Bidding for coffee with Apple’s Tim Cook surpasses $605,000

Tim Cook is an expensive date.

Last month, the Apple chief executive teamed up with CharityBuzz.com to auction off the right to a cup of coffee with him to raise money for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The value of the meeting, to be held at Apple’s headquarters, was estimated at $50,000, but bidding quickly escalated beyond more than half a million dollars.

The auction is set to end this afternoon, and the leading bid is at $605,000. That means that if you want to schmooze with Apple’s main man for about an hour or so, it’s going to cost you at least $610,000 to take the top spot.

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CharityBuzz.com, which raises money for causes through auctions, said it expects the Cook bidding to break the website’s record for highest grossing auction. Currently, the record is held by a 2013 Lamborghini Aventador Roadster that sold for $610,000 in March to benefit One Drop, a nonprofit water accessibility organization.

Other celebrities -- including Jim Carrey, Chris Hemsworth, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert DeNiro, Jay Leno and Peyton Manning -- have offered their help to raise funds for the human rights center, but none of their auctions have come close to what Cook’s will raised.

Bidding is to close at 4:08 p.m. PDT, but CharityBuzz.com said it will extend the auction by 10 minutes if a bid is placed any time after 3:58 p.m. Every time a bid is placed at that point, the auction will automatically extend another 10 minutes. CharityBuzz.com says this process makes the online auction more similar to a live auction and that it gives bidders a chance to offer more.

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