Tim Cook

Cook joined Apple in 1998 from Compaq as head of operations, into a company that was still manufacturing its own products badly. Within roughly a year he took inventory from about two months of supply down to a few days, closed factories, and rebuilt Apple around contract manufacturers. It is not a glamorous achievement and it is arguably the reason Apple could scale the iPhone from zero to 200 million units a year without a working-capital crisis. Jobs designed products. Cook designed the machine that could build 240 million of them a year and get paid before it paid its suppliers.

Under Cook, Apple's revenue has grown roughly six-fold and its market capitalisation from about $350B to over $3T. He did it with almost no new product category of the magnitude of the iPhone. What he did instead was three things Jobs showed little interest in: he built Services from a rounding error into a $108B business at 75% gross margin; he brought chip design in-house and severed Apple from Intel; and he returned over $700B to shareholders, retiring roughly 40% of the shares outstanding.

The fair criticism is the mirror image of the praise. Cook is an optimiser, and optimisers are structurally poor at discontinuity. Apple was late to voice, late to the modern assistant, and is now licensing a competitor's language model to power Siri on its own device. The Vision Pro is the one large category bet of his tenure and it has not found a market. The operator who was better than the founder at scaling the last platform may be worse at catching the next one — which is exactly the trade the board made in 2011, and for fourteen years it has paid.