Why People Leak to the Media
Why employees at top tech companies risk their jobs to leak secrets—and what it reveals about power, frustration, and strategy.
Meta recently fired 20 employees for leaking confidential information. The company has become notorious for employees spilling details from all-hands meetings—a problem Google also faces. Apple, by contrast, keeps a tighter lid on things, though it’s not immune: a year ago, a former iOS engineer was sued for leaking to The Wall Street Journal and The Information.
So why do people—especially those with cushy, high-paying tech jobs—risk it all to leak to the media? It comes down to three main motives: ego, disagreement with company decisions, and controlled leaks orchestrated by the company itself.
The first is about the feeing of empowerement. Working inside a company you know much more about its plans, performance and problems. Sometimes people simply want to leverage this position and feel that power. It’s almost gossip, except that they’re not just talking to their friends, but also to people whose job is reporting such things.
The second motive kicks in when someone’s unhappy with a company decision and wants to shine a spotlight on it. For obvious reasons, this specifically affects Big Tech companies with wide societal implications (so Meta and Google). What can you leak from Nvidia, how expensive their next GPU is going to be?
At early Google, Brin and Page used to run actual Q&A sessions and answer unfiltered questions from their employees. But with scale, they discovered that everything they said becomes public almost immediately. Naturally, they stopped saying things that were meant to be private and soon stopped visiting all-hands meeting altogether.
Apple is almost unique in their capacity to contain information. We see all kinds of the “next iPhone” leaks discussed in the media, but this comes mostly from their supply chain, not the company itself. So when an Apple leak does slip out—like the rise and fall of their electric car project—it’s revealing. I can almost guarantee, that one frustrated Apple employee found the reporter’s email or Signal and tipped them off. It’s easy to understand why: they spent years working on this and probably believed they were on a path to a great product–right before it was killed from the top.
And you can’t even put it on your CV! Oh, maybe know you can, because NDAs usually don’t cover things that have become public knowledge (pretty sure theirs is iron clad anyway). So even if you couldn’t push this electric car to market, you can now discuss what you were actually doing all those years.
Most of the time, leaks don’t happen just because. They appear specific people are unhappy with their company’s decision. A project gets killed, a department shuffled, or the CEO picks someone else’s strategy—and the leaker wants the world to know who’s to blame when it all goes south.
Now, we finally get to the third option: companies consciously leaking the information they want to make public but can’t do through the official channels. The story of the United Kingdom forcing Apple to add backdoor to their end-to-end encryption is the best example. A new law lets the government issue secret orders for data access, with no public appeal allowed. Companies have to comply silently or face consequences. Then, suddenly, the story breaks. My bet? Apple leaked this through the media so it can’t be traced back to them. Another classic: rumors that the original iPad would cost $1,000. When Steve Jobs unveiled it at $499, jaws dropped—partly because the leak set the stage for a dramatic reveal. Controlled leaks can shape narratives or test the waters, all while keeping the company’s hands clean.
This is why you have to be very careful when reading stories based on leaked info. Think who might have done this and why, question their motives.
Meta employs nearly 80,000 people—do 20 leakers represent the majority? Probably not. And what about the stuff that doesn’t leak? We’re blind to the full picture. Sometimes a leak fits a juicy narrative so well that reporters don’t dig deeper or seek counterpoints. Case in point: an anonymous “X employee” fed Fortune a story that turned out to be bogus. It ran anyway.
