In the company’s latest call, Mr Cook said, “We do not have a zero-sum approach to prosperity.” He added, “We are focused on tearing the cake, making sure that our success is not just our success and that everything we create, build or do is focused on creating opportunities for others.”
Apple declined further comment.
Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also lost billions of dollars amid the pandemic. Their greater influence has attracted intense scrutiny over the past year, including a two-part grilling of four of the companies’ top executives in Congress last month.
Representative David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat and chairman of the House subcommittee investigating how the tech giants burned their power, warned at the hearing that the companies had grown too powerful.
“Their ability to dictate terms, call the shots, elevate entire sectors and inspire fear represents the powers of a private government,” he said. “As hard as it is to believe, it is possible that our economy will emerge from this crisis even more concentrated and consolidated than before.”
Last week, Apple’s power over its App Store came to the fore when it launched the popular game Fortnite from its boot. Epic Games, which makes Fortnite, then sued Apple in federal court, accusing the company of violating anti-trust laws by forcing developers to use their payment systems.
Apple has also provided another powerful tool to increase its valuation and enrich its investors and executives: share purchases. Since the company’s value hit $ 1 trillion, it has returned $ 175.6 billion to shareholders, including $ 141 billion in share purchases. Apple has bought more than $ 360 billion of its own shares since 2012, by far the most from any company, and has announced plans to spend at least tens of billions more on Apple stock exchanges.
Apple has increased its purchases since it used the Trump administration’s 2017 tax law to bring back most of the $ 252 billion it once held abroad. (The law saves it $ 43 billion in taxes along the way, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, a research group in Washington.) Apple has $ 194 billion in cash and bonds.
