Tim Cook has long talked about how he plans to give his entire fortune to charity — and a recent SEC filing shows that he’s living up to his word.
Recently, Apple’s CEO gave 23,215 Apple shares to an unspecified charity. At the current AAPL trading price, that’s almost $5 million.
In the past, Cook’s charitable donations have included giving funds to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights and the Human Rights Campaign. That’s in addition to making other multimillion dollar sums to other unspecified charities.
Cook isn’t likely to be running short on cash any time soon, though. He currently controls 878,425 Apple shares, worth $188,896,512. That’s in addition to the shares he is likely to be awarded, which haven’t vested as of yet.
Tim Cook’s charitable plans
Tim Cook revealed his plans to give away his fortune to charity in a 2015 interview with, appropriately enough, Fortune.
In that interview, he said that he had already begun donating quietly, but plans to take time to develop a systematic approach rather than simply writing checks. He also said he plans to pay for his now-13-year-old nephew’s college fund before giving away all his cash.
Despite this push toward charity, Cook hasn’t set up an official charitable foundation as part of Apple — although the company has also donated funds for things like disaster relief. In a 2017 interview, Cook said that:
“I looked at it in early 2012. And I decided not to do it. And here’s why. When a company sets up a foundation, there is a risk, in my judgment, of the foundation becoming this other thing that is not connected to the company. It has a separate board of directors. They make reasonably independent decisions sometimes. It becomes a separate thing. I don’t want that for Apple. I want everybody involved. Because I think that the power that we bring, the things that we can do is because we’re stronger — it’s with our unity there. It’s when we put all of ourselves in it.
We don’t work on that many things. But we try to put all of ourselves in it.
If we had a foundation, my fear was it becomes something that 10 or 12 or 20 or 50 people do. And all of a sudden for the 120,000, it’s just this separate thing out there. People work here to change the world. So I think that should be integral to what the company does. Not peripheral in a foundation.”
Source: Business Insider
