A date with Tim Cook is a bargain in 2014
For the second year in a row, a lunch date with Apple's chief executive is auctioned off for charity.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
The value of an hour of Apple CEO Tim Cook's time is way down from last year, if you go by the amount that lunch with the Cupertino captain of industry fetched at an online auction.
For the second year in a row, the opportunity to spend some quality time with the iHuman ultimately responsible for the future of our iWorld was put up for bid to raise money for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. It seems that the value of bending the ear of the top Cook in Apple's kitchen has decreased a bit since last year however, because the winning bid was just a little more than half the 2013 bid of $610,000 by an anonymous donor that won the inaugural auction.
Bidding on Cook auction 2.0 ended on Tuesday with a winning bid of just $330,000.
This year's auction lot is a particular steal, not just because of the lower price, but because Cook also threw in an invite to an upcoming Apple event as part of the package.
In fact it might not be true that demand for Cook's time is down year over year. The BBC reported that Charitybuzz, the site facilitating the auction, instituted a new credit card verification step as part of the bidding process this year, which may have cut down on shill bidding that helped drive up last year's final price.
There's little reason for Cook to be down on this latest auction result -- at the moment, lunch with Tim Cook is worth roughly 100 times more than lunch with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, which has received just one bid for $3,500 with nine days left in the auction.