The fact is that I never gave this guy a chance. Of course, I was wrong, so I was intrigued to find out how this humble but very smart guy took on probably the hardest CEO role, having to follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs.
How did he grow Apple's revenues from $108 billion to $416 billion, and its market cap from $350 billion to nearly $4.9 trillion, without actually bringing out any real blockbuster devices?
How did such a low-key, no-ego guy come out of Jobs' shadow to be rightly lauded as one of the best CEOs ever?
I enjoyed researching this story more than nearly any previous one. It surprised me, and it’s a cracker.
The Making of Tim Cook
Tim Cook was born on November 1st, 1960, in Mobile, Alabama. His father worked in the shipyards as a drydock rigger, and his mother worked in a local pharmacy.
Cook was quiet, very good at maths, but he was also popular. This is from a classmate:
“He wasn't one-dimensional. I didn't know anybody who didn't like him. He had a great personality.”
So Cook goes to Auburn University and studies industrial engineering, basically about making systems work better. How do you move materials faster? How do you reduce waiting time? Where is the waste?
He graduated in 1982 and joined IBM. And the timing is very good because IBM had only launched its personal computer the year before, and business is booming.
Cook's job is to make sure the right components arrive at the right time without IBM having expensive stock sitting around.
I had never considered this in relation to computers, but of course, if a machine sits in a warehouse and a faster processor comes out, then the price of computers sitting in the warehouse will have to be discounted.
As Cook said of inventory:
"You kind of want to manage it like you're in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem".
And he impresses quickly. His boss said:
“He took a project on, and you could take it to the bank. He was going to get it done.”
While working at IBM, Cook does an MBA at Duke, and by 1991 he’s been promoted to Director of North American Fulfillment for the PC business.
But the PC industry is changing around this time.
Dell and Gateway are selling computers directly, so they’re moving them much quicker than IBM. And around this time as well, IBM is changing, moving away from manufacturing computers and more towards services.
And so in 1994, Cook left and joined a large computer distributor. They got sold a few years later, and Cook joined Compaq, the world’s leading personal computer manufacturer.
And once again, Cook gets results quickly and makes a big impression. As his boss at Compaq said:
“Tim was the quintessential decision-making authority. He's not in it for the fame or the ego or the money. He's in it to win".
And that reference to ego is, I think, very relevant. There never seems to be any ego with Cook. Colleagues described him as not being loud, not trying to dominate the room. They say that he listens, then starts drilling into the numbers and the details.
So while everything is going really well for Cook in his new job at Compaq, there was another computer company on the West Coast that was in deep, deep trouble.
Enter stage right: Apple.
A Company on Life Support
We’re in 1997. Sales at Apple had fallen from around $11 billion in 1995 to $7 billion, with losses of over $1 billion.
Then on February 7th, 1997, Steve Jobs comes back.
Now, I’m not going to get into why Jobs had left Apple in the first place because that’s another story altogether, and a brilliant one.
But by 1997 he’s back, and immediately he starts cutting. He gets rid of most of the different Mac models, cancels products like the Newton, and stops letting other companies license the Mac operating system.
He needs somebody who can fix Apple’s supply chain.
And the recruitment firm he hires zeroes in on Cook.
Now, from Cook’s point of view, there is no reason in the wide earthly world to go work for Apple.
He’s a rising star in Compaq, the biggest PC company in the world, while Apple is on life support and it’s not expected to survive.
Just a few months before Cook was approached by Apple, Michael Dell was asked at a tech event what he would do to fix Apple, and he said:
'I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."
And he was being serious.
Regardless, Cook agrees to meet Jobs anyway.
At their meeting, Jobs is pacing around, talking about rebuilding Apple.
And Cook said of this meeting with Jobs:
“no more than five minutes into my initial interview with Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join Apple. My intuition already knew that joining Apple was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius".
