Apple is sitting on a pile of money that could easily buy a few major companies and then some. The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has announced they are investing $1 billion of that money into United States manufacturing efforts. This move is likely highly politically motivated as the new administration has expressed its desire for companies to bring manufacturing back to the United States. It’s not uncommon for companies to try and work with a sitting administration, in some way, to gain a voice in the lobbying world of politics. If you’re not aware, business and politics go hand and hand in the United States.
“It’s $1 billion of our US money, which we have to borrow to get. That’s another whole topic,” Cook said, lightly commenting on current US tax policy that Apple claims prevents it from repatriating a majority of its overseas cash. “But yeah, we’re really proud to do it. And by doing that, we can be the ripple in the pond. Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs around — those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them.”
Cook says Apple will be announcing the first investment from the fund later this month. “And so you can see, we’re really looking at this thing deeply. How do we grow our employee base?” Cook said. “How do we grow the developer base? How do we grow manufacturing?”
Cook was asked about working with the current administration to which his response was.
“You know, my view on working with any government in the world is that there are things that you will agree upon and things that you will not,” he said. “Because what we want to do when we disagree is we want to say why we view the way we do.”
It will be interesting to see how Apple invests that $1 billion, $1 billion is a lot of money but compared to their $256 billion bank account, it’s not a whole lot.
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