How Tim Cook gets Trump to help Apple
Their personal relationship has not always helped "Tim Apple", but Tim Cook has been more successful in working with Trump than most.
Tim Cook and Donald Trump in a meeting at the White House in 2018 -- image credit: Apple
President Trump has previously backed the FBI against Apple over what he called foreign apps, and famously forgot Cook's name, but overall Apple appears to have been able to benefit under a Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal says that this is down to a particular technique Cook uses, alongside lobbying Trump personally.
"That's why he's a great executive, because he calls me and others don't," Trump said in 2019.
Cook both calls Trump and has meals with him. Reportedly, key to those communications is that Cook makes them about one single point, one single issue, each time.
For example, a 2017 exchange saw Cook persuade Trump to scale down his plans for tariffs, after telling him how this would increase iPhone prices and help Samsung. Cook will presumably have to do this again -- the incoming administration says it will increase tariffs, even though the cost is paid by the importers and passed to US consumers.
Ahead of the new administration, Cook recommenced the relationship by congratulating Trump, as practically all business leaders and foreign governments did. However, Cook may also have kept the relationship going during the Biden administration, as Trump has claimed that the two talked about the EU laws.
"Two hours ago, three hours ago, he [Cook] called me," Trump said on the PBD Podcast on October 17, 2024. "He said the European Union has just fined us $15 billion... Then on top of that, they got fined by the European Union another $2 billion."
"Tim... I'm not going to let them take advantage of our companies -- that won't, you know, be happening,'" he says he continued.
As well as the personal lobbying through calls and meals, Cook has also publicly worked with Trump. In 2019, he gave the President the first 2019 Mac Pro to be made in Austin, Texas, following a tour of the plant.
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Comments
When a corporation bows to a politician, it is called fascism, or state-capitalism.
when a political leader determines the winner of an economic sector, it’s fascism.
1. Call it what you want, but not working with government whether you like them or not is a dead end road. You work with the tools you have and that includes people you don't like for any reason you want.
2. The election is over. He won, so adjust accordingly just like the rest of us have. In 4 years there will be a different group of candidates.
3. Less than 50%, but in reality every person who chose not to vote agreed to take whoever won so you can count them as well.
Trump is like the manager at work who knows very little and meddles in everything and possible does not like you. The only option is to work around it until they quit, your resign, or one of you moves to a different department. In this case the quitting part is his and it is in 4 years.
You can blame lots of things on him but the economy crapping out was due to COVID which he did not cause or control. He tried to close the borders to entry, but of course it was challenged in course. He also opened all doors to getting a vaccine developed as fast as possible and this in itself was incredible effort. Crap on the rest of his actions but not these two.
One of those will be changed by nature of the election. The other will at least be addressed by the President of the United States. He’s spoken about how corrupt the EU is already. So they’re not on his “nice” list.
What a load of crap. One of the first things Trump did in 2017 was gut Obama's NSC Pandemic Preparedness Systems doing things like appointing a Trump Yes Man to head the CDC and provide misleading and false information about COVID deaths.
He claimed it was just like the flu and would be over in a few weeks. He thought injecting bleach and shining UV light in bodies would cure COVID. He did nothing when the pandemic started even though he'd been warned. Then he claimed the pandemic "snuck up on us" which was another of many likes he'd tell.
He appointed Pence to lead a COVID task force and ignored many of their recommendations. In short he DID control a great deal of what happened with the spread of the pandemic through actions, inaction, lies, and misleading statements. What little substantive actions he did take were only because handlers made him realize that all the people dying on his watch were bad optics. He his ilk were responsible for creating and spreading distrust in vaccines. I don't know that he bought shares in Ivermectin but he could and should have reassured the public that there were no nanochips in the vaccines and they didn't magnetize people.
Everything positive he did was too little too late and done only because it was self-serving. So yes we can absolutely blame the disastorus spread of COVID on him and the distrust he fueled. Don't for get when he tried to encourage vaccination at a rally his own cult members booed him.
All this and then there's the lies about widespread voter fraud. Cyber Ninjas found NOTHING. What a surprise.
Those who voted for him and those who didn't vote for Harris will come to realize that what damage will have been done to democracy in the next four years will not be undone in the following four years. Even if complete reason is restored to our three branches of Government. We've got a rough decade ahead of us. How much of it will be under authoritarian rule depends on the new awareness of voters in 2028.
Democrats did a poor job of fighting outright lies and main stream media bears much responsibility for not helping at all. Trump supporters can comeback in four years and tell me how wrong I am. As if.
Gruber over on Daring Fireball was practically soiling himself in rage over Tim Cook congratulating Trump.
Just because Tim Cook is gay, people on the left seem to assume that he must be left leaning and woke to the core. They forget that he has plenty of centre right attributes that kind of matter in business. For all they know he might be a Republican voter!
People just need to move on. It makes good business sense to deal with Trump, end of discussion.
indeed not just them all tech companies and once they uses a new default currency then well how long will USD be considered default.
Sure seems like the fastest way to give up your global position.