TIM COOK

Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple. His personal encounters with racial discrimination during his childhood in Alabama instilled in him a hatred for discrimination in private affairs and in the workplace. His philanthropic endeavors are widespread. He has supported the rights of minorities and the rights of individuals to personal privacy, and he has engaged Apple in those causes, too. He has contributed to politicians of both political parties.

In articles and interviews, Cook has often cited Robert Kennedy as his hero. He serves on the Board of Directors of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. We met in his office in Cupertino, California—where there are three photos on the wall—one of Martin Luther King Jr. and two of my father.

Kerry Kennedy: You have two photos of my father in your office. Talk about that.

Tim Cook: He inspires me. I love his idealism, with some pragmatism as well. I love the fact that he had a deep humanity about him, and he seemed to be someone who really cared for all people, lifting up those who were marginalized. I also love his focus on the individual and how the individual can make a difference. In his words, “a ripple of hope.”

KK: Yes, he used that phrase in a speech in South Africa, in 1966. Each act against injustice “sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,” and many ripples “build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

TC: That’s a powerful concept for me, and a huge inspiration.

KK: Why do you think he’s important today?

TC: In a lot of ways he is timeless: If you go back and listen to or read his speeches, the messages are as key today as they were in the sixties, when he was giving them, and they were key ten years ago, too, and ten years before that. He had a vision about the things that were truly important to focus on: We can do better, and because we can do better, we must act. Act whenever we see injustice. Act whenever we can make a difference. There were other heroes who did incredible things that, if you listen to them today, you can tell that what they were saying was important at that time, but you don’t feel that it’s a modern message. His messages are modern.

He’s someone I wish I had known. I try to learn from him by reading his words and seeing how he conducted himself.

KK: Besides love, the quality Daddy admired most was courage. He surrounded himself with people of uncommon bravery—the astronaut John Glenn, the football player Roosevelt Grier, the bullfighter El Cordobés, the mountain climber Jim Whittaker. He admired courage in all walks of life. That’s a quality you share. You’re the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but you took a full year to consider how to make that announcement. What happened in that year?

TC: It actually probably took longer than that. There were many considerations, like the details of how to say it in a way that would make a difference for people. Because I wasn’t doing it for myself. For me, I would’ve stayed very private, frankly. The reason I wanted to do it was to have an impact, so arguably the way to do it becomes very important: what to say, how to say it, where to say it.

KK: You wrote an op-ed in Bloomberg.

TC: I chose to do it in a business publication, because that’s who I am. I’m not someone who would appear on the cover of People magazine. I also wanted to choose the words carefully, which takes some time because I’m not a poet, so the words don’t necessarily come as naturally for me as they did for your father. And then, of course, I had to think about the company. I didn’t want to do it at a time when it would distract from something, like a product announcement. I wanted to get advice from people about the how and where to do it, and what to expect thereafter, so I could prepare myself. And finally, I wanted to talk to some people in advance, like our board and folks like that.

KK: Was there pushback?

TC: No, I found tremendous support. And I didn’t even know some of the people I called for advice. Like I reached out to Anderson Cooper.

KK: He came out in an email to his friend Andrew Sullivan, the writer.

TC: Yes, I loved the way he chose to do it. But there wasn’t a road map for someone in business. There were people in other fields whom I read about who had done it in a thoughtful and deeply considered way, so I wanted to touch base with them. I also didn’t want it to be a press event. I wasn’t doing it for press or to make a splash—I was doing it to make a difference.

KK: A lot of people come out to emancipate themselves, but that was not your issue.

TC: No, I’ve been comfortable with myself for a very long time, so I wasn’t looking to accomplish anything like that.

KK: So why do you think you’re the first? It’s just unbelievable to me, because your response is pretty much the universal response to those who have social power coming out: that people are very, very supportive. What do you think is holding back other CEOs?

TC: I think there’s still a stigma.

KK: But you said everyone was supportive.

