Tim Cook is one of the country’s most-powerful – and most-visible – CEOs. And it’s that visibility that led him to come out publicly last October.
The Apple CEO opened up to Stephen Colbert about his decision, saying he “wanted to tell everyone [his] truth.”
Cook said he felt “a tremendous responsibility” to do it during an interview on The Late Show.
“It became so clear to me that kids were getting bullied in school, kids were getting basically discriminated against, kids were even being disclaimed by their own parents — and that I needed to do something … Where I valued my privacy significantly, I felt that I was valuing it too far above what I could do for other people. And so I wanted to tell everyone my truth.”
“Many people already knew, for many people it was no revelation. it’s like discovering something in your iPhone that it’s always done but you didn’t quite know it, right?” said Cook. “And so it wasn’t a revelation to a lot of people that I work with but it was maybe to the broader world.”
Cook revealed he is gay in an eloquent piece in Bloomberg last October. There, he called being gay ‘among the greatest gifts god has given him.”
“I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy,” he said.