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Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during a “First Tool-In” ceremony at the TSMC facility under construction in Phoenix, Arizona, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022.

Caitlin O’Hara | Bloomberg | Getty Images

When President Barack Obama asked the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs about making an iPhone in the U.S., Jobs didn’t mince words. 

“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs said at a dinner with Obama in 2011.

The president of the U.S. and the CEO of Apple have changed, but the ambition of a “Made in the USA” iPhone remains. 

Defending its “reciprocal tariffs,” the White House this week said President Donald Trump believes the U.S. has the workforce and the resources to build iPhones in the U.S. Apple CEO Tim Cook nor anybody else at the tech company has come out to back that claim, but analysts who follow Apple say the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best. 

As it’s largely a theoretical exercise, there’s a broad range of guesses as to how much an all-American iPhone might cost.

Bank of America Securities analyst Wamsi Mohan said in a Thursday note that the iPhone 16 Pro, which is currently priced at $1,199, could increase 25% based on labor costs alone. That would make it a roughly $1,500 device.

Wedbush’s Dan Ives pegged $3,500 as the U.S. iPhone’s price shortly after last week’s tariff announcement, estimating that Apple would need to spend $30 billion over three years to move 10% of its supply chain to the U.S.

At the moment, Apple makes more than 80% of its products in China. Those products now receive a 145% tax when they’re imported into the U.S. after Trump’s tariffs went into effect this week.

Experts say that a “Made in the USA” iPhone would face serious challenges, ranging from finding and paying a U.S. workforce to tariff costs that Apple would incur importing parts to the U.S. for final assembly.

There’s broad agreement among analysts and industry watchers that it’s not likely to happen. Wall Street has doubted for years that Apple would do an American iPhone. “I don’t think that’s a thing,” Needham’s Laura Martin quipped on CNBC this week.

“It’s just not a reality that on the time frame of imposing tariffs that this is going to shift manufacturing here. It’s pie in the sky,” said Jeff Fieldhack, research director at Counterpoint Research.

A man checks an iPhone 16 Pro as the new iPhone 16 series smartphones go on sale at an Apple store in Beijing, China September 20, 2024. 

Florence Lo | Reuters

Apple designs its products in California, but they are made by contract manufacturers, such as Foxconn, the company’s top supplier. 

Even if Apple spent heavily to get Foxconn or another partner to agree to build some iPhones in the U.S, it would take years to construct the plants and install the machinery, and there’s no guarantee that U.S. trade policy might not change yet again in a way to make the factory less useful.

The biggest issue with Uncle Sam’s iPhone is that the U.S. doesn’t have the same workforce as China – though the massive number of workers needed to build iPhones is one of the attractions for the Trump administration.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CBS on Sunday.

Foxconn builds iPhones and other Apple products in massive campuses that include dorms and shuttles. Workers often travel from nearby regions to work at the plant for short periods, and employment surges seasonally in the summer before new iPhones come out in the fall. The well-oiled system helps Apple pump out more than 200 million iPhones per year. 

Additionally, Foxconn over the years has come under scrutiny for worker conditions many times, including in 2011 when the company installed nets around some of its buildings after a rash of worker suicides. Oversight groups have said that Foxconn’s work is grueling and that workers are pressured into working overtime.

Despite working conditions, Foxconn hired 50,000 additional workers at its biggest factory in Henan to build enough iPhones ahead of the latest models’ September launch, Chinese media reported last fall.

But Chinese workers get paid far less than American workers. The hourly wage during the iPhone 16 surge was 26 yuan, or $3.63, with a signing bonus of 7,500 yuan, or about $1,000, according to the South China Morning Post. For comparison, the minimum wage in California is $16.50 per hour. 

Bank of America Securities’ Mohan estimated on Thursday that the labor cost for assembling and testing an iPhone in the U.S. would come in at $200 per iPhone, up from $40 in China.

Apple CEO Cook has also said that another issue is that American workers don’t have the right skills. In a 2017 interview, Cook said there aren’t enough tooling engineers in the U.S. Those engineers work on and configure the machines that take the sophisticated designs from Apple, which come in the form of computer files, and transform them into physical objects.

“The reason is because of the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is,” Cook said when asked at a conference why Apple does so much production in China.

A meeting of tooling engineers in China could fill “multiple football fields,” but in the U.S., it would be hard to fill one, Cook said. 

The most recent effort to have Foxconn move significant production to the U.S. was a failure.

Trump announced a $10 billion investment from Foxconn to build plants in Wisconsin in 2017. Apple was never officially attached to Foxconn’s Wisconsin location, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming Apple would build three “big beautiful plants” in the U.S.

