Here’s Apple CEO Tim Cook’s favorite line from the first two seasons of Ted Lasso: “There’s two buttons I never like hitting. That’s panic and, snooze.” (Says Jason Sudeikis’ Coach Lasso when asked about his team’s losing streak).
“I love that. I love that,” Cook told The New York Times DealBook Online Summit. “He has so many great lines.” The Apple TV+ Emmy-sweeping comedy series “has resonated with so many people around the world, and sort of come out at exactly the right time, during the pandemic, and has been a moment of positivity that all of us want and all of us need, frankly,” he said. Even with Apple TV+ big bets and clear financial commitment from its deep-pocketed parent, Ted Lasso, which won 11 Emmy Awards, is the first show to get this many shout-outs at the corporate level, as per Cook when Apple reported quarterly earnings last month.
In a Q&A with DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, the chief executive also revealed that he personally holds cryptocurrency. “I think it’s reasonable to own as part of a diversified portfolio. It’s something that from a personal point of view I am interested in.”
But Cook said Apple as a company has no immediate plans to invest in it. “I don’t think people buy Apple stock to get exposure to cryptocurrency. If they want that, they can invest directly in cryptocurrency by other means.” Nor is Apple planning to accept crypto as payment for products. “But there are things we are looking at,” he said, declining to specify.
Cook has been CEO of Apple for a decade, a milestone that is bittersweet. “On my ten-year anniversary, I am thinking about ten years without Steve, so it’s a bit of a sad time too. He was the inventor, the entrepreneur … of the century. There is no one quite like him and I miss him every day,” Cook said of the legendary Apple co-founder and former CEO who died of cancer in October of 2011 at age 56.
Jobs was talking about the thorny issue of consumer privacy well over a decade ago, Cook said. In a major change, iPhones as of last summer now require users to actively grant permission for advertisers to track them across apps and websites — a feature that’s reportedly cost Facebook, Google, Snap and many other apps billions of dollars in collective ad revenue.
“I don’t know about the estimates. But I think that, from our point of view, privacy is a basic human right and the people who should decide if their data is shared should be the person themselves. We are not making the decision, we are just prompting them to be asked if they want to be tracked across apps. And many of them are deciding no, they don’t want to be. They just never had the choice before.”