Apple CEO, Tim Cook, attends the 2015 Ripple Of Hope Awards at the Hilton Hotel on December 8, 2015, in New York.
Out Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, according toAxios.
Cook, who also recently had dinner with the incoming president, has reportedly spent years building a relationship with Trump. During his first term, Cook “pioneered a template for how business leaders should engage with Trump,” according to the Washington Post.
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That template includes direct and personal communication with Trump rather than through lobbyists, as well as zeroing in on one data point on a single issue to keep Trump focused during a meeting.
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The news of Cook’s donation follows announcements of donations from both Amazon and Meta, as well as from Sam Altman – the gay CEO of the massively influential artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI. All three will also give $1 million to the inaugural fund.
Like Cook, Altman will reportedly be donating the money from his personal funds, whereas Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg will be making the donations through their respective companies.
Many believe the donations are a sort of olive branch to the incoming administration – an attempt by tech companies to smooth over their once-hostile relationships with Trump.
Altman, for example, expressed his eagerness to work with the president-elect to ensure the United States remains a leader in AI and the creation of the infrastructure around the new technology.
“AI is a little bit different than other kinds of software in that it requires massive amounts of infrastructure, power, computer chips, data centers, and we need to build that here, and we need to be able to have the best AI infrastructure in the world to be able to lead with the technology and the capabilities. I believe President-elect Trump will be very good at that,” Altman told the New York Times.
“It does seem to us like this is going to be very important,” he continued. “It does seem like this will be one of these unusually important moments in the history of technology. And we very much believe that the United States and our allies need to lead this.”
Cook came out as gay in 2014 and was the first Fortune 500 CEO ever to do so.
At the time, he said being gay was “among the greatest gifts God has given me” and that he was inspired to come out after reading letters from teenagers confronting their sexual orientation.
“If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality,” he wrote, “then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”
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