John Ternus will replace Tim Cook as Apple CEO

Cook will be executive chairman, but will no longer run the company day to day.

See full article...

 

[eaglefalconn]

Is an American more or less productive than an overseas worker? Maybe. But "maybe" is only a little bit....not 5-10X more productive.

I don't disagree with anything that you said.

But the point that you are making is exactly the argument for investing over the long term in manufacturing, and investing in domestic capabilities from the biggest, most sophisticated, most profitable American companies. Infrastructure investments make people more productive.

I'm not suggesting a return to the 1950s. There would very likely still be many fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than there were then. But the if we had driven significant domestic investment in our manufacturing capabilities, we'd probably be a hell of a lot better at making products that people want to buy at a price they were willing to pay. Instead we have a barely surviving manufacturing sector, with the most complex manufacturing surviving on government makework.

 

[johnsonwax]

Engineer and part of a design team too!

Albeit, I don't actually know what design meant in the article's context.

Apple's hardware design teams (at least they used to) have both generalist and specialist elements. You'll have specialist engineers doing acoustics, and haptics and things like that along with teams that do the individual design of each product - the M5 MBP who are responsible for the layout of the product, sourcing components, and work with the manufacturing partners to get it made. My guess is he was part of the latter group before getting promoted to oversee the whole hardware design group - they are the ones that sort of know the most about how the sausage gets made since they are involved in internal design (logic boards, etc.) cost, supply chain, warranty liability, manufacturability and repairability, and working with the assembly partners, as well as working with the specialists, software, industrial design, etc. Industrial design is a different group. Silicon, radios, etc. is a different group.

To the extent that Apple is a consumer product company and the physical iPhone, Mac, etc. represents the heart of the company (as opposed to software, services, etc.) he comes from the very heart of the company off of which everything else hangs.

 

[citpeks]

I know this is a joke (good one BTW), but that is kind of what they did. The CEO is accountable to the board, and Cook is set to become its chairman.

Good to know at least some people understand the organizational structures of businesses. All too lacking in the peanut galleries that gather around articles like this.

On paper, this was the best path that Apple could take.

Cook relinquishes his daily responsibilities as CEO (which, to the shock of many, doesn't include coding, design, or anything else the aforementioned use to heap personal blame on him), and can continue to look after Apple's interests dealing with tyrants at home and abroad, something he's proven to be adept at.

Ternus is a company veteran, not an outsider, who understands how the company operates, and what customers expect from it. An engineer, not an accountant, marketer, or other background who hasn't been actually involved in making the widgets.

Srouji, who has done a stellar job overseeing Apple Silicon, gets a promotion, which should quell rumors of his departure to a competitor, even if it doesn't preclude his desire to retire at some point.

Often forgotten is that Cook was Jobs' anointed successor, and was given the brief to ensure the survival and legacy of the baby, with the latitude to do it his way.

In isolation, comparisons between the two were unavoidable, and perhaps even unfair, but in the broader perspective, Cook has achieved that goal, and more.

 

[saanaito]

While I'm not a fan of the product design decisions he has allowed(or not known about), I have to admit his business savvy.
I say this as a gay man... Tim(gay) Apple(left leaning) is one of the most, if not the most, visible gay men on the planet. If all it took was a piece of fancy glass and a "merica" chat with 47 to keep the price of my next Mac down, then I'm ok with it.
As a former Apple employee, Apple has been woke since the dawn of time, they are not going to stop because of 47.

I’d really like to learn more about that, if you have any recommendations for reading or watching (documentaries, etc.). I’m aware of the existence of the Pride wallpapers and watch bands, but that’s about it. As an outsider, that looks like rainbow capitalism; but if Apple’s got our backs for real, even with all their faults, I think that would be a good enough reason for me to stick with them for some of my tech needs.

As for the article: I have my disagreements with some of the things Tim Cook did as a leader, but I think that overall, he did a lot of good with his position. Farewell.

 

[Lorentz of Suburbia]

Thanks for your leadership and/or stewardship, Tim.

 

[DrBruceBanner]

I'll miss Tim Cook. Apple is one of the last great American company's as far as integrity, optimism, and reputation.

Most other tech companies have pivoted to advancing American dystopia and I've personally cancelled my accounts and subscriptions with most of them despite knowing most Americans will continue to go along..

