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A CEO, Captured.
I keep thinking about a line Lawrence Sanders wrote: a character asks whether money makes the world go round. The reply: “I do not believe it is money itself. After all, that is just metal and paper. No, it is the power money confers that makes the world go ’round.”
Power. Comfort. A seat at the table. Or, in this case, the crushing weight of a trillion-dollar valuation that demands constant appeasement. MG Siegler puts it plainly: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is captured. And so is the rest of the technology community. This is what happens when valuations trump values.
At a time when the nation is being ripped apart by the brutal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by ICE agents, Cook is facing criticism for attending the White House premiere of “Melania,” a documentary about the first lady. No one is questioning Jeff Bezos, who attended. Bezos is no paragon of humanism. The scorn is reserved for Cook. (The New York Post’s PageSix says Jeff Bezos was not at the event. It was Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO.)
Why? Because Apple once stood for “Think Different.”
When your company is worth more than most nations, you cannot afford principles that inconvenience presidents. The moral equation changes. What once seemed unthinkable becomes necessary. Cook learned this the hard way after he skipped a presidential photo op and was thrown back under the tariff bus. So now he shows up. He sits in the front row. He claps when expected. This is what happens when valuation becomes destiny.
Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical, post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of today’s Silicon Valley. It used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.
Think Different? Not anymore.
Read this. What did you think of the movie, Mr. Cook?
January 27, 2026. San Francisco
Democracy is not the rock we thought it was. It turns out it is incredibly fragile once you move away from the political centre (right or left) and those charged with governance did nothing to protect us from that fragility. What we are seeing now is the playground where the bully rules and there are no teachers.
I don’t buy that he’s trapped. He doesn’t have to brownnose Trump. It’s his choice and a clear signal he’s sending out: “Money before morals.” Maybe it’s a cultural thing but from a European perspective it’s hard to understand that “money trumps everything”-mindset. But we’ve been burned. The Nazi-regime had a lot of profiteurs too. To name a few: The Krupps (Steel Production), Quandts (BMW), even Oskar Schindler sucked up and profited from the nazis at first. The munition he produced until he started to sabotage it probably killed a lot more people than he saved.
All of those collaborateurs continued to profit after the war, but history doesn’t regard them as anything other than reckless opportunists (save for Schindler). A lot of them had to at least spend a few years in prison afterwards.
But my point is this: Cook and his family won’t go to prison if he doesn’t suck up to the Trump regime. He won’t lose his amorally high fortune. Apple won’t be nationalized. Yet. Cook is gay and if countless dictatorships have told us anything, it’s that you can support them as much as you will, but it won’t help you when they’re coming for your minority. Maybe you’re lucky and can ride it’s ineviteable end out, but only on the back of others.
All of this could happen, if this regime or it’s spirit continues for too long. Cook has got a clear choice: Show official support for a government that already has armed thugs in SS-like uniforms roaming the streets shooting and deporting people. Show subservience to an objectively narcistic, lying, people-discrediting, fear- and hate mongering president. Side with that ideology, legetimate it and support it’s goals by publicly standing by Trumps side and giving him gifts – just to keep your own profits high, regardless of the damage it does to other humans.
Or don’t. But the only things he’s “trapped” between are the greed of Apple’s shareholders and his own.
Simon
Those are fine sentiments. Really well said. Bully rules in effect.
The idea that Cook is trapped is complete nonsense.
He is the leader of a three-trillion dollar global company. Apple has the resources to take any Trump edict to court and if there’s one thing the courts have shown (even the Supreme Court) it is a reluctance to get in the way of capitalism.
These tech CEO’s aren’t victims, they are vultures.
I am not sure, it is as easy to balance the realities of business, take holders and erratic leaders. I used the word trapped is because Cook can’t do much about it. He has been handling similar autocratic behavior in China, except there he is away from prying eyes and their rationality to irrationality.