TC: Everyone was supportive—let me be clear on that. My friends were supportive, and the board of Apple was supportive. But at large, the reality today is still that there are groups within which being gay is rare. Sports is an example. Jason Collins was the first professional athlete in a major American team sport to come out, and that was not very long ago. I think business is kind of like that, too. The stereotypical CEO is white, male, married, kids. If there’s a dinner, he’s there with his wife. That makes it harder for some folks.

But for me, that wasn’t the issue. I was getting a lot of outreach from kids who were struggling, who felt cast out. They knew I was gay because they’d read it on some website or something, and I began to realize there’s a greater purpose and a greater need to do it. My own view was that if it could affect one person, it was worth doing. And that whatever kind of heat I took would be worth it.

KK: One of the things that Daddy talked so much about is the idea of moral courage, which he said is rarer than bravery in battle or great intelligence. It’s not the courage to stand with your colleagues against a common enemy but to stand up to your colleagues, friends, and associates and say that what we’re doing is wrong, and risk being ostracized for it. You stood up at a shareholders’ meeting and challenged an investor who said: “Why are you doing things that don’t have a return on investment?”

TC: He wanted me to publish a report, specific to environmental issues, that showed every expenditure we made and the return on investment that it generated. He asked me to make a commitment to only do things that had a return on investment. And my response was, “I’m not going to do that.” We do many things as a company that don’t have a clear return on investment: We make our products accessible to the blind—that doesn’t have a clear return on investment, but it’s the right thing to do, so we do it. He kept pushing, and I said, “Look, if you have a problem with that, your choice is to get out of the stock, because we’re not changing that.”

As a CEO, you do a lot of things on gut, and you do a lot of things—certainly I do—where you look at the long term. And I believe strongly that many things are financially very smart in the long term that don’t appear to be so in the short term. Some environmental initiatives are like that. In the United States, we run Apple on 100 percent renewable energy. That came about from a series of decisions, but if you go back and look at each one of them, you might say, “Oh, that one doesn’t look good.” But in the aggregate, all of them added up to doing something spectacular.

KK: You’re actually making two different points. One is the argument against quarterly capitalism—against judging companies by how much they made in the last three months. They might not see a return on investment for seven years, or ten years, but eventually they’re going to see a return. Which is different from saying, “We’re going to do things that get no return on investment at all, and that is still important for us as a company.”

TC: Yes. Accessibility is an example. There are clearly things that we do to help people with disabilities that, if we measured strictly by sales and profits and the number of users, we’d never do—in the long term or the short term. We do those things because they’re just and right. Now, do other people look at Apple and say, “They’re doing the right thing, and I want to buy products from companies that do the right thing”? And so is there a financial return when you look at the reputation of a company? I would say that there is. But you don’t see that return when you look at it on a micro basis; you see it only when you look long and broad. So I think it’s important for companies not to get so tied into every independent action needing a return.

We’re doing a huge education program in the United States for which we picked more than one hundred schools that are underprivileged or underserved—schools where 97 percent or more of the kids are on free or reduced lunch—and we’re giving them technology and we’re training teachers to teach coding to the kids. We’re doing this because we’re very concerned about public education in general, but we’re also looking at it and saying, “We need more women and minorities in coding,” and this is an interesting way to see if we can excite people to get them into it when they’re very young, so coding becomes sort of a hobby. Our view is that they’ll do it more and more and maybe even someday become an Apple employee. But that’s all on faith. And if I listened to proposals like the one at the shareholder meeting, there’s no way we’d do this.

KK: How do we influence other CEOs and investors to see companies that way? Because a lot of CEOs say, I’m stuck—I’d love to have a better supply chain policy or environmental impact, but I can’t, because it’s costly. And a lot of investors say, I’d love to invest only in ways that are consistent with the programmatic aims of my foundation (for the endowment of a nonprofit committed to environmental protection, for instance, they might avoid investments in fossil fuel stocks), but I can’t, because my job is to maximize risk-adjusted returns.

TC: Well, I think we’re doing pretty well with returns, right? Actually, your father gave us this idea. We try to be the ripple of hope in several areas. We think that if we act in a responsible way, at least some other companies can look at it and say, “I can do that.”

