Is Apple actually going “America First”?
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A week after Apple CEO Tim Cook met with President Donald Trump, the company said today that it plans to invest $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. Is Apple aligning with Trump’s America First agenda? We’ll explain why Apple’s domestic investment isn’t what you may think it is. Plus, how would you respond to an email from your boss with the subject line: “What did you do last week?” And, a big thank you to Tammy from Oregon for today’s Make Me Smile moment.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Apple’s $500 Billion U.S. Investment Is Mostly Already in the Books” from The Wall Street Journal
- “Elon Musk Tells Federal Workers to Detail Work in an Email or Lose Their Jobs” by The New York Times
- “Are federal workers lazy? Let’s look at the data.” from The Washington Post
- “The Long Flight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate” from The New Yorker
- “The Trump administration tells agencies they could ignore Musk order on email reply” from The Washington Post (latest developments after we recorded today’s episode)
Got a question or comment for the hosts? Email makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, you ready? |
| 0:02.4 | Yeah, let's do it. |
| 0:03.6 | All right, Jake. |
| 0:07.2 | Hey, everybody. I'm Kyle Rosedall. |
| 0:11.2 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart. |
| 0:12.5 | Where we make today makes sense. |
| 0:16.4 | Hello, everyone. |
| 0:17.4 | I'm Rie McRaece and for Kimberly Adams. |
| 0:19.4 | Thanks for joining us. |
| 0:20.4 | It is Monday, February 24th. Today we'll talk about some news and then we'll get to smiles later on. Kai, what caught your attention today? |
| 0:28.4 | So much. So very, very much caught my attention. A lot of it happened over the weekend or on Friday afternoon. So I'm just going to pass on most of that. I'm going to go to the Wall |
| 0:37.5 | Street Journal today and the announcement from Apple this morning that it's going to spend more |
| 0:43.8 | than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years on manufacturing facilities |
| 0:49.1 | to provide the servers that it needs to support that company's artificial intelligence things. |
| 0:54.8 | Here's the catch with this, and this is the thing that I want listeners to take from this. |
| 1:01.5 | Don't believe the headlines, right? |
| 1:04.3 | $500 billion, Apple, Trump, very happy, blah, blah, blah. |
| 1:08.2 | Here's the deal. |
| 1:09.7 | It is actually unclear reports to the Wall Street Journal how much of this plan spending is actually new. Apple has unveiled new spending at the beginning of every presidential administration, going back to the first Trump administration, on the order of many billions of dollars. And it turns out that a lot of this spending may already be allocated and have been announced. |
| 1:30.9 | So all I'm saying is it's not necessarily what you think it is. |
| 1:36.3 | That's all I want you to take away from this. |
| 1:38.3 | We will have this story on the show page. |
... |
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