page_title: Tim Cook
section_title: Public affiliations
hierarchical_section_title: Tim Cook / Public image / Public affiliations
caption_attribution_description: English: President Donald J. Trump and CEO of Apple Tim Cook in the Oval Office at the White House. April 25, 2018. In the background: John Bolton.
context_page_description: Timothy Donald Cook is an American business executive, philanthropist and industrial engineer. Cook is the chief executive officer of Apple Inc., and previously served as the company's chief operating officer under its cofounder Steve Jobs.
  Cook joined Apple in March 1998 as a senior vice president for worldwide operations, and then served as the executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations. He was made the chief executive on August 24, 2011, prior to Jobs' death in October of that year. During his tenure as the chief executive, he has advocated for the political reformation of international and domestic surveillance, cybersecurity, American manufacturing, and environmental preservation. Since 2011 when he took over Apple, to 2020, Cook doubled the company’s revenue and profit, and increased its market value from $348 billion to $1.9 trillion.
  In 2014, Cook became the first chief executive of a Fortune 500 company to publicly come out as gay. Cook also serves on the boards of directors of Nike, Inc., the National Football Foundation, and is a trustee of Duke University. In March 2015, he said he planned to donate his entire stock fortune to charity.
context_section_description: During the 2008 election cycle, Cook donated to Barack Obama's first White House election.
  While it had been reported in early 2011 that Cook was gay, at the time, and prior to his Oct. 2014 public statement, Cook chose to keep his personal life private. He did publicly support LGBT rights. In October 2014, the Alabama Academy of Honor inducted Cook, who spoke about his home state's record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. The Academy of Honor is the highest honor Alabama gives its citizens.
  In 2015, Cook said he donated to Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Patrick Leahy for their stances on eBook pricing and surveillance reform, respectively. During the same election cycle he hosted a fundraiser for Senator Rob Portman.
  In early March 2016, he said he donated to the election campaign of Democratic representative Zoe Lofgren of California. In early June, Cook hosted a private fundraiser along with Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Paul Ryan, described by Politico as "a joint fundraising committee aimed at helping to elect other House Republicans".
  In the 2016 election, Cook raised funds for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. At one point, Clinton's campaign considered Cook as a candidate for vice-president.
  In September 2017 at Bloomberg's Global Business Forum, Cook defended the DACA immigration program. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the direction of Donald Trump's administration, stating: "This is unacceptable. This is not who we are as a country. I am personally shocked that there is even a discussion of this."
  In 2018, at a privacy conference in Brussels, Cook expressed his opinions on the stockpiling of personal data by tech firms, suggesting that it amounted to surveillance and should make the public "very uncomfortable."
caption: Cook with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, April 25, 2018
exif: {"Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "274", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "11850", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "680", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "453", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}