Apple and CEO Tim Cook helped get an engineer's grandmother out of Ukraine in 2023, the employee shared on X. Apple, like other mega cap technology giants, has a large security team responsible for protecting employees and company secrets. According to the now former Apple engineer, translators and drivers, along with other personnel, helped coordinate to get her grandmother out of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in 2023 when attacks against civilians were widespread. Her grandmother is now safe, and the engineer added that her revelation is not promoting Apple.
Apple Paid For Employee's Grandmother's Hotel & Travel As It Helped Get Her Out Of Kharkiv
According to the former Apple engineer who goes by the name kate on X, Apple made considerable effort to get her grandmother out of Kharkiv in 2023. This included hiring security contractors as well as relying on translators and drivers to coordinate on ground efforts. The entire attempt "was very internal and not for the press," she added, sharing that Apple's efforts to help her family ensure that she "will be forever grateful" to the company.
Sharing additional details, she revealed that it "was like a full-blown operation" which included "WhatsApp chats with different coordinators and drivers on the ground." Apple went as far as to even "for the hotel and tickets to a safe place from Poland." As of its latest quarter, the firm had $25.6 billion in cash and earned $385 billion in trailing twelve month revenue, so safe to say, it could pay for the engineer's grandmother's tickets countless times over and still not feel a pinch.
The former Apple employee was highly appreciative of her employer's support at the time. Commenting that she had "never seen anything like it," she added that the "support [APPLE] they gave was beyond anything an employer would have done." She "will be forever grateful" to Apple since the company "still means a lot " for her even though she left it.
Commenting on why she was sharing the details now, the engineer shared that the entire affair "was very internal and not for the press." Whether she will return to Apple, the engineer doesn't know when this will take place. She added that the decision to share Apple's initiative to help her family came after "I was cleaning my Gdrive this morning and saw this screenshot I took." "I realised that back then I wasn’t in the state to talk about this," she added.
Consequently, her decision to share the entire affair is "not affiliation or promotion of Apple in any way." She, her grandmother and others "are very happy as a family that she got to safety." The engineer also shared a screenshot sent by Apple CEO Tim Cook at the time. In it, Cook thanked her for presumably appreciating his company's efforts and wished the best to her grandmother."
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been widely described as the largest conflict in Europe since the second world war. It has affected the technology industry far and wide, from firms having to suspend their operations in Russia to Apple acceding to Russian requests to shut down certain applications during wartime.
I’ve never told how much @Apple did to help evacuate my grandmother from the hell that was happening in Kharkiv in 2023. They hired security contractors to get people out. The level of coordination on the ground and online was insane—translators, drivers, everything. Grateful. pic.twitter.com/6Uok3MiIpS
— kate (@whoiskatrin) October 25, 2024
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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