Gold, Frankincense, and Silicon

Friday, 8 August 2025

A list of various related news items and clips from this, and recent, weeks:

1. Apple Newsroom, on Wednesday — “Apple Increases U.S. Commitment To $600 Billion, Announces American Manufacturing Program”:

   Apple today announced a new $100 billion commitment to America, a significant acceleration of its U.S. investment that now totals $600 billion over the next four years. Today’s announcement includes the ambitious new American Manufacturing Program (AMP), dedicated to bringing even more of Apple’s supply chain and advanced manufacturing to the U.S. Through AMP, Apple will increase its investment across America and incentivize global companies to manufacture even more critical components in the United States.

2. Separately, also from Apple Newsroom Wednesday — “Apple and Corning Partner to Manufacture 100 Percent of iPhone and Apple Watch Cover Glass in Kentucky”:

   Apple and Corning today announced a major expansion of their long-standing partnership to make precision glass for Apple products. Apple is making a new $2.5 billion commitment to produce all of the cover glass for iPhone and Apple Watch in Corning’s Harrodsburg, Kentucky, manufacturing facility. This means that 100 percent of the cover glass on iPhone and Apple Watch units sold worldwide will be made in the U.S. for the first time.

   Corning is creating the world’s largest and most advanced smartphone glass production line at the Harrodsburg facility. Corning will now dedicate this entire facility to manufacturing for Apple, which will help increase Corning’s manufacturing and engineering workforce in Kentucky by 50 percent.

3. From inside the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, a 3.5-minute video of Trump’s introductory remarks, then Tim Cook giving Trump a trophy of sorts, with an Apple-logo top made from glass produced at the Corning facility in Kentucky, and a base made from 24-karat gold (perhaps left over from Apple’s decade ago foray into $20,000 “Edition” Apple Watches?).

   This video is one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever witnessed, for everyone involved. (Note Cook’s awkward laughter when Trump, after claiming that “about $17 trillion is coming into the United States” thanks to the brilliance of his economic statecraft, quips “That’s even a lot of money for you”, looking at Cook.)

4. From the same press event in the Oval Office, a 5-minute video of Cook’s benign but obsequious prepared remarks.

5. Apple’s stock, as I type this after the close of markets on Friday, is up 11.6 percent for the week, and jumped over 5 percent immediately after Wednesday’s announcements.

6. Tripp Mickle, reporting for The New York Times back on May 26, under the headline “Tech’s Trump Whisperer, Tim Cook, Goes Quiet as His Influence Fades”:

   In the run-up to President Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East, the White House encouraged chief executives and representatives of many U.S. companies to join him. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, declined, said two people familiar with the decision. The choice appeared to irritate Mr. Trump. As he hopscotched from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Trump took a number of shots at Mr. Cook.

   During his speech in Riyadh, Mr. Trump paused to praise Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, for traveling to the Middle East along with the White House delegation. Then he knocked Mr. Cook. “I mean, Tim Cook isn’t here but you are,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Huang at an event attended by chief executives like Larry Fink of the asset manager BlackRock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Lisa Su of the semiconductor company AMD.

   Later in Qatar, Mr. Trump said he “had a little problem with Tim Cook.” The president praised Apple’s investment in the United States, then said he had told Mr. Cook, “But now I hear you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India.”

   On Friday morning, Mr. Trump caught much of his own administration and Apple’s leadership off guard with a social media post threatening tariffs of 25 percent on iPhones made anywhere except the United States. The post thrust Apple back into the administration’s cross hairs a little over a month after Mr. Cook had lobbied and won an exemption from a 145 percent tariff on iPhones assembled in China and sold in the United States.

7. April 2018: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with Tim Cook in Cupertino, including a tour of Apple Park. From a Kif Leswing report for Business Insider regarding the tour:

   The young prince, often referred to as MBS, was on a charm offensive, according to The New York Times. His goal was to change the Western perspective of Saudi Arabia as a conservative country dependent on oil money where women are treated as second-class people. Instead, Prince Mohammed wants Americans to see Saudi Arabia as a modern country with extensive investments in growth markets like technology.

