Tim Cook (Apple)

178. ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER 04/12 **#16**

They Don't Exist: This A or A+ list CEO has been making the rounds of TV and other media in recent weeks, calling out his younger counterpart for questionable data practices. I don't know if it's ironic exactly, though it does sound funny coming from the head of a major company with a long and well known history of labor abuses in a certain very populous country. What's less well known is that our CEO was a driving force behind the offshoring of so much production. The public reason is money, which is always a factor, but as CDAN readers know there is often a private, and even in some cases secret reason. You see, when the CEO is in country, he likes to visit barely legal nationals of a certain sex. Or rather, they say they are, and we all hope they're that, at least. This country famously keeps tabs on all births, but out in the countryside especially they're not always recorded. Sometimes the family had paid a bribe to avoid violating the national policy, and sometimes it's just bureaucratic incompetence. In any event there's no record of how old they are, or even that they exist. And just as the industrial revolution brought the rural masses to cities in the nineteenth century West, this country's cities have been thronged by migrants looking for work in recent decades. Some of them find it, including at places like the one where this CEO's products are made, but it is often low paying. The toil is miserable, and more than a few have killed themselves. Others find that they can make much more money providing services to wealthy foreigners - especially those with a singular preference for young men of this particular ethnicity, and even nation of origin. In the CEO's community, there's a term for it.

A list CEO: Tim Cook ("Apple, Inc.")

Younger counterpart: Mark Zuckerberg

Populous country: China (2 children per family