Steve Jobs turned Apple into an enterprise with a market value of about $350 billion. Tim Cook made it worth about $4.6 trillion.
His last day as Apple’s $AAPL CEO is tomorrow.
He took over this job six weeks before Jobs died, and he had never designed any products.
Cook grew up in a small town in Alabama. His father worked at a shipyard, his mother worked at a pharmacy, and he delivered newspapers. He studied industrial engineering—the science of building and transporting things without waste. Not design, not marketing—factories and schedules.
Jobs hired him in 1998, a year after Apple had lost $1 billion.
Apple was producing computers nobody ordered at the time, watching them pile up in warehouses and depreciate.
Cook reduced the backlog of unsold products from a month to just two days. And that alone made the company profitable again.
Then, in 2006, Apple pre-paid suppliers for more than a billion dollars to buy memory chips that wouldn’t be needed for years.
Competitors couldn’t match it. When the iPhone launched, Apple already had the components to assemble it, while everyone else was still lining up to wait.
Jobs resigned in August 2011 and told the board to hand the role to Cook. Six weeks later, he was gone.
Cook had once temporarily stood in for Jobs while Jobs was on medical leave. He never made the final call on a product without his boss.
Many people believe that the best days of Apple died with Steve Jobs.
His first major test was a disaster. When Apple Maps launched, it was already broken.
Cook published a handwritten apology admitting Apple hadn’t done well enough and told customers to use Google Maps before the team fixed it.
Then he replaced the executives responsible. Apple had never handled failure this way.
His real insight was that Apple didn’t have to sell you a new phone every year to make money from you.
iCloud, Apple Music, App Store, AppleCare, Apple Pay.
This business now independently generates more than $100 billion in revenue each year, with profit margins about twice as high as hardware.
He also spent nearly a trillion dollars buying back Apple stock.
Each time Apple buys back a share, the remaining shareholders own a larger portion of the company. Since he took over, Apple has repurchased nearly half of its own shares.
Shareholders became richer without Apple having sold many more iPhones.
Cook never launched a major product like the iPhone. He’ll tell you that himself.
What he did was take one of the greatest products in history and build a company that could survive without its founder.
Apple is now worth about $4.6 trillion. The day he began taking over, it was worth $350 billion.