“In weak companies, politics win. In strong companies, the best ideas win.”
Thus (reportedly) spake Steve Jobs in the late 1990s. It was a take on the role of corporations that would become decidedly out of consensus within a few short years, although Jobs seemed to stick with it. “Some people have said that I shouldn’t get involved politically because probably half our customers are Republicans,” he asserted in 2004. “There are more Democrats than Mac users, so I’m going to just stay away from all that political stuff.”
Fast forward two decades, as Apple brings a new captain to the helm of perhaps the world’s most recognizable brand. As Tim Cook departs, new CEO John Ternus, former senior VP of hardware engineering, has a chance to take the company back to the Jobs principle of corporate political neutrality. Getting there, however, is going to require undoing a good bit that’s happened in recent years against the spirit of that principle.
Where is Apple at when it comes to political signaling? The company doesn’t seem to be at Target or Bud Light levels of aisle-chasing. But there is also no denying that the brand isn’t perceived as neutral. While the company has had amazing nonpolitical moments (more on that later), it has also been part of a phenomenon we’ve witnessed with many, many companies in recent years: corporate partnerships that started one way and ended another. Many began as ostensible risk mitigation and gradually morphed into sources of risk themselves.
Two glaring examples stand out. One, particularly in light of the DOJ’s recent indictment, is the company’s previous support for the legal nonprofit known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Apple dropped a $1 million donation to the SPLC in 2017, and then-CEO Tim Cook furthered the move by announcing donation matches to the organization. This isn’t hindsight bias, either. The SPLC has been dropping credibility as a neutral source (and gaining credibility as a corrupt left-wing activist outfit) for years, with the indictment being the latest in a long line of public controversies. Right now, we’re in a moment where many major companies, including Salesforce and Texas Instruments, are backing away from any relationship with the SPLC. To put it nicely, right now it’s decidedly unclear whose pockets SPLC donation money is actually ending up in — and Apple would do well to consider this as a moment to reestablish political neutrality in its charitable contributions.
The second, and more concerning, example is Apple’s current platinum-tier corporate partnership with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). At the risk of getting too mixed up in acronyms, HRC is one of the leading purveyors of gender ideology in corporate America. Getting a perfect score on the organization’s Corporate Equality Index indicates that a company likely covers highly controversial medical interventions, including hormone regimens and gender transition surgery. Apple gets that perfect score — and the company’s not merely scoring high on activist rating systems but funding the activists outright. It doesn’t signal neutrality, particularly when 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies have cut ties with the HRC, many of them concerned over the group’s increasing politicization and association with the wildly controversial dictates of gender ideology, particularly with regard to children. What started as an activist group urging nondiscrimination protections (something no serious investor or company would oppose) has gradually morphed into a radical activism organization demanding something different. Apple would do well to realize this devolution and reconsider the partnership.
For what it’s worth, there are also signs that the company is at least listening to serious presentations of the concerns. In response to shareholder engagement from Bowyer Research, on behalf of the Christian nonprofit American Family Association, the company announced implementation of stronger anti-CSAM protocols and age limit enforcement in its App Store — a win delivered for the sake of thousands of innocent iPad and iPhone-using children. The company reportedly removed ESG modifiers from its executive compensation, another step toward neutrality we’re also seeing at other major brands like Goldman Sachs. The balance of voices at Apple’s annual shareholder meetings, once entirely slanted to the ESG and DEI-aligned left, is now shifting to reflect a real investor base that may be much closer to Jobs’ 50/50 estimation than many corporate activists ever realized.
This is an opportunity, with a fresh face at the head of the Apple brand, to reclaim that perception as a company that cares about phones and processors, not partisan signaling. There’s trust to be rebuilt, a fact that we’ve explained to the ~100 companies we’ve engaged with this season on behalf of investors. For Apple, we’ve asked for answers about membership in net zero activist coalitions, controversial charitable partnerships, and other incidents like delisting religious apps in its Chinese App Store to appease the CCP. As privacy and free speech concerns swirl around the EU’s Digital Services Act, it remains to be seen what part Apple will play there. But trust, and a reputation for political neutrality, can be rebuilt — and it’s crucial that CEO Ternus sees that opportunity.
One of the most heartwarming Apple moments in recent years came in late 2024 when the company advertised a hearing-impaired father having his life changed by Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 technology. This is Apple at its best. The company does not need to chase applause from political activists. Its technology has brought untold good to the world, and its mission of innovation and thinking differently to solve challenges is a noble one. The free enterprise system rewards companies that meet the world’s genuine needs, from assisting the disabled to creating one of the most widely adopted tech ecosystems on Earth. As it happens, Apple is a firm that does both of those things.
Apple doesn’t need DEI initiatives to make its mission good for humanity. It already is. Getting rid of the political clouds that obscure that mission is a bright path forward, a move of genuine cultural and business leadership, and a vindication of Jobs’ belief that “in strong companies, the best ideas win.”
