Tim Cook is leaving the CEO role at Apple after 14 years at the helm. He joined in 1998, took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, and leaves behind a company valued at $4 trillion, a figure that did not exist when he started.
The story is worth reading for what it documents: the specific product lines, services expansions, and China strategy decisions that built that valuation. These are not abstract achievements. They are a sequence of calculated bets made over a decade and a half, and TechCrunch maps them out.
What comes next is the real question. Apple at $4 trillion is a different problem than Apple at $350 billion, which is what Cook inherited. Whoever follows him does not get to build. They get to maintain, or watch it contract.
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