Why Tim Cook never tried to be the next Steve Jobs, and grew Apple to $4 trillion anyway

Tim Cook never tried to lead Apple the way Steve Jobs did, and as he prepares to step down as chief executive after fifteen years, that choice looks like one of the more consequential decisions in the company’s history. Hardware chief John Ternus is set to take over this September, closing a tenure that Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster has described by calling Cook the ‘president of a country, not a company’.

Cook took over in 2011, when Apple was valued at roughly $350 billion. That figure has since climbed past $4 trillion, and while the scale invites comparison to Jobs, the two men led in almost opposite ways.

Jobs operated on gut feeling and a refusal to compromise on his own taste, a style that delivered the first iPhone, iPod and iMac but required a willingness to be wrong sometimes, since betting a company’s future on instinct rarely works out every time. Cook’s path to the top was different: long before becoming CEO, he was known for figuring out how to build and ship Apple’s products at massive scale, and that operational grounding shaped a leadership style defined by patience and listening rather than bold pronouncements.

Shortly before he died, Jobs told Cook never to ask what he would do and instead to simply do the right thing, a piece of advice that gave Cook permission to lead on his own judgment instead of trying to replicate a predecessor whose instincts worked nothing like his own.

Across his fifteen years running the company, Cook pushed Apple into wearables and services while steering it through global supply chain issues, trade tensions and a pandemic, none of which called for the dramatic risk-taking Jobs was known for. As Ternus prepares to take over this September, Apple’s story under two very different leaders suggests the company needed both kinds of courage, just not at the same time.

Wikimedia Commons/by European Commission (photographer Lukasz Kobus)