My hope is Apple stays true to their core values and is able to navigate the rest of the Trump years and resist pressure to fold to the AI industry and activist investors.

 

[zogus]

Will they give him a golden trophy to reward his craven knee bending to the orange overlord. The LGBTQ movement salutes you - maybe a toast in the new ballroom?

What courageous and potentially costly act of public defiance have you done against the said overlord that gives you such impressive moral high ground?

 

[ZZninepluralZalpha]

I wonder if there's a case to be made for a "tick-tock" leadership cadence at tech firms (or any firm), where leadership pivots between growing wide and growing tall. Jobs started went wide by launching all kinds of new products. Cook grew tall by mastering supply chain. Ternus comes in possibly to go wide again by focusing on expanding the product portfolio, until a future successor comes in to go tall with those new launches, and so forth.

It's an interesting idea, but Cook's tenure had a pretty good share of new product "category" launches—AirPods, Apple Watch, HomePod, AirTag, Vision Pro, and of course the whole slew of services. If anything, my issue with his decision-making is that he went a bit too wide, as I don't want to see Apple follow the trajectory of Sony.

 

[JaeTLDR]

Doesn't change the fact that Tim Cook, given $275 billion to invest in the US or China, chose China. Tim Cook chose to do that so Apple's investors could take home more money, instead of American workers.

Isn't that Americas whole deal? Capitalism at any cost (most obviously healthcare and education)

 

[F12]

Doesn't change the fact that Tim Cook, given $275 billion to invest in the US or China, chose China. Tim Cook chose to do that so Apple's investors could take home more money, instead of American workers.

That is literally the requirement of a Corporation.

 

[johnsonwax]

Is an American more or less productive than an overseas worker? Maybe.

The answer is yes. Both objectively and in a larger context. US manufacturing workers are ranked in the top 10 in terms of labor productivity, China is ranked around 90. Vietnam around 115.

Understand that this is in the macro, not micro sense. It's not a measure of how fast can you turn a screw, it's a measure of the value of the thing you produce. China has a LOT of manufacturing but most of it is low-end. The US manufacturing is very high end. Our manufacturing is dominated by things like F-35s and silicon design and software, China's by consumer electronics, and Vietnam's by USB cables. And this is the goal of every economy - to move their population from walking behind an ox, to driving a tractor, to building a satellite. If you can outsource mining iron because you need the labor to assemble cars, you outsource mining iron because it's of less value per worker than the car is. That's true for the US as it was for Japan as it is for China. That's a longer path for China by virtue of their population size relative to the global market for goods, but the US maintained that through immigration (until now). With China's population falling, they will rapidly seek to move their industry upmarket just as the US did and they will outsource to other countries just as the US does. Note, the US could choose to embrace immigration and close that gap with China (rising while they are falling), but we're in great replacement theory mode right now.

Your analysis is lacking in two ways:
1) The US worker is not per-se too expensive, it's that in a free market the choice of what to make is not a dependency of what is best for the country, or part of the national imperative. If you are starting a new business is there more money in growing carrots or building an AI datacenter? It's the latter. It doesn't matter if the country says it needs carrots and not AI, the country doesn't get a say - only the market does and if the market will pay more for AI per worker wage, etc. then that's what gets built. And so wages are only a problem if you run out of upmarket things to make - which the US will never do, because we are a consumer economy and we can always convince the public to buy labubus or F-350s or, well, AI. We are very good at inventing the thing that makes money ahead of the cost of labor, even if that's sports betting and crypto. What usually would sit here is a theory of industrial policy, but we became allergic to industrial policy after electing Reagan and have never really figured out how to return. Biden did a bit of a carrot based policy with taxpayer incentives to get more semiconductor, battery, EV production, and Trump does a more stick based policy (if you can even call it that) via tariffs and demanding Tim Cook bestow him with a golden bauble. Supply chains will never organically materialize in a free market lacking an industrial policy, because there's little incentive to build the components for the finished good when you can choose to build a different finished good. The component will always be lower productivity than the end product. You get a supply chain either through a carrot or stick based industrial policy. China has an easier time with this because unlike Biden's where voters were upset that taxpayer dollars were being used to tip up an industry, China doesn't have voters. They can do whatever the fuck they want and they do a lot in terms of industrial policy where the US does essentially nothing.