Foxconn changed plans several times for what the Wisconsin plant would produce, but it eventually settled on making face masks during the pandemic – nothing electronics related. The Foxconn Wisconsin plant was pitched as delivering 13,000 jobs, but it only created 1,454 jobs. 

During the pandemic, plans for the plant were abandoned, and most of the facility remains unbuilt

Apple worked with Foxconn in 2011 to expand iPhone production to Brazil to avoid large import duties in that country. The plant is still operational today, and will produce iPhone 16 models to help Apple get around U.S. tariffs, according to recent Brazilian media reports.

But even after the $12 billion factory was operational, most components were still imported from Asia, and in 2015, four years after the plant was announced, the iPhones made in Brazil retailed for twice the price of iPhones made in China, according to Reuters.

However, recent efforts by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Apple’s main chip manufacturer, have been successful. TSMC now makes small quantities of cutting-edge chips at a new factory in Arizona, and Apple’s a committed customer.

Apple CEO Tim Cook escorts President Donald Trump as he tours Apple’s Mac Pro manufacturing plant with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin looking on in Austin, Texas, November 20, 2019.

Tom Brenner | Reuters

Even if iPhones could be assembled in America, much of what goes into an iPhone comes from countries around the world, all of which have received tariffs.

The vast majority of parts in an iPhone are made in Asia. The processor is manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, the display is produced by South Korean companies like LG or Samsung, and the majority of the other components are made in China.

Apple would face tariffs on most of those parts, according to Mohan of Bank of America Securities, unless it could secure waivers for individual parts. Semiconductors, which are among the most valuable parts inside an iPhone, are exempt from tariffs at the moment.  

Trump on Wednesday put a 90-day pause on most of his tariffs, but if the pause comes to an end, a Yankee-made iPhone 16 Pro Max could increase in price by 91% thanks to tariffs and increased labor costs, Mohan wrote.

“While it may be possible to move final assembly to the U.S., moving the entire iPhone supply chain would be a much bigger undertaking and would likely take many years, if even possible,” Mohan wrote.

Though Jobs shut down the idea of an America iPhone flat out with Obama, Cook hasn’t taken the same unvarnished approach. 

Instead, Cook has led Apple’s strategy to engage with Trump, including attending his inauguration in January. Apple also announced that it will spend $500 billion within the U.S., including on some AI server production in Houston. Trump regularly cites the investment with approval.

During the first Trump administration, Cook’s strategy worked. 

Although Trump talked about stars-and-stripes iPhones and Apple building plants in the U.S., the tech company was able to secure temporary exemptions for many of its products made in China. That meant Apple didn’t have to pay tariffs on important devices like the iPhone.

The charm offensive during Trump’s first term culminated in the fall of 2019 when Apple extended its commitment to assembling the $3,000 Mac Pro in a Flex factory outside Austin, Texas. Trump toured the factory with Cook. 

Before Apple commits to a red, white and blue iPhone, it may produce some lower-volume products or accessories in the U.S. to charm Trump, Wall Street analysts say. 

“Given we now know that the Trump administration is willing to negotiate, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple commit to some small-volume production in the US (HomePod? AirTags?), similar to its September 2019 commitment to manufacture the new Mac Pro in Austin, TX, to try and win an exemption,” Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in a Thursday note. 

Apple declined to comment.

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Tokenization of the market, from stocks to bonds to real estate is coming, says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, if we can solve one problem

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Tokenization of the market, from stocks to bonds to real estate is coming, says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, if we can solve one problem

Bitwise Spot Bitcoin ETF (BITB) signage on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024, with trading commencing on the first US exchange-traded funds that invest directly in the biggest cryptocurrency.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

If the vision of Larry Fink — CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager — becomes reality, all assets from stocks to bonds to real estate and more would be tradable online, on a blockchain.

“Every asset — can be tokenized,” Fink wrote in his recent annual letter to investors.

Unlike traditional paper certificates signifying financial ownership, tokens live securely on a blockchain, enabling instant buying, selling, and transfers without paperwork or waiting — “much like a digital deed,” he wrote.

Fink says it would be nothing short of a “revolution” for investing. Think 24-hour markets and a trading settlement process that can be compacted down into seconds from a process that today can still take days, with billions of dollars reinvested immediately back into the economy.

But there’s one big problem, one technology challenge that stands in the way: the lack of a coordinated digital identity verification system.

While technology experts say Fink’s idea isn’t improbable, they agree that there are cybersecurity challenges ahead in making it work.

Verifying asset owners in world of AI deep fakes

Today, it’s not easy to verify online that the person you are interacting with is that person because of the prevalence of AI deepfakes and sophisticated cybercriminals, according to Christina Hulka, executive director of the Secure Technology Alliance, an organization focused on identity, access and payments. As a result, having a unified verification system would be useful because there would be cryptographic validation that people are who they say they are.

