When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs, he wasn't expected to reinvent Apple, only to keep it running. 15 years later he hands over one of the worlds most valuable companies. Here's how he did that.
As Apple CEO Tim Cook steps down after 15 years at one of the world’s biggest companies, he leaves it in a very different place than when he found it.
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Cook is turning the CEO role over to John Ternus, the company’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, on September 1, but will remain executive chairman.
“I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people,” Cook said in a statement.
Cook inherited the CEO position from Apple founder Steve Jobs in 2011 and oversaw the growth of Apple from a highly successful company to one of the defining tech empires of the 21st century that saw its value increase by roughly €3.3 trillion.
We take a closer look at the key moments that shaped Cook’s time in Apple’s head office.
Taking over from Steve Jobs: Keeping Apple on course
Cook stepped in for Jobs for the first time in 2009, when Jobs announced a six-month medical leave to get a liver transplant. During his first earnings call with investors he went on a lengthy monologue that some now call “The Cook Doctrine.”
“We believe that we're on the face of the earth to make great products and that's not changing,” Cook reportedly said to investors. “I think regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.”
At the time, Cook was the company’s chief operating officer (COO) and was responsible for all the company’s worldwide sales and operations. In that role, he oversaw the entire Apple supply chain, sales, and support in the company’s market countries.
Cook reportedly offered a part of his liver to Jobs after finding out that he needed a transplant, because they had the same rare blood type, but Jobs refused, according to a 2015 biography about Jobs.
When Jobs eventually resigned as CEO in 2011, he recommended Cook for the job in his letter, saying that he believed “Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it.” Jobs stayed on as an Apple board member until his death, six weeks later.
Cook told employees in a staff email on his first day as CEO that “Apple is not going to change.”
“I cherish and celebrate Apple’s unique principles and values,” the email, reported in full by Reuters, reads. “Steve [Jobs] built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world, and we are going to stay true to that - it is in our DNA.”
But in the industry and media, many wondered whether Cook would be able to keep Apple’s "innovation engine humming".
Learning to lead under pressure
Cook’s first product launch as CEO was the iPhone 4s: a model that, despite a better camera, faster processing time and the introduction of Siri, the phone’s intelligent assistant, fell flat with investors and the media, who called it “more fizzle than pop.”
The iPhone 4s was also the first that integrated the iCloud, the now-well known system that lets Apple users sync photos, apps, contacts and messages with a range of Apple products.
Cook also faced some controversy in his first year as Apple CEO, when media reports found many human rights and labour concerns at factories in China.
In an op-ed, Cook claimed to “care about every worker in [its] worldwide supply chain” and opened up its networks to an evaluation conducted by the Fair Labour Association, an American non-profit that works on labour laws.
During his first year, Cook also took on several high-profile patent cases against Apple competitors Samsung and Google in US courts as a way to limit their growth, according to media reports at the time.
Still, Apple passed the $600 billion (€522.4 billion) valuation mark by April 2012, making it the most valuable company in the world at that time.
The beginnings of the Apple ecosystem
The next goal for Cook at Apple was to build an ecosystem where the various new products they launched could work together.
In 2014, Cook explained during his keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that Apple was engineering its platforms, devices and services together to create a “seamless experience that is unparalleled in the industry. ”
“This is something only Apple can do,” he said.
At that launch, Cook introduced several continuity features like Handoff, which let users start a task on their MacBook and finish it on their iPhone or iPad. It was also the first introduction of AirDrop: the ability to find Apple devices nearby and send them files directly.
The mid-2010s also saw Apple under Cook launch even more software features, such as Apple Pay, that embedded the iPhone into everyday transactions.
Other product launches from this era, including the Apple Watch, supported the idea that Apple was building a system under Cook where all devices would work together.
The first Apple Watch introduced features like “smart replies,” where users could start writing a message from the watch and finish it on the iPhone, use Apple Pay for transactions or even control an Apple TV.
Cook said in an interview at the time that the Apple Watch required an iPhone “because they’ve been designed to work together,” by using cellular data to pull down a user’s messages so they can reply to them.
Apple then expanded in the 2010s to more ecosystem products than they had before: the Apple Music streaming app and AirPod headphones.
Media reports at the time described that Apple was heading towards an “ambient paradigm,” where multiple devices become extensions of one another instead of separate computing platforms.
The world’s first trillion-dollar company
Cook was also at the helm for three major milestones in Apple’s history: the trillion-dollar valuation and the start of the artificial intelligence (AI) era.
Apple reached the one-trillion dollar mark in August 2018 after racking up profits of $11.5 billion (€10 billion) in three months, which pushed up the company’s share price to 207 per unit. The company’s shares exploded after 2007 with the first launch of the iPhone, analysts told Euronews at the time.
Cook called the valuation a “significant milestone” in a memo to Apple employees, but at the time insisted that the company stay focused on delivering good products.
“Financial returns are simply the result of Apple’s innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values,” Cook wrote in the memo.
The company continued to break profit records throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s and is worth approximately $4.01 trillion (€3.48 trillion), according to market data from April 21. It was the third company to reach the 4-trillion mark in October 2025, after chipmaker Nvidia and Microsoft.
Cook also led Apple into the artificial intelligence (AI) era with the launch of Apple Intelligence in 2024, which integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT right into the operating system across devices.
The company was criticised for taking longer than rivals Samsung and Google to rush out the technology, but analysts told Euronews Next that Apple is now in a position to take a “wait-and-see” approach with new AI technologies to offer customers a better experience than its rivals.
Before stepping down, Cook had to master political diplomacy with President Donald Trump, who started trade wars with China during both his terms in the White House.
Cook was able to persuade Trump from exempting the iPhone and other Apple products from Trump’s first-term tariffs; he was only able to minimise fees by relocating the company’s manufacturing efforts to India.
He also promised that Apple would invest $600 billion (€522.4 billion) in the US during Trump’s second administration.
