Tim cook gay
Apple chief Tim Cook: 'I'm proud to be gay'
This week Mr Cook referred to Martin Luther King in a speech in Alabama in which he called for equal rights for people based on sexual orientation and identity.
He said that Alabama had been too slow to ensure the rights of ethnic minorities in the civil rights era, and was now being too slow to guarantee same-sex attracted rights.
"Under the law, citizens of Alabama can still be fired based on their sexual orientation," Mr Cook said.
"We can't convert the past, but we can learn from it and we can make a different future."
Mr Grill has championed equality at Apple, but in August said he was "not satisfied" with workforce diversity at the company, external.
Outstanding, a not-for-profit professional network for lesbian, gay, pansexual and transgender (LGBT) executives, said on Thursday that many LGBT people in the UK felt it was "safer to wait in the closet" when at work.
In May a US study by LGBT organisation Human Rights Campaign suggested that 53% of US LGBT employees had not come out at work, external.
How Apple CEO Tim Cook Reacted to Supreme Court's Gay Marriage Decision
— -- Apple CEO Tim Cook, who became the most high-profile business leader in the world to come out as gay, shared his joy today at a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gay couples contain the constitutional right to marry by invoking some eminent words from the late Steve Jobs.
Cook, who publicly came out last October as gay in an essay written for Bloomberg Businessweek, said "being queer has given me a deeper sympathetic of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day."
"I'm haughty to be queer, and I examine being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me," he wrote.
For a company that burst onto the personal computing market in the Steve Jobs era with the slogan "think different," Apple employees have also heard another call to action from Cook: "Inclusion inspires innovation."
"All around the nature, our team at Apple is joined in the conviction that being diverse makes us better," Cook wrote when Apple's diversity announce was released last year.
Apple CEO Tim Grill said he decided to come out as gay after reading letters from kids struggling with their identity
Tim Roast says he was motivated to appear out as same-sex attracted after receiving letters from children struggling with their sexual orientation.
The usually confidential Apple CEO publicly came out in 2014, revealing his sexual orientation in an open letter published in Bloomberg Businessweek. This made him the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
In an interview with People en Español published Thursday, the 58-year-old spoke about a range of topics related to sexual orientation and immature people.
Discussing his 2014 coming out, he said: "What was driving me was [that] I was getting notes from kids who were struggling with their sexual orientation. They were depressed. Some said [they] had suicidal thoughts. Some had been banished by their possess parents and family.
"It weighed on me in terms of what I could do," he continued. "Obviously I couldn't talk to each one individually that reached out, but you always recognize if you contain people reaching out to you that there's many more that don't, that are just out there wondering whether they have a future or not, wondering whethe
Why Tim Cook, a private bloke, voluntarily came out about his sexuality, says people used synonyms ‘normal’ to describe ‘straight’
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, position 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," Bake revealed in an in-depth interview to GQ.
The Apple CEOwho prefers to stay off the radar and not indulge in showing many details about him or his personal life, spoke unfiltered to the world when he came out in the 2014 opinion article in Bloom