Apple CEO Tim Cook on The David Rubenstein Show

[Music] you get a call from Steve Jobs there was a sparkle in his eye that I'd never seen in a CEO before did your friends tell you this was not a good idea they thought it was not Warren Buffett still uses an old flip phone I told him that I'll personally cut all Mahal to do tech support for you exposed your own personal life a bit I thought I'm making the wrong call why was it called the Apple watch and not the iWatch I kind of like to have a watch what do you think well you're the CEO so would you fix your time please well people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixed but okay just leave it this way all right I [Music] don't consider myself a journalist and nobody else would consider myself a journalist I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though I have a day job of running a private equity firm how do you define leadership what is it that makes somebody tick quite a reception you got here I thought it was for you no it's for you you've now been the CEO of Apple since been July of 2011 the earnings are up about 80 percent so have you ever thought you can't do better than this and maybe you should just say well I've done a great job and now I'm going to do something else with my life we viewed the the stock price and revenues and profits as a result of doing things right on the innovation side on the creativity side focusing on the right products treating customers like their jewels and and focusing on the user experience I didn't even know the numbers that you just quoted this is not something that I it's not even in my orbit to be honest with you well so when you announce your quarterly earnings analysts always say well they didn't sell as much Metra this product is that we thought they would and so where does that bother you it did it one time it doesn't anymore the we run Apple for the long term and and so it's always struck me as bizarre that there's a fixation on how many units are sold in a 90 day period is we're making decisions that are multi-year or kind of kind of decisions and so we try to be very clear that we do not run the company for people that want to make a quick buck we run the company for the long term well one of the shareholders who recently surfaces having bought 75 million additional shares is Warren Buffett are you pleased to have him as her shareholder I'm overjoyed I'm thrilled because Warren is focused on the long term and and so there is we're in sync it's the way we run the company it's the way he invests and yeah so I could not be happier have you thought about this Warren still uses an old flip phone I know he has have you thought how much more your stock could go up if you actually use the product I'm I am working on it and I told him that I'll personally come out on the haul to do tech support for so you now in a building that was designed and inspired initially by Steve Jobs Apple part Apple Park and if you've moved in recently Steve had the vision that the workplace should facilitate people working together having these common areas that people could work together and run into each other without planning on doing it and at the level of ideas and creativity and innovation that would come out of that would would be phenomenal and we're seeing that you're convinced standing up working is better than sitting down we have given an all of our employees hundred-percent standing gaps if you can stand for a while and then sit and and so on and so forth this is much better for you about how you came to this position so you grew up in Alabama a very very small rural town between Pensacola and Mobile on the Gulf Coast and you grew up where you up star athlete or your star scholar where you a tech nerd what were you whether I would say I was a star anything I worked hard at school I had some reasonably good grades the benefit I got in my childhood was being in a family that was a loving family and a public school system that was good and you know that's a huge benefit and honestly a benefit that many many kids don't have these days he went to Auburn and how did you do there I did I did pretty good I did pretty good I really got into engineering in a big way and and Industrial Engineering so then you went to work for IBM I did yes I started as like a production engineer out designing manufacturing lines and at that time robotics were beginning to take off and and so we were we were focused on automation I wouldn't say we successively focused on it but I learned a lot from going through that as well so you were there for about 12 years and then you joined another company called compact yes so you're a compact which at the time I think was one of the biggest manufacturers of personal computers they were they were the number one at the time yeah so you're there for about six months and you get a call from Steve Jobs or somebody working for him saying can you come and join Apple Apple was modest compared to compact why did you take the interview and why did you join Apple yeah it's a good question Steve had had come back to the company and was essentially replacing the executive team that that was there at the time but I thought you know this is an opportunity to talk to the guy that started the whole industry and Steve met me on Saturday and it was like just minutes into talking with him I want to do it which I was totally shocked myself but I there was a there was a sparkle in his eye that I'd never seen in a CEO before and there was he he was sort of turning left when everyone else is turning right it was almost it almost done everything that he talked about he was doing something extraordinarily different than conventional wisdom many people were abandoning the consumer market because they were just it was a bloodbath Steve was doing the exact opposite he was doubling down on consumer at the time everybody else the conventional wisdom said go put your money in storage and servers and I thought it was brilliant and so with talking with him and and the type of questions he asked were all so different and you know I I did literally before the I left everything he I hope he offers me a job really want to do this did your friends tell you this was not