Tim Cook’s final day as Apple’s CEO arrived on August 31, 2026, closing out a 15-year run that transformed a company once defined by its founder’s mystique into the most valuable corporation on Earth. His parting message to the Apple community was simple: gratitude, love, and a reminder that “this is not goodbye.”
John Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran who served as senior vice president of hardware engineering, officially takes the CEO title on September 1, 2026. Cook, now 65, will slide into the role of executive chairman, where he’ll focus on high-level policy work and government relationships in the US and China.
The numbers tell the story
When Cook stepped into the CEO role in August 2011, Apple’s market capitalization sat at roughly $350 billion. Under Cook’s watch, Apple’s market cap surged past $4 trillion. Annual revenue climbed from around $108 billion to somewhere in the range of $400 billion to $416 billion. Annual profit quadrupled to more than $110 billion.
Perhaps the most structurally significant shift: services revenue, which barely registered as a line item when Cook took over, surpassed $100 billion. That business alone, encompassing everything from the App Store to Apple Music to iCloud subscriptions, would rank as a Fortune 100 company by revenue if it were spun off.
