Sen. Bernie Sanders accused Apple chief executive Tim Cook of using component costs as cover for higher product prices, but a central number in Sanders’ attack does not match Apple’s own securities filings, according to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.
In a Thursday post on Twitter/X, Sanders said “corporate greed” was Cook saying Apple price increases of more than $200 were “unavoidable” after the company made $112 billion in profit last year and spent $310 billion on stock buybacks. Sanders called the price increases “unacceptable.”
Gruber challenged the buyback figure on Saturday, citing Apple’s annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He wrote that Apple reported $89 billion in stock repurchases last year, along with $15 billion in dividends to shareholders. Gruber said those figures fit alongside Apple’s $112 billion profit, while Sanders’ $310 billion buyback claim would amount to nearly three times annual profit.
The distinction is not accounting trivia. Stock buybacks are cash outflows, not extra money sitting around in the same bucket as profit. If a company spent far more on repurchases than it earned in a year, Gruber wrote, it would need to draw down cash reserves or borrow heavily. He said Apple’s filed numbers do not support Sanders’ version.
The policy fight underneath the arithmetic
Sanders’ post was aimed at Apple’s reported price hikes tied to higher costs for RAM and SSD components. Gruber framed the issue as a basic pricing question: when essential parts become more expensive for reasons outside a company’s control, the company can raise prices, accept lower margins, or split the pain between itself and customers.
Gruber argued that Sanders treated Apple’s component-cost problem differently from tariffs, even though both can raise input costs. He pointed to two statements from Sanders’ Senate office about Donald Trump’s tariff policy. In one, Sanders said Trump’s across-the-board tariffs would act as a sales tax on imported goods “which will raise prices on products” Americans need. In another, Sanders said Trump’s blanket tariffs “will just raise prices for American consumers” and damage relationships with allies.
Gruber’s criticism is that Sanders acknowledged pass-through pricing when attacking tariffs, but demanded that Apple absorb all higher component costs in the case of memory and storage. Sanders has not been quoted in the material Gruber cited as addressing the discrepancy or the $310 billion figure.
Trump made a similar demand of Walmart
Gruber also compared Sanders’ Apple post with a statement Donald Trump made a year earlier about Walmart and tariffs. In that post, Trump said Walmart should stop blaming tariffs for higher prices and should “eat the tariffs” rather than charge customers more, citing Walmart’s profits.
Gruber said Sanders’ argument about Apple follows the same logic as Trump’s Walmart demand: a profitable company should absorb higher input costs rather than pass them to consumers. That is a political claim, but the Apple buyback number is a factual one. On that point, Gruber’s cited SEC filing puts Apple’s repurchases at $89 billion, not $310 billion, for the year in question.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
