I think this shows how much society has changed recently. In the past 15 years we went from having gay marriage illegal pretty much everywhere to most people being accepting and the head of one of the world's largest corporations feeling comfortable publicly being known as gay. What do you guys think?

Cook's sexuality has been pretty widely known.  He just never bothered to write an essay on the subject because it wasn't anywhere near as important an issue compared to whether or not he would be able to effectively carry on Jobs' legacy of awesome design + customer delight = happy customers + happy shareholders.  I've thought a fair bit about Cook's succession of Jobs, but never once have I thought about his sex life. 

The surprise wasn't that there's a Fortune 500 CEO who was gay.  The surprise to me was that he was the first one who publicly confirmed it.  I thought we'd moved past giving a damn dozens of companies and several trillions of dollars of market cap ago, but apparently we haven't.  The only other two publicly gay CEOs of publicly traded American companies are Trevor Burgess of C1 Financial and Jason Grenfell-Gardner of IGI Laboratories.

Maybe Cook's announcement is the thing that gets the rest of 'em to realize that Wall Street already ought to know: that what you do in the bedroom bears no relevance to what you do in the boardroom.

His sexuality sure had been cooking beneath the surface.

I think this shows how much society has changed recently. In the past 15 years we went from having gay marriage illegal pretty much everywhere to most people being accepting and the head of one of the world's largest corporations feeling comfortable publicly being known as gay. What do you guys think?


I think a better sign of how far we have come will be when people no longer look at someone coming out as "news".

I think a better sign of how far we have come will be when people no longer look at someone coming out as "news".


I'd give it at least another ten years.  :-X