8. October 2018: Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and public critic of the Saudi regime, was brutally assassinated — literally chopped to pieces — inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Within weeks, the CIA concluded that Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the assassination. Tim Cook has not met with MBS since.

9. President Trump, at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in May — one stop among several on the Middle East tour, which, per point #6 above, Tim Cook declined to attend — was effusive in his praise and admiration for bin Salman. Per ABC News:

   President Donald Trump spent the bulk of what was billed as a “major foreign policy address” to outline his vision for the Middle East instead touting his domestic policies and heaping praise on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman while speaking at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum on Tuesday.

   Four years after the U.S. intelligence community report was released that concluded that the crown prince approved the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump lauded the crown prince for his leadership and friendship.

   “He’s your greatest representative, greatest representative. And if I didn’t like him, I’d get out of here so fast. You know that, don’t you? He knows me well. I do — I like him a lot. I like him too much. That’s why we give so much, you know? Too much. I like you too much,” Trump said while speaking in Saudi Arabia.

10. Trump, this week, at the White House event with Tim Cook, per CNBC:

    “We’re going to be putting a very large tariff on chips and semiconductors,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon.

    “But the good news for companies like Apple is if you’re building in the United States or have committed to build, without question, committed to build in the United States, there will be no charge. So in other words, we’ll be putting a tariff on of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors. But if you’re building in the United States of America, there’s no charge.” [...]

    But specifics about the plan, such as how much U.S. manufacturing a company needs to do in order to qualify for the tariff exemption, were not immediately clear.

There is, of course, no need to wait for “specifics about the plan”, which almost certainly won’t ever be put in writing. We all know how to qualify for an exemption — it’s up to the whims of Trump. Thumbs up, you’re exempt. Thumbs down, you pay.

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So, what to make of Cook’s obsequious praise for Trump and gifting of an Apple-branded gold trophy? Your take may well be that Cook is simply now a Trump supporter. Or, your take may be that eating a big shit sandwich like this, right in the Oval Office, is simply what Cook “has to do”.

My take remains somewhere in the middle, but closer to the latter than the former. Did Cook have to do this? No. Could the announcement that Apple was accelerating its investment plans for US manufacturing from $500 billion to $600 billion simply have been made via a press release on Apple Newsroom, rather than a made-for-TV press event in the Oval Office? Yes.¹

But Cook, and Apple, need to pick their battles. To me, what’s obvious is the power dynamic. We’re not used to considering Apple, a $3 trillion company, as subservient in any relationship. But the US federal government dwarfs even the biggest of companies, and Trump is wielding the powers of the executive branch and the bully pulpit of the presidency in unprecedented ways. Flagrantly illegal and unethical ways, but nonetheless, he’s wielding those powers. No company, no matter how big, can stand as a check or balance to that power.

It’s not even a case of “kiss the ring and receive preferential treatment”. It’s more a case of “kiss his ass or else you’ll face punishment”. Trump, like a perverted Santa Claus, keeps only two lists: naughty and nice. Cook and Apple got a taste of that after Cook declined to participate in Trump’s Middle East tour, leading Trump to reflexively declare new tariffs on iPhones assembled in India. Trump offered another taste when he announced this week, with Tim Cook in the room, the supposed 100 percent tariffs on computer chips for companies who aren’t playing ball. (I say supposed because the TACO hypothesis, thus far, has panned out.)

Faulting Cook for playing ball and kissing Trump’s ring (among other things) is like faulting a local business for paying into a protection racket — one in which the cops are complicit, and the whole scam exists at the behest of a crooked mayor. Moral rectitude can feel good, but not so much when the cops are burning your store to the ground. There is no authority to appeal to for help when the highest office in the country is running the protection racket.

