Apple CEO Tim Cook has told Fortune magazine that he intends to
give away his personal fortune to charity.
Reuters reports
the 54-year-old as saying that, besides paying for his 10-year-old nephew’s
education, his estimated $785 million fortune would go to charitable causes.
‘You want to be the pebble in the pond that creates the ripples for
change,’ said Cook.
Although he did not reveal which causes might benefit from his
money, the magazine indicated that he had already begun the process of quietly
giving away some of his money.
Cook is not the first tech leader to indicate that they plan to
give a sizeable chunk of their fortunes to charity. Financier Warren Buffet
(who is reported to be worth in excess of $70billion) has been encouraging the
super-rich to give away at least half of their worth in their lifetimes. His
‘Giving Pledge’ has been taken up by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg.
Cook took over from Apple founder Steve Jobs after the latter’s
death in 2011. Since that time, the company has continued to dominate the tech
industry.
Its fourth quarter profits for 2014 showed it had made $18billion
in the three-month period – officially making it the most profitable company in
history. Between October and December 2014, it was selling 34,000 iPhones an
hour.
Although a widely-known fact within the industry, Cook only made a
public statement that he was gay last autumn. Clearly, the announcement has had
no detrimental effect whatsoever on Apple’s performance or profits. In late
February, its share price rose to $133 – giving the company a value of
$744billion. That makes it twice as large as the world's next biggest company,
ExxonMobil.
Indeed, this week, Brian White and Isabel Zhu, analysts for New
York-based brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald, speculated that Apple’s shares could
rise to $180 before the end of this year, effectively valuing
the company at $1 trillion.
Cook has previously avoided talking about his personal life, but
since revealing that he is gay, has opened up a little more about his thoughts
and feelings on a wide range of issues.
In December, it was reported that Cook had made
a ‘generous’ personal donation to Human Rights Campaign’s campaign to
advance LGBTI rights in the US southern states of Arkansas, Mississipi and his
own native Alabama.
Besides talking about his wealth with Fortune , Cook also
spoke about how he was unprepared for the intense scrutiny he came under when
he took over from Jobs.
‘I have thick skin … but it got thicker.’
‘What I learned after Steve passed away, what I had known only at a
theoretical level, an academic level maybe, was that he was an incredible heat
shield for us, his executive team. None of us probably appreciated that enough
because it’s not something we were fixated on. We were fixated on our products
and running the business. But he really took any kind of spears that were
thrown. He took the praise as well. But to be honest, the intensity was more
than I would ever have expected.’
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