Tim Cook becomes Apple CEO

Charlotte Henry looks back at when the quiet COO stepped up to replace the irreplaceable

CORPORATE SUCCESSIONS HAPPEN fairly regularly and are usually pretty uninteresting and uneventful. However, replacing Steve Jobs as Apple CEO was never going to be straightforward. After all, Jobs wasn’t just his company’s boss, he was its heartbeat.

But on Sunday 11 August, 2011, while recovering from his latest round of treatment for pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant, Jobs called his COO Tim Cook and asked him to come to his Palo Alto home immediately. There, Leander Kahney’s biography of Cook recounts, the two men discussed how Jobs would move to become Apple Chairman while Cook would permanently become CEO. Two weeks later the decision was made public. Just over a month after that Jobs passed away, leaving Cook alone in the spotlight.

Commentators, analysts, and Apple fans were sceptical — what could the boring operations guy do? At Cook’s first product launch as CEO, the unveiling of the iPhone 4s with Siri, there was a seat marked “Reserved” for Jobs, underlining how he would remain a key presence. “It is a pleasure to host you today,” Cook said at the event. “I love Apple.” Reports at the time noted the relatively muted response he received, and how the presentation was rather quiet, dull, even.

It’s not just product launches where Cook has found himself under heavy scrutiny — the most personal elements of his life have been made public, including his sexuality. After rumors were published, Cook confirmed that he is gay in a Bloomberg Businessweek column in October 2014. He was the first Fortune 500 CEO to ever come out publicly.

Cook may not have the charisma or product vision associated with his predecessor Jobs, but in August 2020 Apple’s market capitalization hit $2 trillion, having doubled in value in just two years. Not bad a return from the boring operations guy.