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Hey, this is Peter. Just a heads up, this episode contains a light dusting of profanity. Okay, you've been warned. Steve Jobs had been sick for years. Now he was dying from pancreatic cancer. It has been an eventful evening to say the least, but the real drama has yet to unfold. The world is waiting to see what happens next in Cupertino.
Apple had spent years refusing to acknowledge that Jobs was in decline, even though you could see him wasting away rail thin at onstage events. Silicon Valley whispered about Jobs' health all the time. If he talked about it out loud, though, you'd get shushed. But by August 2011, when Jobs said he wasn't going to run his company anymore because he could, quote, no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple CEO, everyone knew what that meant.
What they didn't know was, well, much of anything about Tim Cook, the guy Jobs had picked to replace him. Except one thing. He's known as a solid leader, but everyone seems to suggest he doesn't have that innovative spark that Steve Jobs had. Brilliant as he is, just about every analyst on the planet will tell you he's no Steve Jobs. You just can't replace someone like that. So the question is, how is this going to affect Apple products down the road?
Yukari Cain covered Apple for The Wall Street Journal. She knew who Tim Cook was because he'd been quietly serving as Apple's chief operating officer since 2007.
Tim was the numbers guy. He was the process guy. And so, you know, if Steve was instrumental and was the visionary behind all these great products like iPhones and iPods, the fact that everybody who wants one has one and can get one is because of Tim.
Apple defined greatness as changing history and being better than other companies and being morally righteous. And that's what people had questions about. The questions for Tim were about Apple's culture and its values and its vision. And they're all things that you can't put numbers to.
Since its founding in 1976, Apple has been shaped most profoundly by two men, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. Jobs co-founded the company and molded it in his image, obsessed with detail and design, passionately focused on a few products, intensely secretive.
Tim Cook inherited that company from Jobs, and he's had the challenge of leading it in Jobs' shadow. But he's managed to do something Jobs never accomplished. Cook has made Apple the most valuable company on the planet. So who are these two guys, and how have their leadership styles and personalities shaped the company that shapes our lives? I'm Peter Kafka, and this is Land of the Giants. The story of Steve Jobs, the design guru, begins with a wooden fence and a lesson.
When Steve was a kid, his father and he built a fence around the backyard of their house. He took me there one day to just rub the back of the fence. Walter Isaacson wrote Jobs' biography. He told his father, why do we have to make this back of the fence so beautiful? And his father said, because people who really care about beauty care about the parts unseen.
And Steve said that made him care about how things were crafted. I think he had an intense appreciation of beauty, but even the spiritual quality of the beauty of parts unseen.
Jobs' parents adopted him as an infant, and by all accounts, he grew up in a loving, working-class home. Bill Fernandez went to high school with Jobs and Cupertino. My mother considered him a fifth son because he was over so much, and sort of so much, so part of the family. And one of the aspects of our house was we had Japanese woodblock prints hanging on the walls.
Later on, Jobs started collecting those Japanese prints. And that aesthetic influenced the look of Apple products. Clean lines and sleek, uncluttered design. Another strong influence, a distinctly Bay Area mix of free speech, mysticism, and sticking it to the man. We would take long walks.
either on the suburban streets or out into the local hills or orchards or up to the reservoir. And we would talk the meaning of life, philosophy, why are we here, what are girls and what do you do with them, the wide range of things. But Jobs was also very much a California capitalist, able to mix spirituality and sales, high-tech and higher consciousness.
One of Jobs' great insights was that there was no conflict between being kind of hippie-ish and free speech movement and loving spirituality and ashrams and loving computers and electronics.
Jobs imprinted these influences on his company. That made Apple a very different place to work than the older tech companies in Silicon Valley like Hewlett-Packard. Apple saw itself as a countercultural company, rejecting dogmas of the old guard, which built things for big business and the military. Apple brought technology to the masses to liberate them. Ellen Petrie-Lienz grew up in Silicon Valley.
She started working at Apple right after college in 1981, after the company had gone public and Jobs had become very famous and very rich. The first time I met Steve Jobs, I'd been at Apple something like eight or nine days. And I remember walking along Banley Drive and I saw this person coming toward me who stood out somehow. As he got closer, I realized, oh my gosh, this is Steve Jobs.
I just became almost like overcome with nervousness and fear. And about 15 feet from him, I simply froze in my path. I couldn't walk any closer. And I remember stammering, you're Steve Jobs, aren't you? And he sort of like gave me sort of one of those looks, you know, when people like sort of put their chin up, you know, like, yeah, like that sort of look. And he goes, yeah, I am. Who are you? And what do you do for me?
And I remember needing to, like, catch up with my breath once he walked on. From early on, Jobs had a knack for getting people to do what he wanted them to do. It's dubbed the reality distortion field. Steve Jobs being able to stare at people without blinking, something he learned from his guru in India, and say, don't be afraid, you can do it. Over and over again, he pushes people to do things they didn't think was possible before.
He'd yell and scream, occasionally cry. Andy Hertzfeld was a key programmer in Apple's early days, working in and out of the distortion field. He was very quick to give negative opinions, sometimes even about things that he kind of liked, you know, the next day or so. You have to take an average of what he says over a period of days instead of putting faith into what he just said, because tomorrow he could say the opposite.
