Big shot of the week
TIM COOK, 57 CHIEF EXECUTIVE, APPLE
WHEN The Beatles made their now famous debut on the ed Sullivan Show in 1964, they were followed on stage by a magician called Fred Kaps.
The Dutchman’s neat sleights-of-hand raised a few laughs among the 700-strong audience, but unfortunately for him television viewers weren’t much interested after being mesmerised by the four young boys from Liverpool.
Broadway legend has it that visitors to that old theatre can sometimes hear the ghost of Kaps’ luckless agent weeping in the stalls.
Back in 2011, Apple’s Tim Cook was the Fred Kaps of the corporate world. As the man chosen to succeed Steve Jobs, the company’s mercurial founder who made Apple a byword for innovation and coolness, he was handed the impossible task.
Like Walt Disney before him, Jobs was the company. his charisma inspired an almost cult-like following among Apple’s millions of devotees. his successor, meanwhile, could not be more different.
While Jobs had an imposing presence, Cook, 57, cuts a wraith-like figure, pale and sinewy, his translucent skin seemingly unaffected by the Californian sunshine.
JOBS was famous for his volcanic outbursts, but Cook remains unreadable in meetings, his voice never rising above sotto voce even during the tersest exchanges.
Jobs was seen as a reckless control freak, Cook is the data-driven pragmatist happy to delegate. If a towering ego lurks behind that Zen-like exterior, it remains camouflaged. ‘But where is the innovation?’ the eggheads cry. It is true that on Cook’s watch there have been no era-defining moments like the launch of the iPhone.
But shareholders won’t complain. The firm recently reported impressive sales with yearly profits of £45bn. The chief executive was rewarded with a £76m payday.
With Cook in charge, Apple is a more mature beast from the truculent image it cultivated in the early part of the century. Questions remain about its tax affairs but the genial Southerner has at least tried to position the firm onto a more socially responsible footing.
Some trace this conscience back to his upbringing in Alabama. Born one of three brothers to Baptist parents, he once recalled bicycling home one evening and seeing the Ku Klux Klan setting a cross on fire outside a black family’s home.
Computers have been his life. After graduating from Auburn University in 1982, he joined IBM where he spent 12 years before moving to Intelligent electronics as chief operating officer.
he then landed a job at Compaq in 1998 where he enjoyed a perfectly happy six months, so much so that when Steve Jobs offered him a job at Apple, he was initially sceptical. But after Jobs informed Cook of a new product he was working on called the iMac, Cook couldn’t resist.
When he accepted the position of senior vice-president, Apple was struggling, having reported $1bn losses the year before.
Cook, a spreadsheet specialist, took drastic action by closing much of Apple’s manufacturing capacity, making it a leaner, more flexible operation. Within a year, the company was back in profit.
The decisive operator rose to executive vice-president and then chief operating officer. Six weeks before his death in 2011, Jobs instructed the board to give Cook his post permanently.
Known for working long, unsociable hours, Cook lives in a modest four-bedroom home in Palo Alto, not far from Apple’s headquarters. Rare extracurricular pursuits include cycling and fitness and he is often in the gym by 5am.
In 2014, he became the first head of a Fortune 500 company to identify himself as gay. he is thought to remain single at present, and has already pledged his considerable shareholding in Apple – thought to be worth at least £500m – to good causes.
In the fullness of time, his name, like that of poor Fred Kaps, will most probably fade into the ether.
not a great man like Jobs, no. But probably a little nicer.