A Google engineer named Amit Patel scribbled "don't be evil" on the office whiteboards in 1999. He was worried Google was about to start selling off its search results, letting whoever paid the most jump to the top and burying the honest answers below.
The phrase caught on. A coworker, the guy who would later build Gmail, pushed to make it the official company motto. He picked those three words for a reason. The idea was to plant something that would be a pain to rip back out later.
By 2000, it opened Google's code of conduct, the rulebook every employee is supposed to follow. In 2004, when Google first sold shares to the public, the two founders wrote it into their letter to investors. Do good in the world, they said, and you win in the long run, even if you leave some money on the table to get there.
Then in the spring of 2018, it quietly disappeared from the top of that rulebook. Google announced nothing. A reporter at the tech site Gizmodo only caught it by pulling up older saved copies of the web page and spotting that the whole opening bit about not being evil had been wiped. Weirder still, the little note at the bottom saying when the page was last edited hadn't moved. On paper, nothing had happened.
Two months before that, word had gotten out that Google was helping the U.S. military teach its computers to study footage shot by drones. The job had a code name, Maven. Around 4,000 of Google's 85,000 workers, one in every twenty people there, signed a letter telling the boss that Google had no business helping run a war. Roughly a dozen of them quit.
On the first of June, a Google executive pulled staff together and said the company would let the drone deal expire and walk away from it. She admitted, by one account, that Google would never take that work again, because the public backlash had been that brutal. A week later, Google put out a fresh set of promises about its AI work. One of them: it would never build the stuff into weapons.
Google has never once said why it moved the motto, so nobody on the outside can prove the two are connected. But the slogan built to be impossible to remove got pulled from the very front of the rulebook in the middle of an open revolt by thousands of its own engineers.
The motto never fully went away, though. It got shrunk down to one quiet line at the very bottom of the rulebook: "remember, don't be evil, and if you see something that isn't right, speak up." It's still sitting right there today.