So I think one word they always use to describe Steve is material. And I think that's a pretty good word for describing his style. Guy Kawasaki was Apple's chief evangelist. That title told you a lot about the way Apple employees and customers thought about the company. It was a religion. And Steve Jobs was the leader of the faith. So if he did stuff that seemed wrong to you, well, that's impossible. You must be the one who's wrong.
One day, Steve shows up with a stranger and asked me what I thought of a product in a company, and I told him it's crap. And after I go through this diatribe of explaining why it's crap, he then says, Guy, I want you to meet the CEO of the company. So he had totally set me up to tell...
him and this stranger what a piece of crap this was and the stranger was the CEO of the company that produced the crap. What a lousy way to treat your chief evangelist, right? So, if you look at that half-empty Steve Jobs set me up, how impolite, how embarrassing. If you look at it half-full...
You'd say, well, I passed the Steve Jobs test because I can pretty much guarantee you that he probably thought it was crap too. I tell him it's shit and Steve is reinforced and Guy lives to fight another day. Because if Steve Jobs thought the software was shit and Guy said, no, it's great, Guy would have been gone.
One way Apple employees got Jobs to love what they did, they'd convince him it was his idea. If some smart engineer came up with something brilliant, they'd pitch it to him by saying, Steve, you just had a great idea. And then they'd explain it to him. Today, we'd call Steve Jobs a toxic boss. Back then, we'd use euphemisms like demanding and difficult.
Being a difficult leader is not hard. It's being a difficult leader who is almost always right. That's the hard part. So after a while, you figured out that, you know, if Steve said that my design was shit or that my software was shit or that my efforts were shit, he was right. And in a sense, that's a lot better than working for a company where the CEO is so stupid that he or she can't even tell you why you're wrong.
That's worse. As Jobs honed his reality distortion field, he also built a code of silence around everything Apple built. And that code was strictly enforced. Nothing was allowed to leak until it was ready to be announced. Steve is sort of intuitively a master showman. Again, Andy Hertzfeld. He really knows how to get people excited about things. And I think he just intuited it.
that keeping things secret would make announcements have a much greater impact. Eventually, Apple developed a culture of being secretive. For many years, inaugurated by Steve, they kind of have a Gestapo to terrorize the employees from talking about what they're working on. So that's Steve Jobs in his first go-around as Apple's leader. Capricious, secretive, and depending on your perspective, abusive.
In 1997, when he came back to Apple after 12 years away, he wanted to show his critics that he was a better leader. But he was also still Steve Jobs. He was wiser, for sure, a little more measured, but he would still scream at people. You know, when you fire people in an elevator, when they look at your cross-eyed or stuff, that's not good.
Did someone actually get fired within an elevator? Yeah. By Steve Jobs? Yeah, I didn't witness it, but that's a famous story. People, when they'd get into the elevator with him, just looked at the floor. They didn't want to engage him, but he would sometimes engage him. One time in a meeting with one of Apple's chip suppliers, Jobs famously called them fucking dickless assholes. Dickless assholes?
It worked because Apple got its chips on time. So the Jobs' managerial style hadn't changed that much, but he was ready to delegate some stuff. When he ran Apple back in the 80s, he was deeply involved on the manufacturing side of the company. He even insisted on painting the machines in the Macintosh factory bright colors, and that didn't work out so well because the paint gummed up the machines. After he came back, Jobs was happy to give operations to someone else.
It took him a year to find the right person, a 37-year-old Compaq executive named Tim Cook. Leander Caney is the editor of Cult of Mac and the author of a book on Tim Cook. The company was not successful. It was really floundering. And he was having trouble recruiting people to come work for the company. They'd had layoffs.
It was slowly being built back up, but by no means a success. And for someone like Tim Cook, who was very, very ambitious and had had up to that point a very successful and meteoric career in operations working for other companies, it was not a no-brainer to join this company. In fact, you know, a lot of people think he was committing career suicide by joining Apple.
Cook and Jobs came from different worlds. Cook grew up in Gulf Coast, Alabama. After college, he went to work for IBM. That's an early Apple rival. And later for the PC maker Compaq. Along the way, Cook earned a reputation as a manufacturing miracle worker. Someone who could build machines with crazy efficiency. More Toyota than GM. That was the magic Jobs wanted Cook to bring to Apple.
At the time, Apple was running factories in the United States, in Europe, in Ireland, and in Asia and Singapore. Everything was done in-house, and it was extremely inefficient. Sometimes
They would send components from Singapore to Ireland for some assembly. And then they would send those components back to Singapore to finally be put into a machine. And it was extremely wasteful, inefficient and expensive. When Cook came in to run Apple's worldwide operations, he immediately saw that Apple's manufacturing infrastructure was dead weight on the company.
