Tim Cook’s last day as Apple CEO: How he led the tech giant’s rise to $4T

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down from his role at the helm of one of the world’s largest tech companies after a 15-year tenure that saw Apple become the first publicly traded U.S. company with a $1 trillion market cap and other notable milestones.

He announced in April that he would step down as Apple CEO at the end of August, and while he is leaving that role, he will remain with the company as the executive chairman. John Ternus, who most recently served as Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, will be Cook’s successor.

Cook became CEO in August 2011 when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs resigned six weeks before his death. Jobs first met Cook in 1998 and convinced him to join Apple that year, starting his career at the tech giant as a senior vice president for worldwide operations.

“As you know, I am not leaving Apple. But I am stepping away from a role that I have loved deeply,” Cook said in a memo emailed to all employees on his final day. “I will miss this work in ways I can only begin to imagine, even as I remain completely at peace with my decision.”

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“Together, we have created something far greater than any one of us could have imagined or accomplished alone. And that’s the secret to our success. We bring out the best in each other. We lift each other up,” Cook said.

“We have made it possible to leave our ‘dent in the universe,’ as Steve once described it, because of who we are and what we believe, because of what we value and how we see the world,” he added.

Cook’s tenure at Apple saw the tech giant move to compete in new product and service categories, building a broader consumer tech ecosystem off of the MacBook, iPhone and iPad.

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In 2014, Cook and the company announced the Apple Watch as the company entered the wearable health tech market, while it also launched Apply Pay that year to build on its base of consumer device users to compete in mobile payments.

The next year, Apple Music marked the company’s pivot from iTunes to a subscription-based model for consumers who stream their music, while 2016 saw the debut of Apple’s AirPods which supercharged the growth of the company’s wearables division. The company also launched Apple TV+ and Apple Card in 2019 as it continued to broaden its service offerings.

Apple also hit a number of major corporate milestones under Cook’s leadership. It became the first U.S.-based publicly traded company to reach $1 trillion in market capitalization in 2018. 

Apple later reached the $2 trillion milestone in 2020, surpassed the $3 trillion market for the first time in 2022 during intraday trading, then crossed $4 trillion in October 2025. It briefly overtook Nvidia for largest market cap in July 2026.

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Over the years, Apple has vied with ExxonMobil, Nvidia and Microsoft for the title of most valuable publicly traded U.S. company, with the top spot regularly changing hands among those companies. Within that period, Apple ranked first for much of the 2013 to 2018 period.

Apple currently has a market cap of roughly $4.6 trillion, ranking second behind Nvidia’s $5.25 trillion market cap while leading Microsoft’s $3.79 trillion valuation.

Apple is planning to hold the first major event under new CEO John Ternus next week on Sept. 9, when it will unveil its newest iPhone and could potentially reveal the long-awaited foldable iPhone.

Cook said in his letter that he takes “enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable as John,” adding that few people “understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does and I could not be more excited for his leadership.”

A report by Reuters noted that analysts expect Apple to launch a foldable iPhone, entering a new segment of the smartphone market to compete with Samsung in the growing device segment.