I don’t know what would happen to Apple if they simply refused to play ball with any of this at all. Targeted spiteful tariffs, bogus investigations by the Justice Department, personal vilification in MAGA media. Could Apple weather such a storm, financially, with its head held high? Probably. But to what effect? It wouldn’t change the game. The game is currently shamelessly corrupted.

Did Cook’s Oval Office display of fealty and his grotesque golden gift make you feel something? Did it engender an emotional response? Grossed out, perhaps? A little sick? Angry? Offended? Me too. But did you feel good — reassured? proud? — when Cook skipped that Middle East Trump tour in May? You know, the one that ranged from Trump singing the praises of the murderous Mohammed bin Salman (“I like you too much”) to accepting as a gift (that he claims will wind up in the possession of his post-presidential “library”) a 747 luxury jet from Qatar.

If you choose to believe that Tim Cook is weak, unethical, greedy, or even — despite his long-professed heroes — secretly a MAGA supporter, there’s likely nothing I can say to disabuse you of the notion. You can’t prove a negative. But I would argue that that line of cynicism is the easy way out. That you’re taking comfort in directing your ire at Cook, and the notion that if Cook had more backbone he’d refuse to play this game. It’s comforting to believe it’s him and his ilk, greedy selfish billionaires, not us as a collective whole.

It is disturbing to think that the leader of a beloved, trusted, and widely believed-to-be-ethical company like Apple has succumbed to avarice. That Tim Cook feels no qualms about — or perhaps even delights in — participating in a quid-pro-quo-driven corrupt administration in which flattery, fealty, gifts, and barely-concealed bribes are rewarded. That the United States devolving into kleptocracy suits Tim Cook just fine, because Apple’s pockets are deep enough to pay the vig.

But the alternative is more disturbing.

What if Tim Cook is, in fact, strong, proud, and driven by a keen sense of moral and ethical clarity? Perhaps Cook declined Trump’s invitation to join his Middle East entourage in May only because he was otherwise busy. But I believe there are bridges he will not cross — and that trip, especially its implicit and explicit praise and sanctification of the Saudi regime in general, and MBS in particular, was one of them. The whole trip was grotesque, and made a mockery of traditional American values.

US manufacturing, on the other hand, is a point of genuine alignment between Trump’s desires and Apple’s interests and ethics. Emphasizing that alignment in an Oval Office event, solid gold trophy in hand, is gross, yes, but not at all a corruption of anything Cook believes to be in the genuine interests of Apple or the nation. Consider the possibility that, far from being comfortable with his gift and obsequious ring-kissing this week, Cook was as discomfited by it as anyone. That he is keenly aware that trust and reputation are only accrued slowly, but are always at risk of being squandered quickly, and that this applies both to how he is perceived personally and how Apple is perceived as an institution — a pillar of American ingenuity and industry. His life’s work. And that despite all of that, Cook concluded that debasing himself, selling some shares of his own dignity, was the best course of action — for Apple, for Apple’s customers (and, yes, shareholders), and perhaps even for the country. That ruthless practicality is necessary merely to stay afloat in a sea of abject graft, extortion, and cronyism. That’s dark. That requires considering that the problem isn’t the greed of a few billionaires and executives who ought to resist burgeoning corruption, but that Trump and his sycophants in the Republican Party have already succeeded in corrupting the system. That the corruption isn’t happening, but happened. The United States isn’t heading for existential trouble. We’re in it — and a pathway out is not yet clear. That’s not to say all is forever lost, but that we are, in our current political moment, beyond the point where the game can be played successfully on the level. You can choose to play a crooked game straight, but you can’t win. Business is competition. A loser who played above reproach is still a loser. You need to choose your battles. US manufacturing is Cook’s choice.

The White House has long been called the People’s House. The embarrassment of this week’s Oval Office bending of the knee isn’t Cook’s or Apple’s alone. It’s an embarrassment for our entire nation. It’s not him. It’s not them. It’s us.