No pressure: Apple’s new CEO needs to be Steve Jobs and Tim Cook at the same time
No pressure: Apple’s new CEO needs to be Steve Jobs and Tim Cook at the same time
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/21/business/apple-new-ceo-nightcap
Publish Date: 2026-04-21 18:00:00
Source Domain: www.cnn.com
A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
New York —
John Ternus may have just landed the best and worst CEO job on the planet.
When Ternus takes over as Apple’s CEO in September, investors will be eager for a return to the kind of bold, creative action that made Apple a design pioneer under Steve Jobs. They’ll also expect Tim Cook-level mastery of Apple’s sprawling operations. And they’ll want to see the new guy do more than just emulate his predecessors — he must embody Apple’s “think different” mantra and put his own stamp on the Ternus Era.
So, yeah, congrats on the promotion, John! All you have to do now is steer a $4 trillion company and its 166,000 employees through the wilderness of the artificial intelligence boom and/or bust, come up with a blockbuster product on par with the iPhone and avoid pissing off any of the governments — like China, India and the United States, all of which have competing interests — that hold the keys to your suppliers’ factories. No pressure!
Of course, any CEO gig is a tall order, but the weight of expectations only grows when it’s one of the biggest companies in the world and you’re the third guy to follow to two back-to-back showstoppers.
Cook announced Monday that he would step down at the end of the summer, capping 15 years of what may well go down in business history books as one of the most successful CEO tenures ever.
From the start, Cook got a lot of criticism for not being Steve Jobs 2.0. He was the “operations guy,” not the creative visionary. But the numbers don’t lie: Apple’s profit has more than quadrupled under Cook; it became the first ever trillion-dollar company in 2018, and later became one of just a few to hit the $4…
