Allow me to preface this by saying: I agree that some regulation is necessary always, and that corporations in general pursue money through whatever means necessary. I just think your original points were not well articulated to support your argument.
My first point was that you conveniently left off the part of the quote where Tim Cook says that he thinks regulation is necessary sometimes. You only included the part that indicated that he felt that "the best regulation is no regulation", which supports your agenda much better than the part where he effectively says "but sometimes we should have regulation because it can be necessary." I'm with you that regulation is always necessary to some extent, but I think you misrepresented Cook's statement to further your points, which is disingenuous.
> It just seems obvious to me
This is not a valid justification for claiming that something was "designed" in a particular way. I could just as well say: "It just seems obvious to me that cars are specifically designed to be able to kill people with great efficiency". Are they good at killing people? Yes. Is that their "design"? Well... no. To claim so would be silly, would it not?
My analogy is somewhat incorrect, of course: cars cannot regulate themselves, cars are not organizations of people, yadda yadda. The point of this analogy was merely that you cannot claim that something was "designed" in a particular way and justify it by saying "well it seems obvious".
I think companies are designed to make money, through whichever means is most profitable. I think they often choose not to self-regulate in the interest of making money. But I do not think that companies, as an abstract concept, were "very specifically designed to be unable to self-regulate". It is completely possible for a company to self-regulate. They just usually don't. It's a different thing.
> You don't know this, though. You can't know, because you can by definition never know what "self-regulation" a company might be doing.
(This is nitpicky of me, but your statement implies that it is impossible to know the self-regulation of any company regardless of circumstances. This is not true, because the people inside the company who deal with the regulation would know about it. You also assumed that I could not have knowledge of such regulation at Apple, which you will see is also not the case.)
I think what you mean is that it is impossible for someone who is separate from the company to know the company's self-regulation, because such regulation is internal and is only upheld by the company itself from the inside, and that therefore an outside observer without direct internal knowledge of the subject matter cannot know whether they are being shown true self-regulation or marketing material.
This is correct in general, I think, although it is a rather cynical view of things.
There are exceptions, though. Consider the case of Siri.
Siri is, as I'm sure you know, meant to be a personal assistant able to help users with anything they may need to do on their phone. Siri has competitors, such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.
Siri was the first widespread personal assistant that kind-of worked, but she was quickly surpassed by Google. Why? Simple: data and privacy.
Google collects significant amounts of data from its users. Most of this collection is automatically collected and automatically tagged. Google defends such actions because "No human sees it" or something. (I'm fuzzy on the specific details, but please note that I am not making any claim about the ethicality of Google's actions here.)
This data is funneled into the Google Assistant, which made the Assistant significantly better than Siri in a short time. How did Siri get passed up so quickly?
Because Apple refuses to collect such significant amounts of data from its users. There are tons of internal documents governing the collection and storage of user data, and Apple uses a very broad definition of "sensitive" with regards to "sensitive user data". I know this because I worked at Apple last year (briefly, as an intern), and for part of a project I had to browse through some of these documents to ensure I was adhering to the correct guidelines. They take user privacy very seriously.
The fact that Siri — which was originally the most advanced personal assistant — was so quickly passed by Google is evidence of Apple's self-regulation. The continued stunted growth of Siri is further evidence that Apple did not relent in its self-regulation of user privacy. If Apple had wanted to, they could have collected copious amounts of user data in short order, and this data could have been used to greatly impact the development of Siri. But that didn't happen, because such data is not collected by Apple as a rule.
In general, I think you're right: self-regulation is nearly impossible to detect from the outside. But there are cases, such as this one, where there is user-visible evidence to the existence of self-regulation. All such evidence would stem from negative results for the company (e.g. Siri's poor performance, in this example), but we can assume the evidence is genuine because companies are incentivized to project themselves in a positive light wherever possible.