Did Obama Predict the iPhone's Success?
Source: Damon Poeter
An early look at Apple's first smartphone convinced Obama it would be a hit, according to David Axelrod.
President Obama (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama got a pre-release peek of Apple's original iPhone back when he was still a first-term Senator from Illinois―and he predicted that it would be a hit.
That's the tale being told by David Axelrod in his upcoming autobiography Believer: My 40 Years in Politics, at any rate. Former Obama political advisor Axelrod's book hasn't been released yet, but excerpts seen by the New York Daily News detailed a private meeting in 2007 between Obama and the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
"In 2007, Obama got a sneak peek at the iPhone during a private meeting with Apple's Steve Jobs. 'If it were legal, I would buy a boatload of Apple stock. This thing is going to be really big,' Obama said after the meeting," according to the excerpt.
Could Obama, famously devoted to his BlackBerry back in the years the Jobs meeting took place, have really been so bullish on the iPhone? If the president had invested in Apple back then, he certainly would have made out well. Per The Washington Post, a $400,000 investment in early 2007 would be worth $3.6 million now.
Jobs was reportedly even more generous to Obama ahead of the 2010 launch of the first-generation iPad, giving the president his own pre-release unit.
Jobs and Obama would confer again several times after the latter became president, though at least one of those meetings was on somewhat more adversarial terms―at a 2011 dinner gathering, the Apple boss reportedly scoffed at Obama's suggestion that Apple and others use Americans instead of Chinese workers for volume computer and consumer electronics manufacturing.
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