Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is a notoriously private and frugal operator. After being at the helm of Apple for almost 11 years since the passing away of the legendary Steve Jobs, Cook helped the Cupertino-based giant to scale new heights and become the wealthiest company known to man. Thanks to his performance, he has been granted stock options which made him a billionaire in 2021. Cook appropriately attended summer camp at Sun Valley which is a regular get-together for some of the richest people on the planet. Interestingly, he was introduced to the Rivian R1T by none other than Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe who was also attending the summer camp.
Scaringe whose personal wealth also skyrocketed after Rivian’s IPO last year brought two Rivians to the conference with him — the R1T and the R1S and these electric vehicles caught the fancy of more than one attendee including Home Depot Inc co-founder Ken Langone. Bloomberg reported that Tim Cook was seen taking the R1T to drive downtown. Cook drove the metallic green R1T in Idaho.
Of course, Apple’s electric self-driving car project dubbed “Project Titan” is one of silicon valley‘s worst-kept secrets and has been one of the projects that iPhone-maker has struggled with. With Cook now in his 60s, many believe that the so-called Apple Car could be his swan song at the company before he retires as he has noted that he doesn’t expect to be working at Apple by the 2030s.
Many believe that Apple’s electric autonomous car project is at least 3-4 years away from coming to fruition. Recently, Apple at its WWDC conference revealed a jaw-dropping new version of CarPlay which extends beyond the infotainment system and takes over many-core car functions. This, Apple believes, could be launched at the end of 2023 despite reluctance from many of its key partners including Mercedes Benz CEO Ola Kallenius who said that CarPlay would likely never fully take over its car interface.
Rivian of course is backed by Amazon and Ford. Amazon has backed Rivian to develop more than 100,000 electric delivery vans as it tries to make its logistics operations green. Ford has also poured money into Rivian despite having its own electric pickup truck the F-150 Lightning which will be delivered to people in the US this year.
Currently, the Apple Car project is run on a day-to-day basis by Kevin Lynch, the former CTO of Adobe who joined Apple in 2013 to develop watchOS, the operating system for the Apple Watch. While he still retains his role in the development of the Apple Watch, most of his time is spent working on the Apple Car where he reports to Apple’s Senior Vice President for AI and Machine Learning John Giannandrea.