Which leads to:
2) The lack of an industrial policy and a free deportation of the supply chain leads to situations where other countries gain control over US output. The US effectively has no domestic production of rare earth metals (we used to, but it's low productivity mining), China dominates it, and we can't make wind turbine motors without them, so by ceding control of the low productivity industry, we lose control of the high productivity industry because again, the free market doesn't do geopolitical strategic thinking that way. The startup doesn't give a shit if GM is going to slow to a crawl because their semiconductor supply chain got screwed up, unless they intend to be part of that supply chain. And since it's unlikely they can patch all of the holes in that supply chain, it looks like a risky place to be providing domestic suspension parts if the Taiwanese factories get knocked off line and GM can't make trucks because there are no semiconductors. They are better off picking something where they have less exposure to problems out of their control, such as making aftermarket parts, or parts for the military which are required to be made domestically (our one bit of industrial policy).

It's under an industrial policy that you have to contend with the difficult problem of wages, where now we just don't. And it begs the question of 'well, wouldn't our exports be too expensive' to which the answer is - they already are - it's why we run such a high trade deficit. And it's not like you need to domesticate all manufacturing, just the things that we agree we can't afford to have disrupted - which is why Biden made a play for semiconductors. If we get embargoed on those, we're seriously hosed. If we can't get smartphones, eh, we can live with that. You pick and choose what is material under your national priorities, what is sufficiently safe for import because we have good relationships with the countries we are importing from (about that...) and what you can simply do without if push comes to shove. But at least you've shifted away from exporting everything based on labor productivity.

 

[NYReichman]

Of course there were the missteps like the trash can pro, the 5c, but overall the story was quiet iteration and relentless execution culminating in a surprise revolution around the (at the time stagnating) Mac that is still reverberating in the industry.

I never understood the hatorade around the trash can Mac Pro. At the time, the trash can was outstanding for pro audio. Silent, fast, portable, way more reliable than the previous generation giant Mac Pros...

 

[Bad Monkey!]

That is literally the requirement of a Corporation.

No it's not. Investors can agitate the board to shitcan the CEO if he can't convince them that his strategy is worth it, but there's nothing that says the CEO must always choose the option that creates the highest immediate monetary value for investors. Tim Cook could have chosen American workers over Chinese workers, but he didn't want to make that case to investors.

 

[stormcrash]

I never understood the hatorade around the trash can Mac Pro. At the time, the trash can was outstanding for pro audio. Silent, fast, portable, way more reliable than the previous generation giant Mac Pros...

I meant "misstep" more in terms of misreading on where the market and tech was heading at the time, the custom cooling and dual gpu solution never really panned out as crossfire and other dual gpu stuff ended up falling mostly by the wayside leaving them with a product core that wasn't able to easily upgrade to the market reality.

For all the hate the trash can got about not being expandible they ended up finding success on the same concept in the mac studio through a combination of apple silicon and the thunderbolt/usb c io situation having become accepted by industry

 

[mainmac]

I used to defend Cook. But his Quisling role in the past several years has soured me on him, and demonstrated that his concern for social issues was more words and little action, when it came to defending the cashflow. It's quite sad he'll be long remembered as Tim Apple, not the successor to Jobs.

I thought 'Tim Apple' moniker was just used by lazy people who didn't know his last name? What's it supposed to mean?

 

[johnsonwax]

Doesn't change the fact that Tim Cook, given $275 billion to invest in the US or China, chose China. Tim Cook chose to do that so Apple's investors could take home more money, instead of American workers.

That's not why.

China has two benefits the US has not figured out how to replicate (mostly by not trying)
1) They have an industrial policy so that if you want to build a factory to assemble something, all of the secondary needs are already in place - equipment, training, components, and so on. It's all right there. I used to work in higher education and I spent a decade trying to get an industrial engineering program off the ground. There's a lot of demand, so filling seats wasn't a question. They require a lot of capital to get started - more than a public university will have to spare, and I could never get the federal government interested in helping to start it up. That's a failure of industrial policy. China turns out 30x or so as many industrial engineers as the US does. Apple would need to hire about ⅓ of the entire US supply of them - not just new ones coming out of university, every one that had graduated from a US university in the last 30 years - just because Apple's scale is that large. So you can get them in China, and they aren't necessarily cheaper, but at least they exist. Tool and die is a similar problem. Almost nonexistent in the US, with no policy to address that.

