Tim Cook — Dazzling at Apple
I don’t know how well your week is going, but the odds are that Apple CEO Tim Cook had a better one than you.
This week, on his 10th year anniversary as CEO of the most valuable company in the world, he was given a bonus of $750 million worth of Apple stock. He was rewarded both for his time and achievement.
He had taken over the company after the death of the legendary Steve Jobs and not a few people were sure he doubted he could live up to his flashy, turtlenecked predecessor.
To get a full brief of how special Steve Jobs was, I recommend reading Walter Isaacson’s “enthralling” worldwide bestselling biography of the man. To summarize, among other things, Jobs launched the smartphonerevolution and through the opening of the App Store he changed how software applications are distributed forever. He debuted debuted the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
So shareholders and Apple spectators were apprehensive when Cook took over in August 24, 2011 at the age of 50. Some of their fears were also about his background. Apple is a hippy flashy startup and there were questions that someone who had spent over 10 years at ‘dinosaur’ IBM prior to coming to Apple as a VP would live up to expectations.
So they set him a target: If he drives Apple stocks to beat the returns of about 70% of the S&P 500 in the last three years, a $750 Million bonus awaited him. (The Standard and Poor’s 500 tracks the 500 largest companies in the United States.)
With this potential reward dangling somewhere in his cerebrum, he got to work.
And he crushed expectation, easily steering, by any metric imaginable, the world’s largest technology company to historic growth:
- Revenues reached a record $111 billion in Q1 2021, four times what the company saw the same quarter in 2011.
- Profits more than quadrupled from $6B in Q1 2011 to $28.8B in Q1 2021.
- The company holds nearly $200 billion in cash, more than double the already-staggering $76 billion it had in 2011.
- Apple has more than doubled in size with 147,000 full-time employees — compared to 60,400 the year Jobs stepped down.
- Under his watch, the multinational tech giant became the first-ever trillion-dollar company in 2018, and last year, the first $2-trillion company.
If you spent $1,000 on Apple stock the week Steve Jobs stepped down, it’d be worth nearly $11,000 today, not including dividends. Within the sae
In fact, according to calculations by CNBC, if you invested $1,000 in Apple the day Cook became CEO in 2011, the market value of your shares would be worth $12,970.28 today. In contrast, a $1,000 investment in the S&P 500 index would have seen a 365.9% return over the same period and would be worth about $4,659.
I say he is worth every dime he’s been given by Apple.
What do you say?
