Cook didn’t specify which tokens he owns but said, “I think it’s reasonable to own [crypto] as part of a diversified portfolio. … I’ve been interested in it for a while.”
“I don’t think people buy an Apple stock to get exposure to crypto,” Cook said. “If they want to do that, they can invest directly into crypto through other means.”
But, he said, “there are other things” related to crypto “that we’re definitely looking at. … I wouldn’t have anything to announce today.”
“We try not to talk about the future too much, because we’ve got so much going on in the current day that we try to be secretive about the future,” he said. “It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t keep something up our sleeves.”
“If you want to sideload, you can buy an Android phone,” Cook said. He added that giving iPhone users the option to “sideload” apps from platforms outside the Apple App Store would, from Apple’s point of view, “be like, if I were an automobile manufacturer, telling me not to put airbags and seatbelts in a car. You would just never think about doing this. In today’s time, it’s just too risky… and it wouldn’t be an iPhone if it didn’t maximize security and privacy.”
“I think that we have a responsibility as a business to do business in as many places as we can,” Cook said. “I believe in what [former IBM CEO] Tom Watson said, ‘world peace through world trade.’ … In terms of what we speak up on, we speak up on some [issues] privately, we speak up on some publicly, we do it in different ways. And you have to get your head around, when you’re operating outside the US in any country in the world, that there are different laws. That’s part of the complexity and part of the beauty of the world is that everybody has their own laws and customs.”