2) China is fast. And Apple is in a very sensitive time-to-market industry. China builds factories before the use of the factory is known - the US does not. There are no empty factories to move into in the US, so you have to start from site planning in the US. It will take you a few years before you can start making product. In China you can start in weeks. This is not a problem of too much government regulation or whatever, it's a problem of capital allocation. The US is extremely conservative with capital allocation because finance is our largest industry and there are a lot of mechanisms they have invented to make money without tying up capital. So cash is very slow to be parsed out in the US, and production is risky relative to buying say residential housing, so they buy housing. Because nobody wants to take capital risks in the area of manufacturing, everything moves at a snails pace. Not so in China which never developed the alternative instruments and where finance is subservient to manufacturing, not superior to it. Now, Apple brings their own money, but not for everything downstream of them, and that's where the US falls apart.

 

[stormcrash]

No it's not. Investors can agitate the board to shitcan the CEO if he can't convince them that his strategy is worth it, but there's nothing that says the CEO must always choose the option that creates the highest immediate monetary value for investors. Tim Cook could have chosen American workers over Chinese workers, but he didn't want to make that case to investors.

You're both not wrong, but also just plain wrong. Sure CEOs are not required to put investors above all in the short term, and in fact doing so is what has been detrimental to society and corporate health. That being said there is a zero percent chance any attempt to try and reshore their entire supply chain to the US would not have been catastrophic and lead to his ouster.

 

[nytta0]

Good to know at least some people understand the organizational structures of businesses. All too lacking in the peanut galleries that gather around articles like this.

On paper, this was the best path that Apple could take.

Cook relinquishes his daily responsibilities as CEO (which, to the shock of many, doesn't include coding, design, or anything else the aforementioned use to heap personal blame on him), and can continue to look after Apple's interests dealing with tyrants at home and abroad, something he's proven to be adept at.

Ternus is a company veteran, not an outsider, who understands how the company operates, and what customers expect from it. An engineer, not an accountant, marketer, or other background who hasn't been actually involved in making the widgets.

Srouji, who has done a stellar job overseeing Apple Silicon, gets a promotion, which should quell rumors of his departure to a competitor, even if it doesn't preclude his desire to retire at some point.

Often forgotten is that Cook was Jobs' anointed successor, and was given the brief to ensure the survival and legacy of the baby, with the latitude to do it his way.

In isolation, comparisons between the two were unavoidable, and perhaps even unfair, but in the broader perspective, Cook has achieved that goal, and more.

This is the best post of the thread so far. And by a very long shot.

 

[lurknomore]

The problem is that, unfortunately and probably illegally, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. became part of the supply chain on January 20, 2025. Tim did as he always did, working to secure that part of the supply chain.

"Just doing my job" is why we are randomly tariffing or bombing people at the whim of some Napoleon-wannabe. The fascists are giving orders, and millions are "just doing their jobs".
There's a reason it wasn't accepted as a Nuremberg defense. There's a line to not cross, be it for personal safety, personal gain, or "the good of the company". That last one has gotten to be a major problem, because even people with fuck-it-all money, not just paycheck-to-paycheck modern-slavery people, cross the ethical line for it.

 

[Eldorito]

It’ll be interesting to see how Ternus approaches shareholder demands to AI all the things, hopefully Cook will set expectations reasonably there.

Software will be interesting going forward in general. Hardware Apple has delivered in the known Cook way - premium products utilising supply chain to keep margins high. But VR seems dead in the water, Siri hasn’t really improved and Liquid Glass wasn’t really an improvement.

 

[VelvetRemedy]

What courageous and potentially costly act of public defiance have you done against the said overlord that gives you such impressive moral high ground?

I left a very nice job closely linked with the American government and took a substantial pay cut to work for a nonprofit because I was tired of feeling like an accessory to abominations. And unlike Tim Cook, my income is low enough that a 20% pay cut is actually something that makes a detectable difference in my life.

We judge people for being a single engineer at Meta, X, Amazon, OpenAI, etc, as a moral choice - and we should. CEOs who make a choice to closely and publicly associate with a tyrannical government don't get a pass because "oh, well, it's in the interest of the company (and the company makes cool toys that I personally like.)"