I’m also hugely optimistic about the younger generation. What I see is a group of kids who are much more socially conscious than any generation that I’ve experienced in my lifetime. As they enter into their prime earning years, those kids will be the consumers, and they’re going to demand that companies be responsible. So I think there are a lot of vectors here that are hugely positive. I get outreach all the time from customers saying, “Hey, I saw you doing this, thank you.” Now, I also get the ones that are not so positive, so you have to be willing to take the arrows, too.

KK: Let’s talk about that. How do you decide which issues to take on? For instance, you spoke out against President Trump’s Muslim ban—his executive order that restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Why that issue and not something else?

TC: The filter that I use is I look at a subject and say, “Does Apple have standing in it?” Not me, but Apple. And I say, “Can we make a difference by doing something?” I strive very hard to stay totally out of politics. We always try to focus on policy and legislation and steer clear of personalities and elections and so forth. In the case of the travel ban, we looked at it and said, “One, this goes to the heart of why our company is successful: Apple wouldn’t exist without immigration. Two, we have a number of Muslim employees, and we have a number of employees from one of the seven countries named in the ban and an even broader number of employees who have families in those countries.” So we had cases where families were separated. One employee was traveling and couldn’t get back into the United States—her spouse was here. We had a case where parents were trying to join an employee for the birth of their first grandchild and couldn’t get in. These are very human stories. Some folks get mesmerized with the numbers, but it’s the humanity that we care about. We felt that we had standing to go in, and we thought we had a point of view that might help the situation, so we spoke out.

KK: One of the issues that we work on at RFK Human Rights is protecting privacy and the right of information, and Apple is right in the midst of these concerns. How do you see the conflict between privacy rights and national security?

TC: We had a situation about a year ago, the San Bernardino case, in which the US government made a request to us that we found shocking: it asked us to create a product that could penetrate secured, locked data.

KK: The FBI wanted you to break into the phone of one of the alleged terrorists who had killed fourteen people in San Bernardino, California. You responded with an open letter to customers explaining that unlocking the phone would constitute a “breach of privacy” with “chilling” consequences. ^{Can you explain why you were so resistant to this request?}

TC: Yes. There are many things technology should never be created to do, and this is one of them—not only because of the consequences for privacy but also for security. The reality is, you can’t have a back door in just one country. If you put a back door in a system, it could be used anywhere in the world.

KK: You wrote in your letter that, once created, such a back door “could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks—from restaurants to banks to stores and homes.”

TC: Yes. You could imagine a government that wants to target a human rights activist having such a master key. You could imagine a hacker who wants to not only steal something from somebody but also perhaps to sell this information. You could imagine someone trying to figure out where someone’s kids are so he could kidnap them—it becomes a safety issue. You could imagine someone taking down a power grid in the United States, and people on life support could lose their lives. There are so many examples you could imagine. And in Ukraine, this actually happened: The power grid was taken down. So these concerns are not just theoretical.

So we looked at all the incidents and possibilities. The question was not just can we do it but also should we do it. The government wanted us to answer only the “can we” question. And if the answer was yes, they wanted us to do it. And it was so disappointing to hear that from the US government, which should be the beacon for human rights around the world.

Now that more than a year has passed, and we’ve seen all the hacking that has taken place, and WikiLeaks has posted a whole bunch of data stolen from the CIA, it’s not just a theory that these tools can be stolen. My guess is that people today would be much more hesitant to make that request than they were a year ago, because much of what we feared has come about.

KK: It will be interesting to see how the Trump administration approaches this issue.

TC: Honestly, it doesn’t fall along party lines. It’s not red-blue. When this occurred, there were libertarian-leaning people who felt strongly that there’s no way we should do this. Keep in mind, this request came under a Democratic administration, and yet there were Democrats who said there’s no way this should be done, as well as some who said they couldn’t understand why Apple wasn’t doing this.

KK: Was it partly a matter of technical literacy?