a good idea they thought it was nuts they thought it was nuts again conventional wisdom was you're working for the top personal computer maker in the world why would you ever leave you have got a great career head and there was it wasn't a decision that you could kind of sit down and do the engineering kind of analysis saying here are the pluses and here the minuses because that analysis would always say stay clogged it was this sort of voice in your head that was saying go west young man go west I'll despite the fact that there was no state income tax in Texas and there raising a California you're still said you're gonna go west so in hindsight this was the best professional decision of your life I assume may be the best decision of my life I'm not sure you need to put professional in that Steve health was such that he couldn't continue to be the CEO I thought honestly my my thought at that time was he was going to be chairman and he would do that forever and it you know unfortunately it didn't turn out that way [Music] so you go there and what is your job at Apple running worldwide operations and the company that time was struggling in many different areas and operations isn't there different our economies of scale didn't lend itself to us doing manufacturing and in different places like we like existed in a company at that time and so we found partners that were expert manufacturing and we maintained the sort of the intellectual knowledge of how the process and obviously all of the design of the problem when you got there and you're working for her Steve was it better than you thought worse than you thought more challenging than you thought I found it to be liberating is the way I would describe it because it's you could you could kind of talk to Steve about something very big and if it resonated with him he would just say ok and you could do it and so it was like a you know like a total revelation for me that a company could run like this because I was used to these layers and bureaucracy and studies and you know studying things sort of the paralysis that companies can get into and Apple was totally different than that I realized that if I couldn't get something done I could just go to the nearest mirror and look at it and that was the reason Steve health was such that he couldn't continue to be the CEO he told the board that and you were announced as the CEO I think around July of 2011 something around there when you became the CEO did you feel you had Steve would say here's what I was interested in doing and you fulfill my goals or did you feel you had your own view on what you should do and how did you balance the two you're succeeding a legendary figure it's not so sequential as that we have a really open company and so most of us could finish the other person's sentences even when we might disagree with them and so it wasn't a matter of Steve having this secret file or something he was always sharing his ideas all the time and so so you're very different than that and I thought honestly my my thought at that time and I know people people have told me you're just not very smart but my view at that time was he was going to be chairman and he would do that forever and we would figure out the you know the sort of the relationship that changed there and that's what I thought and it you know unfortunately it didn't turn out that way today Apple is going to reinvent the phone you have product that is the most successful consumer product in the history of mankind which is the iPhone there was a sense that it was a profound product it was a game-changer if you go back and watch the keynote that Steve announced it you can feel his passion in it and the way the way he described I still remember it like it was yesterday so how many iPhones have now been sold oh well over a billion so there are seven half billion people in the face of the earth so one of every seven people has one more or less well some people probably bought more than one along oh I hope so anyway well well you do have new ones coming out every so often you know is that if I buy a new iPhone should I expect another one in two years or you should expect that Apple is going to keep innovating and and you should jump on the train now though okay because because life is so short up here and I have my iPhone here actually and I do use it and I love it and one time with you and I were in China I couldn't quite work something and I asked you to help me and you said look I normally don't do Texas nice and it did work we came out with the Apple watch not too long ago why was it called the Apple watch and not the eyewash because you have iPhone iPod iPad why not I watch did you ever think of that and I'm sure you must have thought of it I'm sure it's on a novel idea but I'm just curious it was something that we thought of it wasn't a crazy question so no it wasn't a crazy question at all and some Apple watch one out well I kind of like the Apple watch what do you think well you're the CEO so Heyman CEO says something okay so how are they doing they're doing fantastic cellular is now on the watch you don't have to travel with your iPhone you can just use your watch one of the my best moments of a day is to go through my emails that are from users and I get so many each week from people that found out they have a heart problem from their watch it's alerting you if you've been sitting and your heart has climbed to a level that doesn't make sense relative to the activity that you've been doing suppose you don't want to know if you have a heart problem well we think most people do because you can then go seek help and seriously David so many people have written and said the watch alerted me to a problem I took an action and went to the cardiologist he told me that if I had not gone there I wouldn't be alive so you say you go through your emails nobody emails you directly I can't I assume you can oh sure they do well you how could you could respond all those email I can't but but it doesn't mean that I can't read a fair number of those myself because I think it's important to sort of keep your hands on the pulse of the user have you ever thought that maybe you could run for president in the United States