Tim Cook has donated more than $5 million worth of Apple shares to a charity, as revealed by a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing posted this week.
Cook’s decision to give away 23,700 shares of AAPL stock comes one year after he made a similarly sized donation to charity. Apple’s CEO has said that he plans to give away his entire fortune, currently valued at around $625 million.
It is not clear which charity Cook donated the money to. In the past, Cook’s charitable donations have included giving funds to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights and the Human Rights Campaign. That’s alongside multimillion donations he’s made to other unspecified charities.
Cook shared his plans to donate his personal cash pile to charity in a 2015 interview with Fortune. During the interview, he said that he will pay for his nephew’s college fund before donating the remainder to charity. Cook’s personal life isn’t widely known about. However, he has long had a reputation for living a fairly frugal lifestyle for a person in his position.
Apple’s approach to charity
Apple sometimes make donations for things like disaster relief. This week, Cook said that Apple will donate money to help recovery efforts after fires in the Amazon rainforest. Despite this, Cook has avoided setting up an official charitable foundation within Apple. In a 2017 interview, Cook said that:
“I looked at it in early 2012. And I decided not to do it. And here’s why. When a company sets up a foundation, there is a risk, in my judgment, of the foundation becoming this other thing that is not connected to the company. It has a separate board of directors. They make reasonably independent decisions sometimes. It becomes a separate thing. I don’t want that for Apple. I want everybody involved.
…
If we had a foundation, my fear was it becomes something that 10 or 12 or 20 or 50 people do. And all of a sudden for the 120,000, it’s just this separate thing out there. People work here to change the world. So I think that should be integral to what the company does. Not peripheral in a foundation.”
Source: SEC
