Apple Shareholders Reaffirm DEI: 97% Reject NCPPR Proposal

On February 25, 2025, Apple shareholders rejected a National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) proposal asking the board to consider winding down the company's DEI program. The vote was lopsided: 97.3% against, roughly 0.02% in favor, about 1% abstaining. Apple's board had recommended a vote against the proposal in its 2025 proxy statement, arguing the resolution "inappropriately attempts to restrict Apple's ability to manage its own ordinary business operations, people and teams, and business strategies." It was the second major shareholder vote in five weeks (after Costco on January 23) to publicly reaffirm a company's DEI posture, and it came one month after Trump's Executive Order 14173 ended affirmative action obligations for federal contractors.

Key Findings

97.3% of Apple shares voted against the NCPPR proposal (approximately 8.84 billion shares), per the February 25 8-K vote disclosure. Roughly 2.1 million shares supported it.
Apple's board recommended AGAINST the proposal in its DEF 14A proxy statement, calling it overreach into ordinary business operations.
NCPPR is the same conservative think tank whose Costco anti-DEI proposal lost 98% to 2% on January 23, 2025.
The vote landed approximately five weeks after Trump signed EO 14173 on January 21, 2025, rescinding LBJ's 1965 EO 11246 and ending affirmative action obligations for federal contractors.
Tim Cook told the meeting Apple may need to make changes "as the legal landscape around this issue evolves," but the company's "north star of dignity and respect for everyone" would not waver, per Fortune's coverage.
Apple's position contrasts with Meta, Google, and Amazon, all of which announced cuts to diverse hiring goals in late 2024 and early 2025.

What was the proposal?

The NCPPR's resolution asked Apple's board to "consider abolishing its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, policies, department and goals." The think tank's argument, as summarized in coverage of the proxy statement, was that DEI programs create discrimination risk and legal exposure that threaten shareholder value, citing the Supreme Court's 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision and the wave of post-SFFA reverse-discrimination lawsuits against private employers.

NCPPR's playbook is recognizable. The same think tank filed substantially similar proposals at Costco, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca-Cola, Bristol Myers Squibb, and other large-cap companies during the 2025 proxy season. The boilerplate argument cycles through the same statutory citations (Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Section 1981, SFFA) and asks the board to "consider" a step rather than mandate it, which keeps the proposal within Rule 14a-8 admissibility.

Apple Park ring-shaped headquarters in Cupertino, California — Apple's annual meeting was held virtually on February 25, 2025. The 97.3% vote against NCPPR's proposal was disclosed in an 8-K filing that day. NCPPR holds a small Apple position, the minimum required under Rule 14a-8 to file a proposal. *Photo via Unsplash. Unsplash License (CC0).*

How did Apple's board respond?

Apple's proxy statement opposition ran three arguments. First, the proposal was structurally inappropriate because it sought to dictate ordinary business operations that are statutorily reserved for the board and management. Second, Apple already has a "well established compliance program" that monitors legal and regulatory risk on employment matters, making the proposal redundant. Third, the company's approach to inclusion is operationally tied to its product strategy, and dictating its removal would be a business decision the proposal had no basis to compel.

Notably absent from Apple's response: any concession that DEI carried meaningful legal risk, or any signal the company planned to scale back programs preemptively. The board's framing was that Apple's existing approach is correct, legally compliant, and aligned with its operating model. That is a stronger position than most peers took in early 2025.

At the meeting itself, Tim Cook acknowledged the legal environment was shifting. Per Fortune and HR Brew, Cook said: "As the legal landscape around this issue evolves, we may need to make some changes to comply, but our north star of dignity and respect for everyone and our work to that end will never waver." That is a careful sentence. It commits to the values framework while leaving room to adjust specific program mechanics (numerical targets, supplier diversity scoring, training curricula) if a court or regulator forces the question.

Why did the vote land where it did?

A 97.3% vote against is not close. It reflects three structural realities of large-cap shareholder voting.

The first is the dominance of passive index funds. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street collectively own a significant slice of Apple's float. Their default voting practice is to follow management recommendations on operational governance matters absent a specific reason to defect. When the board says vote against, the Big Three generally do. That alone accounts for a substantial floor against the proposal.

The second is proxy advisor recommendations. ISS and Glass Lewis both recommended against the NCPPR proposal. Most institutional investors follow proxy advisor guidance on shareholder proposals as a default. NCPPR's resolutions reliably draw recommendations against, both because the proposals are seen as overstepping into ordinary business and because the advisors generally treat DEI-related matters as management discretion items.

The third is that NCPPR proposals function as protest filings, not vote-winning campaigns. The think tank's stated goal is to raise the conversation and force boards to publicly defend DEI programs, not to win a majority. A 2-3% support level is consistent with the floor of activist-aligned retail shareholders plus a handful of small institutions, which is the same range NCPPR proposals have hit at other companies. The vote outcome was predictable to anyone watching the proxy season closely.

