Apple CEO to Join Michelle Obama at State of the Union Speech

Apple CEO Tim Cook will sit with Michelle Obama as the President delivers his State of the Union speech on February 12.

Cook is the second member of the world of Apple to join the First Lady. At last year’s speech, Mrs. Obama invited the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to view the SOTU speech.

Gene Sperling, a top White House economic adviser, confirmed the First Lady’s invitation as well as Mr. Cook’s acceptance.

“Apple is a great American company, and it stands for our sense of innovation, invention, entrepreneurship, and risk taking and I think that’s quite an appropriate person to be in the First Lady’s box when the president is talking about our economic future, the importance of job creation, manufacturing, innovation and how we create strong middle class jobs,” Sperling said.

Apple recently announced that it was bringing some of its manufacturing back to the United States. In December, Apple CEO Cook announced that the company was going to re-start domestic manufacturing of its iMac and other desktop computer lines.

Apple isn’t the only company to begin to reevaluate the off shoring of manufacturing.

“There was a herd mentality to the off shoring,” John Shook, the CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts said in a December interview. “And there was some bulls**t. But it was also the inability to see the total costs–the engineers in the U.S. and factory managers in China who can’t talk to each other; the management hours and money flying to Asia to find out why the quality they wanted wasn’t being delivered. The cost of all that is huge.”