I’m sorry. This sounds like excuse making because you like Cook. He’s not trapped. Apple has stood its ground to the US and other governments before and won. Apple is fighting the EU tooth and nail right now and lobbing rhetorical bombs instead of kissing up to get better treatment under the DSA. Trump isn’t going to tariff iPhones because Apple would add a tariff surcharge and it would infuriate voters. Cook doesn’t have to give gold bars as bribes. It’s time to stop pretending he’s an unwilling participant
I respect your opinion. Where I stand, I wrote in my post. To clarify, I neither like not dislike Tim Cook. In comparison to many of the other tech leaders, he is a better person and leader. Why he is doing what he is doing, I don’t know. But keeping the Apple machine ticking with twin bombs on his head – China and US leadership — can’t be easy task.
I appreciate the response, but we have seen Apple take stands before when they thought it was right. The China issue is stickier than dealing with Europe because of the nature of the regime (no democratic feedback) and having all their manufacturing apples in one basket* (no pun intended).
As we’ve seen from universities, law firms and in international relations, those that bend the knee get asked for more and more and those that push back get the Trump TACO.
Once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.
Though having that risk is on leadership
It’s odd the calculations around Tim Cook fawning over the president (with Apple-designed awards!) always consider the damage the president could do to the stock price in the next 3 years, but not the long term damage his kowtowing is doing to the brand.
Very fair point. And good one to think about.
Yes, but no one is ever really “trapped.”
Circumstances may combine to force brutally difficult decisions upon us, but we are never “trapped.” We can decide. To suggest that Cook is a “captive” implies that he (a billionaire, for crying out loud) has no latitude, no freedom of movement. But Cook is there with Trump — grinning like an idiot last year while Trump, to whom Cook has handed a ridiculously obsequious gift, gives him childish shit for his personal appearance; rubbing elbows with Trump at a ludicrous event for Melania hours after Trump’s thugs executed an innocent American in the street — because Tim Cook, the man, made the decision to be there. The cost to him, personally, of non-appearance was greater than the cost of his personal principles, which means that he holds his principles awfully cheap.
Oh, but what of the Holy need to protect Apple and its stock price? Resign. Make that someone else’s problem. Let someone else make the decision. I’m sorry, but this is all about Tim Cook’s personal cowardice — though, to be fair, it’s only truly cowardice if Cook actually holds the principles we all impute to him, and the evidence of that diminishes with each passing day.
Way back in 2016, Tim Cook fund raised for (openly homophobic) Paul Ryan and “a joint fundraising committee aimed at helping to elect other House Republicans.” –
He has long chosen the “power money confers” over his principles. This desperation to please the party of hatred and corruption is nothing new for him.
“Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped.”
A blue collar nurse will put his life on the line to stand in the icy streets of Minneapolis to defend his principles and the least among us, while a billionaire like Cook expends his enormous resources to support and build a power structure who seeks to eradicate him and people like him from existence.
If that is not evil, then what is? A billionaire is never trapped.
It is we the users that are trapped. We are trapped in an the apple eco system that is moving in a direction that is serving us less and less. How will they maintain this privacy they love to sell us – using Google model?
Who will speak up? There are avg americans in MN using their voice at risk of their lives and the rich and powerful do not?
Shame on Tim Cook.
What is the purpose to gain the whole world – and not use the power you have?
Milton Friedman has done tremendous damage allowing companies and culture to accept that their only responsiblity is to shareholders and profit.
Is there no higher value than money?
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
I think Apple and other companies have lost their soul.
Where I sit today? I will never purchase another apple product.
Yes, he’s trapped. But Cook knows that he could have chosen, still can chose not to be the man he does not want to be. Precisely because he is not stupid. The trap only works under the premise that the most important thing in existence is making more money. Cook – like everybody else – can, as you say, think different. As a billionaire, it wouldn’t even hurt him too much.
Thing is, I’ve heard excuses like “If it wasn’t him, someone worse would have done it” or “What could he have done? Lose his business and all his employees their job?” from my grandparents. Who were born in Austria in 1920.
Amateurs in militaristic uniforms deporting people to camps or executing them on the streets, and obscenely rich people arranging themselves with a sometimes charming, often aggressive leader that victimizes minorities… from outside the US this looks pretty alarming.
Think of having to live with this environment. That’s scary as well. I think the challenge is not politics or motivations, but mostly absolute disregard for the laws and the constitution. Anyway don’t want to get too negative this early in the day.
Appreciate the feedback and comment.
If you would have told me 15-20 years ago the whole world would be afraid of a disgusting con man/reality tv star I would have said you are crazy, yet here we are.