Tim Cook doesn’t often lose his cool, but he got surprisingly riled up while discussing claims that Apple is doing its best to avoid paying taxes on overseas earnings during an interview with 60 Minutes’ Charlie Rose.
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Former U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in 2013 accused Apple of shifting “billions of dollars in profits offshore” that should be subject to U.S. taxes.
The current tax code was made for the industrial age, and not the “digital age”, Cook said.
Williams’ new job makes him the second-most powerful Apple executive, and one of the company’s elite C-level executives, which includes chief design officer Jony Ive. “We pay more taxes in this country than anyone”, he tells Rose. He says he would “love to” repatriate it but he can’t “because it would cost me 40 percent [in taxes] to bring it home”. He admitted that Apple retains overseas income in its foreign companies to avoid incurring American corporate taxes, the highest in the developed world.
The episode is due to air at 19:30 ET on CBS this Sunday. “It’s backwards. It’s bad for America”, Cook said. The interview was conducted before the shootings in Paris, where the perpetrators are believed to have used encrypted messages to communicate; Cook said later the event didn’t change his opinion on the issue, according to CBS and interview excerpts provided by the show.
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“There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door”. It should have been fixed many years ago. I think that’s an overly simplistic view.
