Apple CEO Tim Cook: Government ‘Isn’t Working’, Responsibility Falls on Business CEOs to Fill ‘The Void’

In a New York Times article this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed businesses need to start acting in place of the government, which “isn’t working at the speed that it once was.”

“The reality is that government, for a long period of time, has for whatever set of reasons become less functional and isn’t working at the speed that it once was,” claimed Cook to The Times. “And so it does fall, I think, not just on business but on all other areas of society to step up.”

The New York Times attempted to paint Cook and other major company CEOs as the next generation of politicians, proclaiming that the Apple CEO had just been on a “mini-tour across the country during which he focused on topics usually reserved for politicians: manufacturing, jobs, and education.”

“He had just spent the prior day in Ohio, where he toured CTS, a technology company that produces the equipment that Apple uses to test water resistance and dust protection for the iPhone and the Apple Watch,” they reported. “He then flew to Des Moines, where he announced plans to make a $1.3 billion investment in a 400,000-squarefoot data center in nearby Waukee to help store and move giant amounts of information for its services like iCloud and FaceTime. And he arrived here to announce that Austin Community College will begin offering its 74,000 students a curriculum that Apple developed to teach them how to write code to create apps for iPhones. Austin is one of 30 community colleges that will offer the curriculum.”

After explaining that Cook was irritated by “Washington’s seemingly perpetual state of gridlock,” The Times claimed he is now “one of the many business leaders in the country who appear to be filling the void, using his platform at Apple to wade into larger social issues that typically fell beyond the mandate of executives in past generations.”

“He said he had never set out to do so, but he feels he has been thrust into the role as virtually every large American company has had to stake out a domestic policy,” the article explained, before adding, “Is his focus on jobs and speeches in front of American flags a hint at something bigger? After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s name is now regularly bandied about in discussions of potential presidential candidates.”

Apple has repeatedly banned free speech social network Gab from its App Store, citing “objectionable” user content, despite the fact that flagged posts could also be found on social networks such as Twitter, which are readily available on the store.

In response, Gab, which has raised over $1 million in public investments, launched a legal fund to take on large technology companies who are cracking down on free speech.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also been rumored to run for president in 2020, after he embarked on a tour of the entire United States and hired one of Hillary Clinton’s top campaign strategists.

In a profile of Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom this month, Wired claimed that the concept of free speech was starting to lose support in Silicon Valley, with major CEOs doubting the First Amendement.