Over his 15-year reign as Apple’s top banana, Tim Cook has become instantly recognizable, powerful beyond imagination, and exceedingly wealthy. Most estimates peg Cook’s current net worth at roughly $3 billion, assets that he amassed largely through performance-based equity awards as Apple’s market cap has grown more than 11x on his watch to roughly $4 trillion.
But the job comes with plenty of baggage, too. Cook has also had to navigate two Trump administrations and one Biden administration – each with its own posture toward Big Tech, China, and regulation. Cook also faced down the FBI over encryption, spent years in court defending the App Store against accusations that Apple had turned the iPhone into an illegal monopoly, and made compromises to stay in the Chinese market that attracted a whole lot of unwanted attention from human rights groups. Not last, Cook watched the company’s most ambitious hardware bet — the Vision Pro headset — bomb with consumers. That’s saying nothing of AI, where the outcome is still unknown. Incoming CEO John Ternus inherits all of it.
Here’s a walk through some of Cook’s biggest battles over the years:
Surely we all remember that 2016 FBI encryption fight? After a mass shooting at a holiday gathering in San Bernardino, California, the FBI demanded that Apple help unlock the gunman’s iPhone. Cook refused, arguing that encryption was the only meaningful countermeasure against exposing people’s private data and that being forced to break it would set a dangerous precedent. The standoff eventually ended when the FBI found another way in, but it cemented Apple’s identity as a privacy company and set up years of tension with governments around the world. Ternus will inherit that identity and the obligations that come with it.
The App Store antitrust wars haven’t been a walk in the park for Cook, either. Epic Games sued Apple in federal court over its requirement that apps …