Tim Cook
Tim Cook succeeded Steve Jobs at Apple in 2011 and roughly ten-folded its value doing a job nobody thought could follow that one. Born in 1960 in Alabama, the son of a shipyard worker and a pharmacy employee, he took an engineering degree at Auburn and an MBA at Duke, and spent twelve years at IBM and then Compaq in manufacturing and distribution. Jobs recruited him in 1998, when Apple was months from insolvency and holding months of unsold inventory. His contribution was the supply chain, which is unglamorous and was decisive. He closed factories and warehouses, outsourced manufacturing, cut inventory from months to days, and built the relationships with Asian contract manufacturers and component suppliers that let Apple ship in volumes nobody could match — and, later, buy up years of manufacturing capacity in advance so that competitors could not. He ran the company during Jobs's medical leaves and took over six weeks before his death. Under him Apple became the first company worth a trillion dollars and then three, launched the Watch, AirPods and its own silicon, and built a services business larger than most of the companies it competes with. He made privacy a competitive position, refused an FBI demand to write software to unlock a shooter's iPhone in 2016, and litigated rather than comply. He came out publicly in 2014, the first chief executive of a company that size to do so. The critiques are the dependence on China and the App Store's terms, which regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have moved against.
- Lived: 1960 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: executive, businessman