So he started outsourcing it, moving it to third-party suppliers, mostly in Asia, and negotiating with them to streamline their operations, getting them to run lean in a way Apple itself had never been able to do. He's tough on vendors. It was actually brilliant to watch, and I learned a lot from watching him doing this. As head of engineering, John Rubenstein would travel with Cook when he visited suppliers in Asia. We'd sit there with a vendor, and he'd basically give them a proctology exam for hours.
days if necessary, right? You know, until we would get what we needed. One challenge Cook had to deal with early on, Apple was sitting on piles of inventory, was drowning in parts for computers it hadn't made yet and finished products it hadn't sold yet.
Under Cook, Apple wanted a just-in-time manufacturing model, so parts arrive as soon as they're needed instead of sitting around in a warehouse.
In the manufacturing business, the way you measure efficiency is by something called inventory turns, meaning how quickly you use up all the parts on the shelf. Before Cook came along, Apple's Asia operations were turning inventory 25 times a year every couple of weeks. Within 18 months of Cook's hire, Apple turned over its inventory every day. Here's Yukari Kane again.
He built the entire operations infrastructure that Apple exists on today and succeeds on. I mean, he got Apple to a point where the products were sold almost as soon as they were made. That's the kind of infrastructure you have to have if you're going to sell something that changes the world. We have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, it didn't look or work like any other phone on the market. And the biggest difference was there was no keyboard, just a big screen on the front of the phone. It works like magic.
You don't need a stylus. It's far more accurate than any touch display that's ever been shipped. But there was a problem with the prototype Jobs showed off in San Francisco. At the time, the front piece of material was going to be plastic. And so the one he held up on stage had a plastic screen on it. Mark Hamblin led hardware design for the iPhone touchscreen.
And basically he pulled out the phone and there was a huge scratch on it. And he said, we have to use glass. That's just the only way this is going to be acceptable. Hamblin's team had considered glass early on and ruled it out. Because who wants a big piece of glass on the front of a gadget you are definitely going to drop on the ground. Now, with less than six months before the first iPhones were supposed to ship, Jobs had thrown them a major curveball. So the first thought in my mind is you've got to be fucking kidding me.
And there was a big meeting in the design studio, basically, of what the hell are we going to do? The amount of re-engineering that had to happen in that span of five months or so was, it was epic. And not just re-engineering. They also had to figure out how these new glass screens were going to get built. We had to go explain this to our suppliers, right? And so we had a whole supply chain put together for
that we had to throw out. And then we had to find new suppliers for things. Supply chain? That was Tim Cook's department. Yukari Kane says Cook forced Apple's Chinese assembly vendor to make the change in almost no time. They had to call in workers in the middle of the night. Tim was Steve's right-hand man in the sense that if Steve wanted something, Tim made it happen. You know how the story ends. The iPhone ships on time with the glass screen and dents the universe.
But credit for the iPhone's success goes to Steve Jobs, the visionary, not Tim Cook, the supply chain guy. I don't think really Steve cared much about operations. I think as long as it ran well, it wasn't an interest to him. Apple veteran John Rubenstein says Cook did exactly what Jobs wanted him to do. It freed him to spend time on the stuff he cared about. Industrial design, that he was interested in.
Steve was always hanging around the ID studio because that was his happy place. I don't think Steve ever understood how much work it took to get millions of these products shipped in the exact way that he wanted them.
And the industrial design team would have these parties in a lavish hotel with free-flowing drinks and their spouses. And the operations team had, you know, a team lunch near the office with raffle prizes. One version of the Apple turnaround story goes like this. Jobs came back to Apple, streamlined the offerings, killed off a bunch of bad products, and dreamed up Hail Mary projects like the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone.
And that's the story we told in the last episode. But behind all that, the guy who was actually getting those shiny new machines into stores and making the numbers work, that was Tim Cook. Tim Cook does not get the credit he deserves for saving Apple. Leander Caney from Cult of Mac. I think all the credit went to Jobs because he was the public face of the company. But behind the scenes...
It was, you know, Tim Cook's restructuring the company, remaking it, rethinking it, turning it into a modern, you know, 21st century manufacturing behemoth. All that stuff came, I think, from Tim Cook and is hugely important, almost as important as the hit products, you know, which have been credited with saving the company. Coming up, Tim Cook helped save Apple. But somehow, after a decade of being Apple's CEO, he's still a mystery to the outside world. So let's get to know him right after this.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash vox. Customers love iPhones.
And it's consistently rated number one in every customer satisfaction ranking I can find. And it's not number one by a small amount. In fact, the iPhone is pummeling the competition. Tim Cook's formal debut as Apple's new boss came when he unveiled the iPhone 4S. This was, it turns out, the day before Steve Jobs died. The event was about as exciting as it sounds there. Cook was like a photo negative of Jobs. Low energy. Uninspiring.
Yukari Kane wasn't surprised. I think he was, you know, he was unpracticed. He was stiff. He's a more serious guy. This went on for years. Tim Cook would appear in public and he was not Steve Jobs and people were bummed out that he wasn't Steve Jobs. Really going to need you to stick to the script on this one. I'm the CEO of Apple, Willis. I'm not going to do anything stupid. Please stop comparing me to Steve Jobs. Nobody's comparing me to Steve Jobs. They're going to forget they ever heard the name Steve Jobs. The comedy show Key & Peele imagined the Tim Cook they'd like to see.
Steve Jobs on steroids. