Gold in electronic equipment is not generally recycled because it's cheaper to mine it. Gold might seem expensive, but you can put a ceiling on its price by thinking about what it would cost to reprocess phones in bulk. Currently tens of dollars per phone, for dollars worth of gold. Increase the price of gold, or recover some other valuable materials, and it becomes economically viable.

Except that an order of magnitude more gold is mined[0] than used in electronics[1].

[0] https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299603/gold-demand-by-se...

When was the last time you've seen gold plated USB cables?

Gold plating contacts may have been necessary with analog back in the day, but today's digital equipment is much more reliable thanks to error checking / correcting protocols, and other improvements. Besides, gold contacts wear out faster.