And yes, Jobs was a creative genius, but even more than that, Jobs was always driven by a sense of purpose that was much bigger than making and selling computers or devices.
When Jobs returned in 1997, this is what he told staff about Apple’s purpose:
“What we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get jobs done... Apple, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”
And by having that kind of elevated sense of purpose, I believe that’s one of the main reasons why Jobs was able to develop the types of devices that have such a huge impact.
And it was also why he was able to inspire massively talented people like Cook to leave safe careers and go work for Jobs.
You see, they’re not just joining a company. They're joining a mission, and that’s really powerful.
And Cook bought into this vision, this purpose. It’s what drives him in the exact same way that it drove Jobs.
Fixing Apple's Supply Chain
So in March 1998, Cook joined Apple as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations. Salary: $400,000 a year, $500,000 signing bonus.
And man, does he earn his money because Apple is in a mess.
It has more than 100 component suppliers, different shipping systems all over the place, huge amounts of inventory sitting around losing value.
So Cook starts cutting suppliers, cutting inventory and linking production much more closely to what customers are actually buying.
And he gets results fast. Within his first full year, he cut the value of unsold inventory from $437 million to $78 million. Within two years, he gets that down to just $20 million.
Then in October 2001, Jobs launched the iPod, which became the fastest-selling music player ever.
And for Cook, that means suddenly having to find enough parts and enough factories to make tens of millions of them, which he does.
Then in 2004, Jobs emailed Apple staff to let them know that he had undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumour and that Cook would be taking over while he was recovering.
Now, Jobs returned just a month later, but this is the first clear signal to everyone that Cook is number two.
And by 2006, Apple was thriving. That year it sold over 39 million iPods and 5.3 million Macs, with annual revenue reaching $19.3 billion.
And then in January 2007, Jobs launched the iPhone.
Within three years, Apple is selling nearly 50 million of them a year, and it’s down to Cook to build the supply chain fast enough to keep up.
And he does.
As Jobs said of Cook:
"He had the same vision I did. We could interact at a high strategic level, and I could just forget about a lot of things".
The Man Who Gets Things Done
So while everything was going gangbusters on the business front, Jobs' health was becoming a major concern.
At an Apple event in September 2008, he came on stage, and I remember seeing the video at the time. He had gotten very thin.
And investors are worried because by now Apple and Jobs are impossible to separate.
Apple’s revival over the previous decade had been built on Jobs bringing great products to the market, and the view is that Jobs is irreplaceable.
But because of his visibly poor health, the discussion around succession is inevitable, and this puts a spotlight on Cook.
Magazines run profiles of him, and one of them tells a great story from an operations meeting where executives are explaining manufacturing problems.
Cook listens and then says:
"This is really bad. Someone should be in China driving this".
Thirty minutes later, as the meeting is coming to a close, he looks at his operations director and says:
"Why are you still here?"
The operations director drives straight to the airport without even going home to pack and gets on a flight to China.
So that’s the culture that Cook builds. You don’t waste time discussing a problem. You go and fix it right away.
In January 2010, Jobs unveiled the iPad. It sold 1 million in the first 28 days, and three million in 80 days.
So once again, Cook has to take another new, wildly successful Jobs product and make sure they can get enough into the stores on time.
And he does.
The Human Cost of Apple's Success
But to meet their manufacturing needs, Cook has, over the preceding years, pushed more and more manufacturing out to companies like Foxconn in Asia, and this leads to big labour issues.
For example, in 2006 there are reports of excessive hours and workers living in huge, crowded dormitories.
Then in 2010 there is a cluster of worker suicides at Foxconn, with reports pointing to long hours, repetitive work, strict management, low basic pay and young migrant workers living far from their families.
Now, in fairness, Cook does take this very seriously, and I do believe that he is a very moral and empathetic guy.
He sends auditors and mental-health experts into the factories, tightens Apple’s supplier rules and pushes much harder on workers' welfare. Foxconn also raises basic pay by more than 30%.
