CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin Throws Cold Water On Apple’s ‘Squishy’ $500B U.S. Investment Pledge Lauded By Trump

CNBC’s Squawk Box host Andrew Ross Sorkin dismissed Apple’s “squishy” pledge to invest $500 billion into the U.S. as money the company “needed to spend” anyway.

On Monday Apple unveiled the plans to invest it will implement over the next four years, a move that includes hiring 20,000 new employees and establishing a new server factory in Texas.

The announcement followed a meeting last week between CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump and comes as the tech giant navigates the economic fallout of Trump’s trade policies. Apple is already facing a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, with the administration threatening to impose a 25 percent tariff on semiconductor chips.

The Apple investment announcement was praised by President Donald Trump in a post to Truth Social, who hailed it as proof of the “faith” businesses were putting in his policies and publicly thanked Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, however, Sorkin was skeptical about the claim and highlighted that the spending wasn’t “all new” and that multinationals would be making “a lot of these kinds of announcements” to charm the Trump administration ahead of tariff decisions.

It is a bit of a down payment, potentially, on trying to get some relief from tariffs from the work that they’re doing in China later on. I think one of the things we’re seeing here is the president and Tim Cook, for example, meeting last week, Tim Cook telling him about these plans in hopes that when in fact there is a decision finally made on what tariffs look like for goods being imported from China, that perhaps some of that gets some kind of relief, a carve-out, or something else.

I think you’re gonna be seeing a lot of these kinds of announcements. I should say some of them are very real and I don’t want to discount them, but for, example in, even in this $500 billion number, it’s not all new if you will. For example the production of films and TV shows on Apple+ is part of that number. So there’s going to be a lot of different, sort of squishy elements to this.

And to put it in context, for example, Microsoft has committed to spend $80 billion a year on its AI development, and it says it needs that as well.

So, there are sort of necessities that I don’t – I wouldn’t say that Apple is doing this simply to placate the president or anybody else, they actually do need to be spending a large part of this money. Of course where they spend it was up for debate prior to this.

Watch above via MSNBC.