Steve Jobs built it, Tim Cook scaled it: the handoff behind Apple’s $4 trillion rise

Fifteen years after taking over Apple from Steve Jobs, Tim Cook is stepping down as chief executive, with hardware chief John Ternus set to succeed him this September. The move has prompted renewed comparisons between the two men, whom Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster once described together by calling Cook the ‘president of a country, not a company’.

The comparisons are natural given the numbers: Apple was worth around $350 billion when Cook became CEO in 2011, and that figure now sits above $4 trillion. But the story behind that growth is less about spreadsheets and more about two starkly different approaches to leading the same company.

Jobs led with instinct, gut feeling and an unwillingness to compromise on his own taste, betting the company’s direction on hunches that produced the first iPhone, iPod and iMac, even though that kind of nerve meant being wrong sometimes too. Cook took an entirely different route, having built his reputation long before becoming CEO as the person who worked out how to manufacture and ship Apple’s products at scale, a background that made him calmer and more deliberate than his predecessor.

Not long before his death, Jobs gave Cook a single instruction: never ask what I would do, just do the right thing, a line meant to stop Apple from getting stuck trying to imitate a leadership style that was never going to be Cook’s own.

Over his fifteen years, Cook expanded Apple into wearables and services while keeping the company on an even keel through supply chain disruptions, trade tensions and a pandemic, all without the dramatic risk-taking that defined Jobs’s tenure. As Ternus prepares to take the reins this September, Apple’s history now carries two distinct chapters: one where Jobs built the mountain, and one where Cook made sure it didn’t collapse under its own weight.

Wikimedia Commons/by European Commission (photographer Lukasz Kobus)