But the problems don’t disappear. Even up to very recently, independent inspectors continue to find labour issues at Apple suppliers in Asia and India.
Now, I do think Cook takes this seriously and works hard to enforce Apple’s rules.
But the reality is, if you want to make sure the people making your products aren’t being abused, you need to manufacture in countries where workers have strong protections that are actually enforced.
And of course, if Apple moved production to countries with much stronger worker protections, the products would almost certainly cost more.
And most of us are quite happy to buy them at the current price and not think too much about where or how they were made.
The Hardest Act to Follow
In August 2011, Jobs handed the CEO role to Cook, and just months later, on October 5th, Steve Jobs died.
Cook tells employees:
"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being... His spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."
Plenty of people think Apple will struggle. Larry Ellison, who was a good friend of Jobs, famously said:
“He’s irreplaceable. They will not be nearly so successful”.
And look, I agreed with Ellison. A lot of people did.
Cook said that when he spoke to Jobs about taking on the CEO role, Jobs warned him: don’t ever ask “what would Steve do”.
And this ties very much into a quote from Cook in an interview where he said:
”I never had the objective of being like Steve- because I can only be good at being myself.”
On becoming CEO, Cook works even harder, if that was possible.
And the following is from an article that profiled him after he took the top job:
“He gets up right before 4 a.m. every day. Then after a one hour workout, he begins his 5 a.m. ritual reading “the majority of” the 700 to 800 emails that hit his inbox everyday- (and note, these aren’t internal emails- these are emails from customers). Cook said that “It keeps my hands on the pulse of what customers are feeling and thinking and doing.”
Now, no one is expecting Cook to come out of the gates with a blockbuster product, and for the first few years he doesn’t need to. The sales that are coming from the iPhone, the iPad and laptops keep growing.
Like in 2011, when Cook took over, revenue was $108 billion. By 2014 it was $183 billion, but I think it’s fair to say that most of us weren’t heaping praise on Cook at this stage.
Everyone was waiting for the next big Apple product that would wow us.
The Apple Watch: Not Quite an iPhone
And so in 2014, Cook unveils his first major new product as CEO: the Apple Watch.
I remember being underwhelmed by it, but I have to admit that I’m not a techie. I’m not into phones or gadgets.
And there was nothing at all wrong with the Apple Watch. It looked nice, did lots of cool stuff, but unlike the iPod or the iPhone, for me there wasn't this wow factor.
But what Cook and Apple did really well was that when they realised that a lot of users were using the watch mainly to track their fitness, they pivoted, changing the focus and marketing of the watch from a high-end fashion accessory to a health and fitness accessory.
And the pivot worked.
For a company that had never sold a watch, Apple has now become the biggest watch seller in the world, selling 40–50 million a year. It sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch businesses combined.
The watch brings in annual revenues of about $16 billion, so while it wouldn’t be considered a blockbuster product compared to the iPhone, the watch serves another purpose.
It ties you more closely to the iPhone because once you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on a Watch that only works properly with an iPhone, you’re probably not going to switch to Android.
And this is all part of the grand Apple ecosystem strategy that Cook is building.
But in 2014, when the Watch launched, this strategy was only at its very early stages, and I certainly wasn’t aware of it back then.
A few weeks after the Watch launch, Cook writes an essay for Bloomberg and publicly comes out as gay, the first serving CEO of a Fortune 500 company to do so.
It’s a surprising move given that Cook is such a private person. So why did he do it?
Here’s what he wrote:
“If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is... then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”
Well, good on him, and thankfully it has zero negative impact on either him or Apple.
The Trillion-Dollar Milestone
And over the next few years, Apple under Cook just keeps growing.
By 2018, annual revenue reaches $265 billion, and Apple becomes the first company in modern stock-market history to reach a valuation of $1 trillion.
