Technology & Business
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple Inc., taking over from Steve Jobs in 2011. Where Jobs was the visionary product genius, Cook is the operational mastermind who transformed Apple into the most valuable company in the world.
Cook grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama, a small town near Mobile. His father was a shipyard worker, and his mother worked at a pharmacy. He's described his upbringing as modest but filled with strong values.
He earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Auburn University in 1982, where he was valedictorian of his engineering class. He later earned an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1988.
Before joining Apple, Cook spent 12 years at IBM, rising to director of North American fulfillment. He then worked briefly at Intelligent Electronics and became VP of Corporate Materials at Compaq—at the time, the largest PC maker in the world.
He was only six months into his Compaq role when Steve Jobs recruited him to Apple in 1998. At the time, Apple was struggling, and leaving Compaq for Apple seemed risky. But Cook met with Jobs for five minutes and knew he had to take the job.
"My intuition told me that joining Apple was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius."
Cook's genius is in supply chain and operations. When he joined Apple, the company had months of inventory sitting in warehouses. He slashed that to days, then hours. He closed factories, built relationships with suppliers, and created the lean manufacturing machine that lets Apple launch products globally at massive scale.
Cook's leadership style is different from Jobs. He's calm, measured, and collaborative where Jobs was intense and demanding. He focuses on values like privacy, environment, and accessibility—issues Jobs rarely discussed publicly.
In October 2014, Cook publicly came out as gay in a Bloomberg Businessweek essay, becoming the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He wrote that being gay was "among the greatest gifts God has given me" because it gave him a deeper understanding of what it means to be in a minority.
"I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."
Cook never tried to be Steve Jobs. He understood that Apple needed operational excellence and steady leadership after Jobs' death. Critics say Apple under Cook has been iterative rather than revolutionary, but the numbers tell a different story: