TJ Walker discusses Apple CEO Tim Cook’s public revelation — via a personal Bloomberg column — that he is gay. Walker frames the announcement as a breakthrough for Fortune 500 visibility of gay leaders, predicts limited long-term commercial harm to Apple despite conservative backlash, praises Cook’s measured tone and PR handling, and suggests the disclosure will resonate positively with minorities and many consumers.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook announces to the world through a personal column in Bloomberg that he is, in fact, gay. There certainly was a time when you didn't get to be the CEO of Fortune 500 company without at least appearing to be flagrantly heterosexual. You had to have the wife, the three smiling kids, the whole bit. Forget being gay. You couldn't even be single or a woman. Thankfully, those days are gone. But this is still a bit of a breakthrough. There's certainly, to my knowledge, never been the case of a publicly traded Fortune 500 company having a CEO publicly come out as gay. Now, there's certainly been prominent CEOs, especially in the media world, certain magazines, I won't mention their name, where the CEO was gay, but had a closeted life and still had a wife and children and the whole bit. So this is something new. I think that overall it's going to be seen as a net plus for Apple. They're going to be attacked by conservatives. They're going to be boycotts from religious right groups. But here's the thing. When they're organizing their boycotts, they're going to be emailing and texting on iPhones. They are going to be uploading their podcast of hate onto itunes. Problem conservatives. And I don't mean to suggest all conservatives hate gays, but the problem with religious traditional conservatives who think that homosexuality is an egregious sin and abomination is that Apple is so intertwined in people's lives that most people are just not going to inconvenience themselves to make some sort of statement against Apple. Meanwhile, Tim Cook now looks like a complete hero to the gay community, to minorities of all stripes. His column was quite passionate about how he believes being gay has made him a better CEO because he identifies with the underdog, he identifies with minorities, he has a special appreciation for diversity. And I thought he really struck the right tone. He said he's not some hero. He's not Martin Luther King Jr. He's not Robert F. Kennedy. But he's just trying to do this one thing. If it can make the lives better for other people who might be gay or might be some other minority group, then that's why he's coming forward. And he made it very explicit. He's not an activist. He likes his privacy. So his tone, I think, is going to go down well on Wall Street. In fact, I don't think people on Wall street are even going to be talking about this a week from now. So it was all a masterful, masterful play by Tim Cook. And by the way, I'm often quite critical of Apple's public relations because they do have an arrogant, arrogant attitude and they typically don't respond to reporters calls. But this time, from the top, they got it just right.