This was a huge story, a huge milestone, and I really like Cook’s reaction when he tells staff:
“Financial returns are simply the result of Apple's innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values... This milestone is not the most important measure of our success.”
What I like about this statement is the humility of it. There’s no ego.
And when he says reaching a trillion dollars isn’t the most important measure of success, I believe him.
Because just like Jobs, for Cook success isn’t about short-term gains or monetary measurements. It’s about Apple’s mission: improving and changing people's lives by creating great products.
It’s all about the customer, the product, the values.
Get the product right. Keep the customer happy. Keep people passionate about the work.
And the money follows.
And it’s not just words. Remember, this is a guy who is reading hundreds of customers' emails at 5.00am every morning. He is passionate about improving people's lives by creating great products.
That’s his driving force.
And I think it was around this time, 2018, that it finally hit me and I started to realise that, OK, Cook hasn’t produced another iPhone and more than likely won’t, but this guy is actually doing brilliantly here.
But I still didn’t fully understand why Apple was so successful under his reign.
As far as I could see, he’d been mainly focused on continually improving the iPhone and the iPad, and there was also some success with the Watch and the AirPods.
But what I wasn’t seeing is that Cook was building all of these other services around the hundreds of millions of people who already own Apple devices.
Cook's Brilliant Ecosystem Strategy
You have the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and then in 2019 he launches Apple TV+.
And again, when this launches, I’m scratching my head because Apple says that this TV service could lose between $15 and $20 billion over the first ten years.
But when you dig into it, as I just did over the last few weeks for the first time, you can see what Cook is doing.
Yes, Apple TV competes with Netflix for your attention, but Apple is playing a different game.
Apple TV is just another reason to stay inside Apple.
And that becomes even clearer in 2020 when Cook launches Apple One, where you pay one monthly fee for a bundle of Apple services.
And this is the Cook model, this brilliant strategy.
Where most of us have been looking at Cook and saying this guy is simply selling newer versions of older products, which, to be fair, he has been doing, he has also massively increased the number of Apple devices in use, from around 200 million in 2011 to 2.5 billion by 2025.
And then he has made the people using those devices more and more likely to stay inside Apple by continually adding new services to the ecosystem.
Crucially, these services give Apple a much steadier revenue stream than hardware sales, and they are also far more profitable.
For example, in 2025, Services brought in $109 billion in revenue, with a gross margin of just over 75%. So that produced about $82 billion in gross profit.
Hardware brought in a much bigger $307 billion, but with a gross margin of only 37%, producing about $113 billion in gross profit.
So Services generates roughly a quarter of Apple’s revenue, but more than 40% of its gross profit.
So huge kudos to Cook.
Taking on Facebook
Another thing that Cook rightly gets a lot of praise for is his diplomacy or political skills. With both Trump and Xi Jinping in China, Cook has managed both relationships brilliantly.
He never rocks the boat, no drama, he gets things done.
So it’s surprising when he gets into this very public fight with Facebook in 2018, when the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.
And I like this story because it shows Cook's backbone but also a real cunning streak.
So for context, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Cook is asked what he would do in Zuckerberg’s position and replies:
“I wouldn't be in this situation.”
He goes on to say that Apple makes money by selling products to its customers, while Facebook makes money by selling advertisers access to those customers, often using personal data the customers may not even realise is being collected.
Zuckerberg is reportedly so furious that he ordered his executive team to switch from iPhones to Androids and declared internally:
"We need to inflict pain."
But it’s Cook who inflicts the pain because in 2020 Apple introduces App Tracking Transparency, which basically lets iPhone users tell Facebook and other apps: no, you can’t track what I’m doing.
This one change cost Facebook about $10 billion in lost advertising revenue.
I think Cook knew exactly what he was doing here.
By taking such a public stand against Facebook, and knowing that it would get headlines, this was a very deliberate and calculated move because he generated huge publicity that highlighted one of Apple’s strongest selling points: that Apple takes privacy far more seriously than other tech companies.