 

[johnsonwax]

It's an interesting idea, but Cook's tenure had a pretty good share of new product "category" launches—AirPods, Apple Watch, HomePod, AirTag, Vision Pro, and of course the whole slew of services. If anything, my issue with his decision-making is that he went a bit too wide, as I don't want to see Apple follow the trajectory of Sony.

I think he's a bit mixed on that front. I don't think Jobs would have launched Vision Pro without a go-to-market strategy around it. Apple was always a company that didn't just sell devices, but one that sold solutions to consumers. The iPhone solved certain problems for consumers - go watch the product intro. As would be described in job-to-be-done theory, customers don't buy a ¼ inch drill, they buy a ¼ inch hole. The drill is bought to solve the problem, but the problem first has to be established, articulated, and then the connection made to the product.

That never happened with Vision Pro. The problem it solves was never demonstrated, and so customers couldn't be walked back to it. I suspect Jobs wouldn't have launched the product until that was clearly established to the company so they would know how to sell it to the customer.

Many of the others are much better on that front, but Vision Pro has been a red flag for me for a while. As is some of their software moves. They're kind of running in B+ rather than A territory right now and it remains to be seen if that's a downward trend or they will return to form.

The thing Cook deserves the most credit for is Apple Silicon. That was a 100% bet the company move that they could move into silicon design, and run ahead of Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung. There was no going back once they started, and any failure would be catastrophic as they have no off-the shelf plan B. And nobody expected Apple to succeed there, and they excelled. Not many companies have the guts to do that.

 

[SeanJW]

There's no doubt that Tim Cook will go down as one of the better business leaders of the past 20 years. Maybe one of the greatest in Silicon Valley history.

The biggest knock on his legacy, in the long run, will not be his pandering to Trump. I think that'll mostly get excused as an embarrassing mistake that many CEOs of his era did (and therefore probably not all that well remembered at all).

The biggest knock on his legacy will be the way Apple, under his leadership, drove the upskilling and expansion of China's impressive manufacturing ecosystem. Tesla was a big participant there too. But just look at the amount of money Apple invested in its Chinese supply chain. $275 billion over 5 years was the pledge, and they exceeded it.

Just think about what would happen if someone invested that kind of money in American manufacturing.

Easy to think about. They would have pissed most of it away as the supply chain - Tim Cook's expertise - isn't in the US.

 

[VelvetRemedy]

The thing Cook deserves the most credit for is Apple Silicon. That was a 100% bet the company move that they could move into silicon design, and run ahead of Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung. There was no going back once they started, and any failure would be catastrophic as they have no off-the shelf plan B. And nobody expected Apple to succeed there, and they excelled. Not many companies have the guts to do that.

It really wasn't a bet-the-company move, and it was also expected (and expected to succeed) by everyone in semiconductor. Apple had been making their own (excellent) microarchitectures inhouse for iPhones since Swift in 2012 (2011? - it's been a while.) Cyclone and its successors were clearly desktop grade. The question among anyone paying attention was "when", not "if", they'd move the Mac.

 

[SeanJW]

I thought 'Tim Apple' moniker was just used by lazy people who didn't know his last name? What's it supposed to mean?

The lazy person who couldn't remember his last name was the POTUS.

 

[Resistance]

He was good at his job, and under his stewardship his company produced products that were likely a net good. As far as billionaire CEOs go, that's above average.

The MacBook Neo is a real high note to end on, though the insufficient production is a bit of a bummer.

 

[vought1221]

I never understood the hatorade around the trash can Mac Pro. At the time, the trash can was outstanding for pro audio. Silent, fast, portable, way more reliable than the previous generation giant Mac Pros...

It’s because the most vocal critics often judge the new thing against the old thing, instead of against what’s actually appropriate and useful.

“NO SLOTS OMG” was barely relevant to Mac creatives when the trash can design shipped. Apple then spent a shit-ton of money to make a Mac Pro with slots after years of actual customers telling them they liked quiet, portable, powerful machines. The fact that the last Mac Pro was a recycled design was a tell: Apple just gave the shouty folks what they wanted and it still didn’t sell terribly well, because it isn’t what most Pro customers need.

