Teflon Don, aka Donald J. Trump, aka the president of the United States, gets away with pretty much anything he does without ever really suffering the repercussions, from enticing Russia to meddle in the 2016 election, to using Ukraine in a quid pro quo deal to diminish a potential political rival, to reportedly deceiving the IRS for years about his family company’s valuation and the taxes he should have paid. I could go on for a while, but you get the point: shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it.
Teflon Tim, aka Tim Apple, aka Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, also manages to get away with pretty much anything he does, though what he tries to get away with is a bit different. Cook runs the biggest company on earth, with a current market cap of $1.16 trillion, and yet, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan tax-policy think tank, Apple has been playing America for billions in taxes for years. Cook’s company has a long list of sketchy tax-avoidance schemes; just ask Ireland, which was charged by European authorities in 2016 for illegally cutting a special tax deal with Apple, helping save the company up to $13 billion. (Apple is currently appealing the E.U. judgement and said the case “defies reality and common sense.” The company has long disputed that it avoids paying taxes and has argued that it is, in fact, “the largest taxpayer in the world.”) Cook also, infuriatingly, charges customers $39 for an iPhone case that probably costs a few pennies to make. But one of his most impressive feats is flying under the radar in his relationship with Trump, a kinship that almost every other tech CEO has been excoriated for. Yet Cook, somehow, has come out unscathed.
The contrast here is jarring. In 2017, when Travis Kalanick was CEO of Uber and serving on Trump’s economic advisory council, he was forced to step down after a massive backlash on social media and from his own employees. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, has been lambasted by everyone from Kamala Harris to Sacha Baron Cohen for allowing Trump to spew vitriol and outright lies in 140- and 280-character spurts. And in a more recent example, just last week, when news broke that Trump had secretly dined with Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, the internet aptly erupted in outrage. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” wrote journalist Jessica Valenti on Twitter. “Zuckerberg is compromised. Completely, utterly compromised. And you know what that means about Facebook,” wrote entrepreneur Elizabeth McLaughlin. Elizabeth Warren said of the dinner meeting: “This is corruption, plain and simple.”
Yet if there’s any outrage over Cook’s meetings with Trump, it is typically muted and short-lived. Somehow the Apple fanboys, employees, and tech press so quick to ensure the company is morally unimpeachable in every other situation—who’ve been known to turn into a vitriolic mob to defend anything from massive product mistakes like Antennagate to product design flaws—mostly seem to shrug at the Cook–Trump relationship. This was astoundingly evident last week when Cook took Trump to an Apple manufacturing plant in Austin after announcing that Apple had broken new ground on a campus in the area. Cook didn’t even pretend his arm was being twisted to do this; he instead wasted no time groveling. “I’d particularly like to thank President Trump, Secretary Mnuchin, and Ivanka,” Cook said to a gaggle of press as he stood next to Trump. “It would not be possible without them.”
Trump, of course, loved this. He has praised Cook in the past, saying that Cook is “a great executive because he calls me and others don’t.” Flattery is one thing, but Cook continues to allow himself to be a prop in a classic Trumpian falsehood. Shortly after the meeting in Austin, Trump tweeted: “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America. Today Nancy Pelosi closed Congress because she doesn’t care about American Workers!” As others pointed out, the claim was patently untrue. The plant Trump toured last Wednesday has been putting together the Mac Pro in Austin since 2013, when Barack Obama was president. It isn’t even owned by Apple, but is run by the global manufacturer Flex.
Apple superfan John Gruber did call the appearance “a low moment in Apple’s proud history, and a sadly iconic moment for Tim Cook.” Elsewhere, however, the anti-Trumpsphere was silent. So why have Kalanick, Dorsey, and Zuckerberg been pilloried when everyone twiddles their thumbs and looks the other way in Cook’s case? When I asked a group of tech investors, C-level Silicon Valley executives, and engineers this question, one of the investors didn’t skip a beat when he explained, “Apple gets away with it because they make pretty things.” Another technology CTO echoed this, holding their iPhone in the air and offering a soliloquy that Cook could have delivered himself onstage. “When you think of this thing,” he said, pointing at the phone, “you don't think Russia, the end of democracy, attacks on the free press; you think of photos of your family, or Candy Crush, or listening to music. When you think of Facebook, you think of the end of democracy. So with Apple, everyone is willing to give the company a pass.” At the end of the day, the investor said, this is all about Cook saving billions on taxes and leveraging an exception with Trump’s largely ineffective China tariffs.
One Silicon Valley insider blamed simple lethargy. “These days there is a fatigue at being fatigued at anything involved [with] this president,” the insider said. “In the early days of the Trump administration, the outrage was real and visceral. Now we’re in what feels like year 13 of the Trump administration, and my reserve of fucks to give is really depleted.” Still, that said, the insider noted that Cook likely only has a few more lives left when it comes to his relationship with Trump. If he keeps going, eventually the backlash will be real.
But others were less convinced a backlash is on the horizon. This strategy to suck up to Trump has been a long time in the making, with huge financial benefits. For the past few years, Cook has been separating himself from Zuckerberg, pointing out that Apple values privacy, and warning the public to keep their kids away from social media. Another high-profile tech investor I spoke to said that this all comes down to Apple’s expert public relations strategy. “Apple has spent the past couple of years separating itself from Facebook and Zuckerberg, and making them into the bad guys, and Apple into the good guys,” the investor said. “Cook’s been going around saying, ‘Zuckerberg, he’s bad; he hates your privacy, and he lets Russians on his platforms; here at Apple, we care about your privacy, and there are no Russians on your iPhone.’”
Apple’s good guy narrative is so dominant now that Cook’s dalliances with Trump hardly seem to register. And meanwhile, the fact that Cook threw Trump a P.R. lifeline during an hour of need, in the midst of the impeachment hearings, could turn out to be spectacularly valuable. During the tour of the six-year-old Apple plant, Trump said he was “looking at” exempting Apple from tariffs on goods imported from China. For Cook, Trump has been a huge boon. Last year Apple saved $1.68 billion in taxes during a single quarter, special thanks to Trump’s corporate tax cuts. What’s Cook been doing with all that money? Spending it on massive corporate buybacks that have helped push Apple’s stock to well above the trillion-dollar mark.
To Wall Street, which is, after all, Cook’s most important audience, that’s the only good guy story that matters. For the people who should be outraged—us—we’re too busy looking at our screens to point out that what Cook is doing for Apple could help hand Trump another four years in the White House.
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