CCP

"The second function the Didi investment served related to Apple’s surprise at how slowly its digital payments platform, Apple Pay, was taking hold. It saw Didi as a solid platform for expansion. At the time, WeChat Pay and Alipay were vying for dominance, spending as much as RMB 40 million ($7 million) per day to acquire new customers. Apple was looking for a way to compete. An investment in Didi and a relationship with Liu helped Apple establish *guanxi*—political relationships—in two budding industries, aided by Apple taking a seat on the board. Meanwhile, the Apple investment gave Didi international name recognition, further fueled by Cook. The week Apple’s investment was announced—five days before his secret meeting at the CCP headquarters—Cook met with Liu in Beijing, where they hailed a ride together and visited an Apple Store. The next year Liu was named one of *Time* magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Her profile was penned by Cook."

"Even Apple executives were surprised. “That was a signpost event,” said one person who’d helped Apple build out its Asian supply chain in the early 2000s. “Like, this is how organized the graft is. It used to be a roll of hundreds out of your pocket, under a table in a restaurant. Now it’s in public: ‘You’re going to write us a billion-dollar check to invest in our autonomous driving and machine-learning start-up.’ ” Apple executives in the immediate aftermath told this person that Beijing had specified the investment and that Apple followed through to “show we’re committed to the CCP.” This, however, is unlikely. Chinese politics rarely work that way. Rather, officials set the conditions where such demonstrations of commitment are warmly welcomed, but the commitments are not well defined. That way, nothing untoward is put into writing, China avoids breaking WTO rules, and the corporation is left wondering if its actions are enough."

"“Apple is playing with fire,” Marco Rubio, Republican vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the *Financial Times* in September 2022. “It knows the security risks posed by YMTC. If it moves forward, it will be subject to scrutiny like it has never seen from the federal government. We cannot allow Chinese companies beholden to the Communist Party into our telecommunications networks and millions of Americans’ iPhones.” In Congress, a bipartisan group of senators including Democrats Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner had urged the Biden administration to put YMTC on a Commerce Department blacklist that would effectively bar US companies from providing technology to the Chinese group. Apple acknowledged it was “evaluating sourcing from YMTC… to be used in some iPhones sold in China,” but it was adamant these chips wouldn’t be used in iPhones in America. Yet that’s almost beside the point. As Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, put it: “Apple will effectively be transferring knowledge and knowhow to YMTC that will supercharge its capabilities and help the CCP achieve its national goals.” Apple, under pressure from US lawmakers, said it had suspended the partnership."

"I took to that market like a fish to water. I had some experience of the tech sector through my gaming portfolio companies. One such business was CCP, an interesting company founded in Iceland by a team of developers and gaming enthusiasts with investments from an Icelandic pension fund. These two very different groups did not see eye to eye at all, so the founders approached me to buy out the institutional investor. They presumed someone like me who had founded and built several businesses would speak their language and be a better fit to expand the company. The founders and management had massive ambitions that I took with a pinch of salt, but there was an incredibly loyal fanbase of customers who paid a monthly subscription fee. The company’s stated goal was to create another world outside the real one: to their users, the creation was more important than the actual world! They called it the ‘Metaverse’ and they were actually the first real players there, years before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called it out as the next level of social networks and renamed his company Meta. CCP’s EVE Online game was and is a space-based sandbox ‘massively multiplayer online’ (MMO) game known for its player-driven economy, vast universe and complex gameplay mechanics. It allows players to explore, trade, engage in player-versus-player combat, and participate in large-scale battles and political events within the game’s persistent universe. I saw CCP grow from one office in Iceland to large offices in the US, Shanghai, the UK and elsewhere. As most of EVE’s players were inside that sandbox world for hours each day, it really felt that it was becoming the most important place for many of them. The annual EVE Fanfest attracted thousands of people from all over the world, and often people from different countries who had met inside the game would get married there in reality. It was astounding to watch this community as it grew, and I really felt that if this was a guide to the future, then technology was changing the social fabric in more fundamental ways than most people realised."