Today, an 8GB Mac SKU gets the same criticism an 8GB PC would, despite vastly different memory mapping schemes and efficiency between the two OSs.

 

[dh87]

Thanks, Tim. I'll just leave it at that.

 

[johnsonwax]

And all this is because 30 years ago Apple chose to start making iPods in China. China's high-value electronics supply chain was still nascent and the volumes of a super popular but relatively compact and complex high margin device were a huge boost over the simple low-value circuit board manufacturing they had been doing up to that point, and similarly China's smartphone supply chain practically didn't exist before the iPhone. CEOs have agency, they are not merely puppets dancing on the strings of mysterious market forces. Apple literally has so much cash that the only thing that Tim Cook could think to do with it was simply gift it back to investors in the form of stock buybacks, when for the past 10 years Apple could have been restoring its US supply chains.

That story has been told countless times. Apple tried to do it in the US, and the supply chain and industrial talent weren't here. We were 20 years into unfettered free market capitalism, and the foundation was already crumbling. Long before Jobs returned, let alone the iPod, even Democrats who had been the strong defenders of US industry and labor had pivoted away from industrialization to intellectual property and financialization, and Apple looking for skilled workers for digital electronics found none, found no component supply chain. China had already well established those. Shenzhen was opened up as an economic opportunity zone in the early 80s and a high tech industrial development zone by the mid 90s. The population had grown from 350K to 7M before Apple even showed up. China had modernized the port and freight airport there, they built trade schools in the city and focused them on this industry. The iPod was a lowish volume product at launch - 400,000 units and was well suited to their industrial capacity at the time considering that Apple didn't have cash to burn then (I've been an investor since '97) and it wasn't clear that iPod would even succeed as a product. Their capacity grew considerably in the 6 years before the iPhone. The supply chain was there and the supply chain grew rapidly - which it could not have done in the US. Even if they had started in the US, they would have moved to China for that reason. The US is not interested in solving that problem. They may talk about it, but they do nothing. And Apple is not the government.

I worked in higher ed in the US - we do not do this, at all. We sat and watched China run past us on countless measures because the US was completely hands off. Apple didn't want to plow money into our university to build a program and then wait 7 years for the first graduates to come out, and neither did the government. China did that though - they built ahead of demand, and when Apple went looking for skilled workers, they found them there and not here. I cannot tell you how many reports I wrote on this phenomenon. My governors office called me as the state expert on the subject to produce a report for a company that was looking to set up in California and needed a certain engineer talent pool. I laid out the current production, including neighboring states, what we could produce simply by readjusting priorities within the universities but not adding funding, what we could produce with increased subsidies, what we could produce with increased subsidies and capital expenditures. Under no circumstance could California and neighboring states have met their stated need for engineers - and California turns out a fucking HUGE number of engineers relative to the country. They went to Germany who have a more focused industrial policy. And note, German engineers aren't cheap.

I won't argue with the stock buyback and the excess of cash, other than to note that they are doing what US economic policy - by both parties - incentivizes them to do. Stock buybacks are the politically intended result. If you don't like it, start pushing against politicians instead of industry.

 

[johnsonwax]

Sure. It also cost about $17,000 in today's money. Are you fully incapable of understanding why people may have a problem with that?

Are you fully incapable of understanding how much money a professional audio engineer or video engineer costs? These guys cover $17,000 in a few days.

 

[evanTO]

I'm struck by this anecdote from Steve Wozniak:

In 1973, Jobs was working for arcade game company Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California.[34] He was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 (equivalent to $725 in 2025) for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation. Whilst a lack of scoring or coin mechanisms made Wozniak's prototype unusable, Jobs was paid the full bonus regardless. Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 and that Wozniak's share was thus $350 (equivalent to $2,500 in 2025).[35][5]: 147–148, 180  Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus (equivalent to $36,300 in 2025) until ten years later. While dismayed, he said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.[36]: 104–107 Source: Wikipedia

and this quote from Ternus:

I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century.

Finally I'll note Woz left in 1985, so for 40 of those 50 years the Steve Jobs ethos has been the dominant one, specifically the "I'll pocket $4,650 of the $5,000 of value you created that we agreed to split evenly".

 

[afidel]

$350B to $4T market cap in 15 years, that's a 16.5% compound interest rate. There have been very few CEOs in the history of public markets that can claim that kind of sustained growth.