Tim Cook, Apple CEO recommended anti-environmental investors “get out of the stock.”
Image: Valery Marchive / Flickr CC
At Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on 2/28, Apple CEO Tim Cook laid some verbal bluntness on the company’s conservative investors who want Apple to abandon some of its progressive policies.
Over the last several years the company has been advancing progressive policies, amongst them some environmental ones, such as the company’s stated goal to get on 100-percent renewable energy. In the words of Tim Cook, the company hopes to “leave the world better than we found it.”
Apple’s policies could be more progressive, of course, but Apple has lots of investors and, on the whole, companies tend to want profit first and foremost. It should come as no surprise, then, that a shareholder resolution proposed by Justin Danhof from the National Center for Public Policy Research accused Cook and Apple of compromising shareholder interest in favor of specious environmentalism. In short, Danohof isn’t happy about the company’s social agenda.
During Q&A at the meeting, Danhof stood up and asked if the company was advancing environmental policies that weren’t necessarily good for business. Cook wasn’t amused, according to Apple Insider: “We do a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive,” he is reported to have said, and he even “recommended that anyone who had a problem with that ‘should get out of the stock.'”