When Tim Cook, the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world, Apple, came out about his sexuality in 2014, it shocked the world but his story also became an inspiration for millions.

But what has remained a topic of conversation is what took Cook so long?

The 62-year-old CEO of Apple, who was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1960 and grew up in Robertsdale where his father worked in a shipyard, had a different childhood growing up which in return made him feel that he was fundamentally different.

Growing up in Robertsdale where there was no internet and also very slim hope of finding people who were similar to you, set the template for the way Cook still sees himself.

“When I was growing up there was no internet, and therefore you didn’t find a lot of people like you around,” Cook revealed in an in-depth interview to GQ.

The Apple CEO who prefers to stay off the radar and not indulge in revealing many details about him or his personal life, spoke unfiltered to the world when he came out in the 2014 opinion article in Bloomberg published on October 31.”While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me,” the businessman had written.The decision to talk about his sexuality was voluntarily because Cook thought that not doing so would cause actual harm.

His sexuality had been quietly speculated about in several reports, but Cook remained silent and preferred to keep his life private until he started getting notes from kids.

“I was getting notes from kids who had read on the internet somewhere that I was gay,” Cook says. “And they were at the end of their ropes. They were being pushed out by their families and sort of written out of life in a way. And I felt a responsibility to try to do something. Part of what they need to see is that life doesn’t end. And so I made that trade-off with my own privacy,” Cook said in his recent 2023 GQ interview.

The importance of “privacy” also reflects in Apple’s ideology. In Cook’s tenure with the Cupertino-based tech giant, the company has adopted a set of public values and practices that are particularly rigorous around privacy and security. “We feel privacy is a basic human right,” the Apple CEO adds.