Apple CEO Tim Cook smartly maintained ties to GOP ahead of Trump victory

“Donald Trump had some harsh words for Apple during the campaign, but what will his attitude be toward the world’s biggest company now that he is the President-elect?” Ina fried writes for Recode. “During the campaign, Trump said he would call for a boycott of Apple products if the company didn’t reverse its strong pro-encryption stance. He also criticized the company for not making more of its products in the U.S.”

“Apple, for its part, distanced itself from Trump. It reversed its longstanding practice and didn’t provide support to this year’s Republican National Convention. CEO Tim Cook told Time in March that he hadn’t talked directly with Trump about the issues,” Fried writes. “But, in a clearly prescient move, Cook maintained some ties to the GOP, hosting a fundraiser for House speaker Paul Ryan this summer.”

“Tim Cook’s biggest hope has to be that Donald Trump didn’t mean a lot of what he said, and that it was the rhetoric of a politician looking to get elected,” Fried writes. “The silver lining for Apple (and other cash-rich tech companies) is that they may finally get to bring home billions of dollars in profits recorded and stored overseas. And if Trump follows through on plans to lower corporate taxes in general, Apple and other tech companies won’t have the same incentive to store cash overseas in the future.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Apprehensive?

Fire up your Breathe app, relax, and consider:

The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
—— Salena Zito, The Atlantic, September 23, 2016

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