Apple is going to miss Tim Cook — one statistic perfectly illustrates why

It’s the end of an era. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced Monday (1) that Tim Cook, the 65-year-old CEO and former chief operating officer under previous CEO Steve Jobs, will step down on Sept. 1 and transition to executive chairman. John Ternus, Apple’s hardware engineering chief, will take the reins — the first time Apple will have a new CEO since Cook succeeded Jobs nearly 15 years ago.

While Cook leaves behind an incredible legacy, one statistic really helps put it all in perspective. Since Cook’s first day as Apple CEO on Aug. 24, 2011, when split-adjusted shares closed at $13.25 (2), the company’s stock has climbed to $269.28 as of Tuesday morning — a return of roughly 1,932%. If you compare the unadjusted close price from Tim Cook’s first day as CEO to now, that return balloons to 2,289%. Over that same stretch, the S&P 500 (3) rose from 1,177.50 to 7,123.80, a gain of about 505%.

To put it plainly: Apple stock outperformed the broader market by a factor of more than four during Cook’s tenure.

In dollar terms, a $10,000 investment in Apple on the day Cook took the job would be worth roughly $239,000 today. That same amount parked in an S&P 500 index fund would have grown to about $60,000. Both are strong returns, but Apple’s is in a different stratosphere — and that’s largely a result of what Cook did with Apple when he took over for Jobs, the company’s visionary cofounder.

Steve Jobs stepped down (4) just six weeks before his death in October 2011 — and when Tim Cook took over, many questioned whether anyone could sustain what Jobs had built. Apple’s market capitalization sat at around $350 billion. Today, it’s roughly $4 trillion (5), making it the third most valuable publicly traded company in the world, behind Nvidia and Alphabet.

The growth went well beyond hardware. Cook turned Apple Services — the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple TV+ and more — into a business generating more than $100 billion annually (1). Revenue nearly quadrupled under his watch, climbing from $108 billion in fiscal 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal 2025. He also oversaw Apple’s transition to its own custom silicon, the launch of Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Vision Pro, and a complex supply chain diversification (6) away from China.

Cook’s tenure wasn’t without turbulence, though. The botched launch of Apple Maps (7) in 2012 was a disaster. Apple’s plans to build a car faltered (8). And the Vision Pro, which many believed could define Tim Cook’s legacy, has still struggled to find mainstream adoption (9) since its 2024 launch.

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Ternus, 50, has spent nearly his entire career (10) at Apple. He joined in 2001 (5) after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering. He rose to senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021 and has overseen work across every major product category, including iPhone, Mac, iPad and AirPods. He will become Apple’s eighth CEO and join its board of directors when the transition takes effect.

He inherits a company that prints cash and commands a global installed base of more than 2.5 billion devices — but also one navigating tariff uncertainty, a maturing smartphone market and an AI arms race where Google, Microsoft and Meta have made aggressive bets. Apple reports earnings (11) on April 30, one of the first major milestones of the transition.

Of course, Ternus’s work is cut out for him. If he hopes to impress Wall Street and enrich shareholders, he’ll have to do something similar to what Cook achieved: a 15-year leadership run, going four-to-one against the market.

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Apple (1),(4); StatMuse (2); Yahoo Finance (3); CNBC (5); Bloomberg (6),(8); The Guardian (7); TechCrunch (9); Fortune (10); Deadline (11)

This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Apple is going to miss Tim Cook — one statistic perfectly illustrates why

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