because I think you know you know the president is something that you'd love to to be president but not ever wrong and and that should never happen in our country and so that kind of eliminates pace today let's talk about some of the values that you've been espousing one is a privacy we see privacy is a fundamental human right and and so it's to us it's right up there with some of the other civil liberties that make Americans what they are you know it defines us as Americans and we see that this is becoming a larger and larger issue for people and so our our tax on this is we we take a minimum amount of data from customers only that which we need to to provide a great service and then we work really hard to protect it with encryption and and so forth and you've also talked about the importance of equality yeah why is that important to you as I look at the world many of the problems of the world come down to the lack of equality it's the it's the fact that it's the kid that's born in one-zip code who doesn't have a good education because they happen to be born in that zip code it's someone that is maybe an LGBT community that is fired because of that it's someone that has a different religion than the majority and therefore they're ostracized in some way and some very simply I think if one day you could wave a wand and everybody in the world would treat each other with dignity and respect there are many many problems that would would go away with that so you exposed your own personal life a bit you you know the privacy that you've said other we should have you kind of gave up some of your privacy why did you do that well I did it for a greater purpose is that it became clear to me that there were lots of kids out there that were not being treated well including in their own families and and that kids need someone to say oh they did okay in life and they're gay so it must not be a life sentence in some kind of way and when I were getting these nodes it would tug on my heart even more and it got to the point where I thought I'm making the wrong call by trying to do something that is comfortable for me which is to stay private that I needed to do something for the greater good and so that's why no never grabs now you're obviously in the public eye recently you had a meeting with the president Trump what was the meeting with President Trump like you know I wouldn't want to say what he said what I talked about was I talked about trade and the importance of trade and how I felt that two countries trading together make the pie larger and that it's true I think undoubtedly true that not everyone has been advantaged from that in in either country and we've got to work on that but I I felt that tariffs were not the right approach there and I showed him some more of analytical kinds of things to demonstrate why we also talked about immigration and the importance of fixing the dreamer issue now you know we're only one Court ruling away from a catastrophic case there so do you think you made progress on these issues I hope so and I hope so Apple has roughly 260 billion dollars of cash more or less what do you do with that cash we're going to create a new site a new campus within the United States we're gonna hire 20,000 people and so we're gonna spend 30 billion in capex over the next several years and so we're what number one we're investing in investing a ton in this country we're also going to buy some of our stock because we view our stock is a is a is a good value so your did your parents live to see your success my mother passed away three three years ago and my but my father's still alive so your mother was in it your mother lived to see you be the CEO she did and that she say well you're great I always knew your be successful and can you help me with my iPhone can you well I did get both of them on iPad and I finally convinced my father to start using iPhones and so but they honestly they treat me like they did 20 years ago in 40 years ago six years ago he calls with tips about what to do or tell you how to do things or now if I do something doesn't think as good he tells me about it hey I saw you on that show you aren't very good I'm hoping you edit this well you're obviously a pretty public figure you were not before have you ever thought that maybe you could run for president of United States because you know you've seen the president up close I'm not political right I I loved focusing on the policy stuff but in the dysfunction kind of in in in Washington between the the legislative branch and and so forth I think that I can make a bigger difference in the world doing what I'm doing and I appreciate the comment but I think yeah you know the president is something that you'd love to be president but not ever run and and that should never happen in our country and so that kind of eliminates me of all the CEOs that I know that have run major companies you are the lowest ego kind of most self-effacing person that I've seen in this kind of position so have you ever noticed that you're different than the other people are CEOs and and how do you maintain this self-effacing kind of modest demeanor when you're running the biggest company in the world what would you when you work at Apple there's a high expectation on everyone to perform and to contribute and because of that high bar and you never quite get there including the CEO including every job in there and so I'd never feel that way very long if I ever felt that way well thank you for taking the time today and I'd say having me you're the first person I've interviewed without a tie on and so I was in your honor and I bet you sleep in a tie [Applause] [Music]

Channel: David Rubenstein

Views: 1,085,979

Keywords: Bloomberg, apple, CEO, tim, cook, tim cook, steve, jobs, steve jobs, iphone, ipad, apple watch, imac, mac, apple music, airpods, software, hardware, IOS, David Rubenstein, technology, california, success, successful, ambition, product, phone, mobile, passion, innovation, tech support, itunes, app store, IOS 11, GB, gigabytes, game changer, human, rights, president, gender, gay, gay rights, iphone x, iphone pro, apple tv+

Id: 2ZfGBGmEpRQ

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 13 2018