“The [financial services] industry is focused on how to build a zero-trust framework for identification. You don’t trust anything until it’s verified,” Hulka said. “The challenge is getting everyone together about which technology to use that makes it as simple and as seamless for the consumer as possible,” she added. 

It’s hard to say precisely how a broad-based digital verification system would work but to support a fully tokenized financial structure, a system would, at a minimum, need to meet stringent security requirements, particularly those tied to financial regulations like the Know Your Customer rule and anti-money laundering rules, according to Zulfikar Ramzan, chief technology officer at Point Wild, a cybersecurity company.

At the same time, the system would need to be low friction and quick. There’s no shortage of technical tools today, especially from the field of cryptography, that can effectively bind a digital identity to a transaction, Ramzan said. “Fifteen to 20 years ago, this conversation would have been a non-starter,” he added.

There have been some successes with programs like this across the globe, according to Ramzan. India’s Aadhaar system is an example of a digital identity framework at a national scale. It enables most of the population to authenticate transactions via mobile devices, and it’s integrated across both public and private services. Estonia has an e-ID system that allows citizens to do everything from banking to voting online. Singapore and the UAE have also implemented strong national identity programs tied to mobile infrastructure and digital services. “While these systems differ in how they handle issues like privacy, they all share a key trait: centralized government leadership that drove standardization and adoption,” Ramzan said.

Centralized personal data is a big target for cybercriminals

While a centralized system solves one challenge, the storage of personally identifiable information and biometrics data is a security risk, said David Mattei, a strategic advisor in the fraud and AML practice at Datos Insights, which works with financial services, insurance and retail technology companies. 

Notably, there have been reports of data stolen from India’s Aadhaar system. And last year, El Salvador’s government had the personal data of 80% of its citizens stolen from a centralized, government-managed citizen identity system. “A lot of security experts do not advocate having a centralized security system because it’s kind of like the pot at the end of the rainbow that every fraudster is trying to get his hands on,” Mattei said.

In the U.S., there’s a long-standing preference for decentralized systems for identity. On mobile devices, Face ID and Fingerprint ID are done not by centralizing all of that data in one spot at Apple or Google, but by storing the data in a secure module on each mobile device. “This makes it much harder, if not impossible, for fraudsters to steal that data en masse,” Mattei said.

Larry Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc., at the Berlin Global Dialogue in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. 

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Digital driver’s licenses offer a cautionary tale

It would take a significant coordinated effort to come up with a national identity system used for identity verification.

Identity systems in the U.S. today are fragmented, Ramzan said, giving the example of state departments of motor vehicles. “To move forward, we will either need a cohesive national strategy or a way to better coordinate identity across the state and federal levels,” he said.

That’s not an easy task. Take, for example, the effort many states are making to adopt digital driver’s licenses. About a quarter of states today, including Utah, Maryland, Virginia and New York, issue mobile driver’s licenses, according to mDLConnection, an online resource from the Secure Technology Alliance. Other states have pilot programs in effect, have enacted legislation or are studying the issue. But this undertaking is quite ambitious and has been underway for several years.

To implement a national identity verification system would be a “massive undertaking and would require just about every company that does business online to adopt a government standard for identity verification and authentication,” Mattei said.

Competitive forces are another issue to contend with. “There is an ecosystem of vendors who offer identity verification and authentication solutions that would not want a centralized system for fear of going out of business,” Mattei said. 

There are also significant data privacy hurdles to overcome. States and the federal government would need to coordinate to resolve governance issues, and this might prompt “big brother” concerns about the extent to which the federal government could monitor the activities of its citizens.

Many people have “a bit of an allergic reaction” when anything resembling a national ID comes up, Ramzan said.

Fink has been pushing the SEC to look at issue

The idea is not a brand new one for Fink. At Davos earlier this year, he told CNBC that he wanted the SEC “to rapidly expand the tokenization of stocks and bonds.”

There’s BlackRock self-interest at work, and potential cost savings for the firm and many others, which Fink has spoken about. In recent years, BlackRock has been dragged into political battles, and lawsuits, over its voting of a massive amount of shares held in its funds on ESG issues. “We’d never have to vote on a proxy vote anymore,” Fink told CNBC at Davos, referring to “the tax on BlackRock.”

“Every owner would be notified of a vote,” he said, adding that it would bring down the cost of ownership of stocks and bonds.

