When Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in 2011, he had to continue the heavy legacy of his predecessor. One of the largest and most innovative companies in the world had just lost its visionary founder. Steve Jobs and the company he co-founded were considered more than iconic, and after his death, experts predicted disaster. With Android competition growing and uncertainty about the company’s future products, Cook had a lot to lose taking control. But it proved that the critics were wrong. Eight years later, under Cook’s leadership, Apple has soared. After Jobs’ death, Apple reached the ultimate milestone: it became the first company valued at one trillion dollars, meaning it was the company with the largest market capitalization in the world. Its stock price nearly tripled. Its cash reserves more than quadrupled compared to 2010, reaching a record amount of 267.2 billion dollars, despite having spent nearly 220 billion dollars on share buybacks and dividend payments.

To give you an idea of Apple’s enormous size with Tim Cook as CEO, in the first quarter of 2018, when I was writing this book, the company had revenue of 88.3 billion dollars and profits of 20 billion dollars. In comparison, Facebook, with more than 2.2 billion active users, earned just 40.6 billion dollars for the entire year of 2017. Moreover, in those three months alone, Apple earned almost as much as its competitor, Microsoft – once the largest technology company – did for the whole of 2017 (90 billion). Cook’s Apple crushes the competition in almost every possible way: The iPhone is the most successful product of all time. It has swept everything. Apple has sold over 1.2 billion iPhones in the ten years since their introduction – four of those years under Jobs’ leadership and the rest under Cook’s.