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Tim Cook donates $2M to unnamed charity

Apple CEO Tim Cook last week donated 6,880 in personally owned company stock to an as-yet-unidentified charity, an amount worth about $2 million as of the trading date.

According to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday, Cook conducted the transaction on Dec. 27, when Apple shares were priced at $289.80. No shares were sold and a reporting price was not applied to the transfer, meaning the exact sum Cook donated will likely remain unknown.

Executives of publicly traded companies are not required to reveal the destination of charitable donations, but Cook has in the past made donations to the Human Rights Campaign's Project One America, a gay rights initiative. The Apple chief in 2014 donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Pennsylvania's Steel Valley School District, a gift that funded the purchase of iPads for students and teachers.

Cook routinely participates in philanthropic activities like auctioning off one-on-one meet-and-greets through CharityBuzz. In 2014, for example, a lunch with Cook at Apple's headquarters sold for $330,000. Proceeds of the online sales typically go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights.

Like other tech executives — albeit not a multi-billionaire — Cook has promised to give a bulk of his money away to charity and in 2015 said he plans to take a "systematic approach" to philanthropy.

In addition to today's reported donation, Cook made similar gifts to unspecified organizations over the past few years. He donated 50,000 Apple shares to an unidentified third party in 2015, 23,215 shares in 2018 and 23,700 shares in 2019.

Following last week's trade, Cook controls 847,969 shares of beneficially owned Apple stock that, as of today, is worth $256.5 million.