Apple's customer demographic skews younger, more urban, and more educated than the US average. Unlike Harley-Davidson or Tractor Supply, the company's brand identity does not put it in tension with maintaining visible DEI programs. Photo via Pexels. Pexels License.

How does this fit the broader pattern?

The standard 2024-2025 story is the DEI retreat: John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply, Ford, Lowe's, Meta, Google, McDonald's, Target. Apple and Costco are the visible counter-cases. Both held shareholder votes on substantially identical NCPPR proposals. Both saw the proposals defeated by margins above 97%. Both boards recommended against.

The pattern is not random. The two counter-cases share traits that make DEI commitments commercially sustainable for them where they were not for the retreaters. Costco's shareholder vote reflects a customer base that skews toward higher-income, college-educated, urban-suburban shoppers, a demographic where visible DEI commitments are net neutral or modestly positive for brand perception. Apple's customer base skews even further in the same direction: younger, more educated, more urban, more globally distributed. The companies most exposed to the Robby Starbuck playbook (per the brand activism playbook) are those whose core customers hold values misaligned with visible DEI programs. Apple and Costco are at the opposite end of that distribution.

There is also a labor-market argument. Apple competes for engineering, design, and product talent against Meta, Google, Microsoft, and a deep bench of well-funded startups. In that competition, signaling a stable DEI posture while peers visibly retreat is a recruiting differentiator. NYU Stern's Alison Taylor told Fortune the vote makes Apple "look a lot better than Meta and Google" on talent management. That is a commercial calculation. The values framing follows from the math, not the other way around.

What it tells you

Apple's DEI position is not unconditional. Cook's statement at the meeting left explicit room to adjust if courts or regulators require it. Some programs may quietly shrink. Numerical targets in supplier diversity scoring are the obvious candidates given the post-SFFA legal environment. Training curricula may get reworked. EO 14173 and its follow-on litigation will force every large federal contractor (Apple sells substantial volume to the federal government) to reassess race and gender-conscious procurement criteria during the 90-day grace period that ended April 21, 2025.

What the vote does establish is that, as of early 2025, Apple's institutional shareholder base, management, and board were aligned on maintaining the company's existing approach. The same alignment did not hold at Meta, Google, McDonald's, or Target, where management itself initiated rollbacks before any shareholder vote forced the question.

The interesting test will be what Apple's 2026 proxy statement looks like. If the company quietly drops specific programs while keeping the values language intact, the 2025 vote will look more performative in retrospect: a defense of the brand label, not the underlying programs. If the programs remain substantively in place a year later, the vote will look like what it appeared to be at the time: a company whose customer base, labor market, and shareholder structure all pointed in the same direction, and a board that read the room correctly.

Aerial view of Apple Park's circular campus in Cupertino — Apple Park, Apple's sprawling circular headquarters in Cupertino, California. The campus serves as the backdrop for the company's shareholder meetings where DEI-related votes have drawn significant attention from investors and advocacy groups. Photo: Zetong Li via Pexels. Pexels free to use.

The WokeCorp assessment

The commitment. Apple's board publicly defended its DEI programs at the February 25, 2025 annual meeting, recommending against the NCPPR wind-down proposal and framing inclusion as integral to product strategy and legally compliant with evolving employment law.

The outcomes. 97.3% of shares voted against the proposal, a margin that reflects structural voting realities (passive index funds, proxy advisor recommendations) as much as it does genuine institutional conviction. Tim Cook explicitly left room for Apple to adjust specific program mechanics if courts or regulators require it, and EO 14173's 90-day grace period for federal contractors ended April 21, 2025, with no public accounting from Apple of what changed.

The core question. Apple's defense was commercially rational given its customer and talent demographics, not a stand on principle. The real test arrives when Apple's 2026 proxy statement lands. If numerical supplier-diversity targets and specific training curricula have quietly disappeared while the values language stays intact, the 97.3% vote will look like it protected a label, not a program.

Compare with Costco DEI Shareholder Vote: 98% Reaffirm.

Sources

Verified May 2026.

Apple Inc., 2025 Proxy Statement (DEF 14A), filed January 2025, SEC EDGAR
Apple Inc., Form 8-K, annual meeting vote results, filed February 25, 2025
CNBC, "Apple shareholders reject outside proposal to end DEI programs," February 25, 2025
ESG Dive, "Apple shareholders emphatically reject anti-DEI proposal"
Fortune, "Apple's DEI shareholder vote sets it apart from Silicon Valley giants," February 26, 2025
HR Brew, "Apple shareholders vote to keep DEI practices," February 25, 2025
Executive Order 14173, "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity," January 21, 2025
National Center for Public Policy Research, shareholder proposal text, as reproduced in Apple's 2025 DEF 14A
Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023)