Episode Details

I have been a user of Apple products since the first Mac came out in the early 1980s, and I have been an investor off and on in the company for much of its life. The announcement that Tim Cook was planning to step down as CEO after a stint of fifteen years atop the company caught my attention, and in this session, I look at his legacy. Given that Cook was preceded by Steve Jobs, it is almost unavoidable that comparisons will be made between the tenures of the two, and I do so. Without taking anything away from the Steve Jobs legend, I feel that investors and observers have underplayed how well Tim Cook has played the cards he was dealt,, as he has helped Apple transition from being the disruptive growth engine it was under Jobs to the cash machine that it became under Cook. While Cook has been critiqued for being too cautious and missing out on tech trends, the trade offs he made have worked out well for shareholders. I do believe that his discipline and restraint deserve celebration.
Slides: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/blog/CookatApple.pdf
Blog post: https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2026/05/an-ode-to-restraint-lessons-from-tim.html

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