It is clear from Fink’s decision to give this issue prominent placement in his annual letter — even if it came in third in the order of issues he covered behind both the politics of protectionism and the growing role of private markets — that he isn’t letting up. And what’s needed to make this a reality, he contends, is a new digital identity verification system. The letter is short on details, and BlackRock declined to elaborate, but, at least on the surface, the solution for Fink is clear. “If we’re serious about building an efficient and accessible financial system, championing tokenization alone won’t suffice. We must solve digital verification, too,” he wrote.

Blockchain continues to evolve and people are learning to understand it better. Accordingly, there are initiatives underway to think about how the U.S. can achieve a broad-based identity verification system, Hulka said. There are technical ways to do it, but finding the right way that works for the country is more of a challenge since it has to be interoperable. “The goal is to get to a point where there is one way to verify identity across multiple services,” she said.

Eventually, there will be a tipping point for the financial services industry where it becomes a business imperative, Hulka said. “The question is when, of course.”

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: The capex needed for AI infrastructure is only going to grow

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Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund closes $4.6 billion growth fund

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Peter Thiel's Founders Fund closes .6 billion growth fund

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.

Marco Bello | Getty Images

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm run by billionaire Peter Thiel, has closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund, Founders Fund Growth III, includes capital from 270 investors, the filing said. Thiel, Napoleon Ta and Trae Stephens are the three people named as directors. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Axios reported in December that Founders Fund was raising about $3 billion for the fund. The firm ended up raising more than that amount from outside investors as part of the total $4.6 billion pool, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

A Founders Fund spokesperson declined to comment.

Thiel, best known for co-founding PayPal before putting the first outside money in Facebook and for funding defense software vendor Palantir, started Founders Fund in 2005. In addition to Palantir, the firm’s top investments include Airbnb, Stripe, Affirm and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Founders Fund is also a key investor in Anduril, the defense tech company started by Palmer Luckey. CNBC reported in February that Anduril is in talks to raise funding at a $28 billion valuation.

Hefty amounts of private capital are likely to be needed for the foreseeable future as the IPO market remains virtually dormant. It was also dealt a significant blow last week after President Donald Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs roiled tech stocks. Companies including Klarna, StubHub and Chime delayed their plans to go public as the Nasdaq sank.

President Trump walked back some of the tariffs this week, announcing a 90-day pause for most new tariffs, excluding those imposed on China, while the administration negotiates with other countries. But the uncertainty of where levies will end up is a troubling recipe for risky bets like tech IPOs.

SpaceX, Stripe and Anduril are among the most high-profile venture-backed companies that are still private. Having access to a large pool of growth capital allows Founders Fund to continue investing in follow-on rounds that are off limits to many traditional venture firms.

Thiel was a major Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, but later had a falling out with the president and was largely on the sidelines in 2024 even as many of his tech peers rallied behind the Republican leader.

In June, Thiel said that even though he wasn’t providing money to the campaign for Trump, who was the Republican presumptive nominee at the time, he’d vote for him over Joe Biden, who had yet to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris.

“If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump,” Thiel said in an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “I’m not going to give any money to his super PAC.”

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

From left, U.S. President Donald Trump, Senator Dave McCormick, his wife Dina Powell McCormick and Elon Musk watch the men’s NCAA wrestling competition at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Meta on Friday announced that it was expanding its board of directors with two new members, including Dina Powell McCormick, a part of President Donald Trump’s first administration.

Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to Trump from 2017 to 2018. She is also married to Sen. Dave McCormick, a Republican from Pennsylvania who took office in January.

“He’s a good man,” Trump said of McCormick in an endorsement last year, according to the Associated Press. Powell McCormick and her husband were photographed in March beside Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a current advisor to the president, at a wrestling championship match in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Additionally, Powell McCormick was assistant Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice in President George W. Bush’s administration.

Besides her political background, Powell McCormick is vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners. That company was founded in 2023 when the merchant bank BDT combined with Michael Dell’s investment firm MSD. Powell McCormick arrived at the firm after 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where she had been a partner.

Her appointment represents another sign of Meta’s alignment with Republicans following Trump’s return to the White House.

In January, the company announced a shift away from fact-checking and said it was bringing Trump’s friend Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, onto the board. The changes follow Trump dubbing the company behind Facebook and Instagram “the enemy of the people” on CNBC last year.

Also on Friday, Meta said Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of payments startup Stripe, was also elected to the board. Stripe was valued at $65 billion in a tender offer last year.

“Patrick and Dina bring a lot of experience supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to our board,” Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Zuckerberg visited the White House last week, after attending Trump’s inauguration in Washington in January. Politico last week reported that the Meto CEO paid $23 million in cash for a mansion in the nation’s capital.

Powell McCormick and Collison officially become directors on April 15, Meta said.

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