Stephen Colbert invited Tim Cook onto his show Tuesday, and asked the Apple CEO some very personal and insightful questions about coming out and being gay.
On the one week anniversary of his new show, it seems like Stephen Colbert isn’t going to be exceptionally different on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” than he was on “The Colbert Report” – and that’s good.
Tuesday night Colbert spent a few minutes with Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking him if being gay is “an upgrade or a feature?“
Cook is considered by some to be the most powerful CEO in America, since Apple is the most respected brand and also the richest company. So when he came out as gay last October it was big news. But he did it, as he told Colbert, because he wanted to help make a difference for kids who are being bullied.
Citing a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?,'” Cook said it “became clear to me: 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, so I wanted to tell everyone my truth. Many people already knew, and so it was no revelation. It’s like discovering something on your iPhone it’s always done but you didn’t quite know it,” Cook quipped.
“It wasn’t a revelation to a lot of the people I worked with, but it was maybe to the broader world. And I felt a tremendous responsibility to do it.”
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Image: Screenshot via The Late Show with Stephen Colbert