Following Steve Jobs was the hardest job in business, and Tim Cook took it in 2011. He did not attempt the showmanship. What he brought instead was the thing Apple actually needed by then: mastery of an immense supply chain, operational discipline, and the patience to run a decade rather than a quarter.

Apple crossed a trillion dollars under him, then several. The iPhone did most of the lifting, but services grew into a business large enough to matter on its own, and the Watch and AirPods turned wearables from an accessory line into a category Apple owns.

Jobs designed the products. Cook designed the machine that could make a billion of them, flawlessly, every year.

He also gave the company a public position — privacy, environmental commitments, an ecosystem so tightly stitched that leaving it costs something. Manufacturing at scale in China had to be managed as diplomacy as much as logistics, and production has slowly begun to spread elsewhere.

The criticism is fair enough: a superb optimiser rather than an inventor, with new categories arriving late and carefully. The rebuttal is the balance sheet. Cook built the most profitable consumer-hardware business in history, which is its own kind of creative act.

Cook grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama, studied industrial engineering at Auburn University and took an MBA at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. He spent twelve years at IBM and worked briefly at Compaq before Steve Jobs recruited him to Apple in 1998, when the company was still recovering from its near-collapse.

His first job was operations, and it was unglamorous and decisive. He closed factories and warehouses, moved production to contract manufacturers and cut inventory sharply. That supply chain is what later allowed Apple to ship hundreds of millions of iPhones a year. He became chief operating officer in 2005, ran the company during Jobs's medical leaves, and was named chief executive in August 2011, weeks before Jobs died.

Cook also oversaw the move of the Mac from Intel processors to Apple's own chips, starting with the M1 in 2020, a shift that rested on the silicon team Apple had built since the early iPhone years. In 2014 he became the first chief executive of a Fortune 500 company to say publicly that he is gay, writing that he was proud to be. He has said he intends to give away most of his fortune.