Tim Cook ignored logic to join a struggling Apple in 1998
In early 1998 Tim Cook had a comfortable job at Compaq, and everyone who knew him advised staying put. Five minutes into an interview with Steve Jobs he changed his mind. Apple was then shrinking fast, and Cook's unglamorous talent for factories and inventory would help rescue it.
Cook grew up in small-town Alabama, the son of a shipyard worker and a pharmacy employee, and finished second in his high school class in 1978. He studied industrial engineering at Auburn, then spent twelve years in IBM's personal computer business while earning an MBA at Duke. After a stint at a computer reseller he joined Compaq in 1997, leaving just six months later. Speaking at Auburn in 2010, he recalled that every rational calculation favoured Compaq, but his intuition told him Apple was a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
As head of worldwide operations he shut Apple's own factories and warehouses and handed production to contract manufacturers, shrinking inventory from months to days. His team also locked in long-term supplies of flash memory from 2005, guaranteeing parts for the iPod Nano, iPhone and iPad; a rival later described its own abandoned tablet as built from rejected iPad components. Apple's revenue had sunk from $11 billion in 1995 to under $6 billion by 1998, and working alongside Jobs, it climbed back to about $100 billion.
Cook ran the company day to day during Jobs's medical leaves and became chief executive on August 24, 2011. Jobs died six weeks later. Critics at times compared Cook to a caretaker, but he oversaw AirPods, the Apple Watch and Apple's own Mac chips, doubled revenue and profit by 2020, and lifted Apple's market value from $348 billion to more than $4 trillion in 2026. In 2014 he became the first Fortune 500 chief executive to come out publicly as gay.
He stepped down as chief executive in September 2026 under a planned succession, handing over to hardware chief John Ternus and becoming executive chairman.
Source: Tim Cook
