legal sense. Nobody broke a law. But all three are useful data points in a larger conversation about the vocabulary gap between corporate leadership and the public they serve, one where a burger becomes a “product,” a citizen mapping public cameras becomes a “terrorist,” and a $9 coffee becomes “affordable.” Whether that’s tone-deafness, legal caution, or something else, it’s fair to ask: are CEOs out of touch?