And Cook had been saying this for years:
“Privacy, to us, is a human right. It's a civil liberty... We're not going to traffic in your personal life”.
The China Contradiction
But there is an obvious contradiction here.
Because Chinese users’ iCloud data is stored inside China, and under Chinese law that data can be handed over to the authorities.
Cook’s defence is that Apple has to obey the law wherever it operates, and that it has more chance of changing things by staying in China.
Maybe, but there’s an obvious contradiction or hypocrisy here when you say privacy is a fundamental principle and then apply a different version of that principle depending on the country.
But look, I also understand the practicalities.
Apple relies heavily on China for manufacturing, the consumer market is worth around $64 billion a year in sales, and there are an estimated 5 million jobs in China tied in some way to Apple through its supply chain and wider ecosystem.
So yes, I think Cook compromised his values in China.
But I also think this is one of those very difficult decisions leaders have to make, and it’s very easy for people on the sidelines to criticise him.
From $350 Billion to Nearly $4.9 Trillion
Now, in terms of growth under Cook’s tenure, Apple’s annual revenue grew from $108 billion to $416 billion, while its market cap has gone from $350 billion to nearly $4.9 trillion.
That is some result.
But, and I’m not being critical here at all, the following needs to be pointed out in order to put some context on Apple’s figures.
Because over the same time, 2011–2025, the valuations and revenues of other tech companies have also grown significantly.
Microsoft's market cap went from $210 billion to $3.9 trillion, Amazon went from $80 billion to $2.8 trillion, Google (Alphabet) rose from $170 billion to $4.2 trillion, Meta from $100 billion to $1.7 trillion, and Nvidia exploded from $8 billion to over $5.7 trillion.
Now, when Cook announced his retirement, I came across plenty of analysis with the same theme.
Something that would have been unthinkable when he started out as CEO: a lot of praise for not focusing primarily on the big blockbuster products.
And here’s a quote from Dan Wang, professor of business at Columbia University:
“If you can predict next year’s consumer tastes, then you enjoy all the riches — it’s winner takes all. But if you get it wrong, you bear that cost. And what Tim Cook did well is to take Apple out of this cycle of having to search for a new hit product every time.”
Now, that’s not to say that Cook didn’t try to launch some very big products. He did, and they just didn’t work out.
For example, Apple spent 10 years and $10 billion on its secret autonomous vehicle project.
They spent $20–$30 billion on the Vision Pro headset. I don’t see that working.
The difference is that under Cook, a product failure no longer threatens the company's survival.
Despite the headlines whenever one of these big failures happened, they haven’t put a dent in Apple's growth.
And also, while those products didn’t work out, I think fair dues to Cook. At least he was willing to try to launch a big product.
Why Apple Still Needs Its Next Big Product
But I think the idea that Apple can continue to thrive without being at the forefront of device development is false.
Because you have to remember that all of those very profitable services that Apple has, they all sit on top of the hardware.
It’s the iPhone primarily that brings people into Apple, and while the services keep them there, that brilliant ecosystem relies on the popularity of the iPhone.
And it might well be the iPhone that could be the most important device in the next few years, even with the emergence of AI, because people will still have to access AI through a device.
But it’s inevitable that new devices will be developed. Who knows what they’ll look like, how they’ll work, but if Apple isn’t at the forefront of developing those devices, then it could well lose its dominance, and pretty quickly.
Which is why I think Cook quite rightly stood down as CEO to make way for John Ternus, widely seen as a device or products guy.
Because the fact is that Cook was never a device guy.
As he said himself, he knew he could only be good at being himself.
And by being himself, and holding true to Apple's values, he has done a remarkable job.
Taking over from Steve Jobs was probably the hardest act in the business world, and for 15 years he did it with such efficiency, humility, no ego, and just brilliant strategy and execution.
Hats off to him. I think he’s been a fantastic CEO and overall a very decent guy.