TC: Yes. The deeper people understood the technology, the more they feared the tool being created in the first place—and the more likely they were to say it shouldn’t be done. To the degree that people didn’t understand the technology, they were more likely to quickly just say, “Phone, terrorist, why don’t you just unlock it?”

KK: In a speech, you said that challenges should inspire us: “They do not daunt us. They do not deter us. Like Robert Kennedy, we reject pessimism and cynicism. We see no contradiction between a hardheaded realism and an unshakable idealism that says that anything is possible if we just get to work.”

TC: I loved his optimism. In all the stuff I’ve listened to, he was never cynical, never negative. He spoke about things as they really were but also painted a picture of what they could be. And all too often in the last many years, there just hasn’t been enough of that optimism.

KK: The easiest way for a politician to win is to sow division in a country, but Daddy sought to bring people together. And he brought together black and white, old and young, what today would be red and blue. He had the backing of George Wallace racists and Martin Luther King activists. So in today’s divided country, what can be done to bring people together? What is your role personally, and what is the role of Apple, in bringing people together and healing those divisions?

TC: When I look at the dysfunction in Congress today, what I see is that all too often the incentives lead some politicians to take extreme-Right or -Left positions, and the middle has been hollowed out. In my view, this has occurred largely through gerrymandering. So I guess if I could do anything, I would probably have a computer system redraw the districts, to kind of bring things back to a new normal. I would also probably limit the presidential term to one and extend it to six years, so that presidents are not constantly running for reelection. I’d take all the money out of the system and say that only people could contribute to elections—that corporations could not, that institutions could not. Maybe those huge changes would rattle the system so much that there would be a fresh start. Maybe those aren’t the right changes, but I am beginning to think that some structural change is needed. The important thing is that we keep our democracy.

So what can we do? I think we need to recommit ourselves to being great citizens—not only of the country but of the states, cities, and communities that we live in—and play an active role and contribute. We should all think about ways to motivate even more people to engage in improving their lot, and the lot of their neighbors and fellow citizens.

As a company, what can we do? We’ve tried to convince our people to give more and participate more by offering to match their charitable donations. We have a day of service on Martin Luther King’s birthday, when people go out and donate their time. And if someone who maybe can’t give money contributes their time, we will match that with money. We also provide ways for people to get involved in company initiatives, like fighting climate change.

It’s important for companies to think through how they can provide opportunities for their customers and their users, too. In our case, we touch a lot of people, so we will, for example, rope in some developers for an “Apps for Earth” promotion, with proceeds from the apps going to the World Wildlife Fund. On the user side, there’s our Product Red partnership: For every Red product that we sell, we donate to the Global Fund for the elimination of AIDS. To raise awareness, we turn our logo red on World AIDS Day, so people walking into the store say, Why is the logo red? Or we turn the stem green for Earth Day, same kind of thing. All of these things add up to create momentum.

KK: Ripples of hope.

TC: Exactly. All of us can do something. Your father had that great insight that—I can’t remember his exact words—but it was basically that maybe only a few things or people were able to bend history, but he quickly got it back to the individual and what the individual can do, and that it would all add up to making a difference.

KK: “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”

TC: I feel the same way about companies. All people should have values, and companies are nothing more than a collection of people, so by extension they should have values as well. Obviously companies should do things to help change the world in their own way, and one of the hardest challenges is picking which things to pursue. So we take on a few causes and put a lot behind them. At the same time, we’ve said to our employees, “Okay, you make the decision, and we’ll match.” So everyone becomes a sort of mini foundation.

KK: And that empowers people.

TC: It empowers people to do their own thing, because everybody has their own passion. I know that your father was somewhat suspicious of business. But he did think that private enterprise was, as he put it, a vast untapped resource for social change. He also said, there is no more promising asset that we have today than the skills, the resources, and the inventiveness of our private sector. He understood that business has a central role to play in helping society solve its greatest problems. And he saw, even in the 1960s, that coming advances in technology held enormous potential to change the world for the better.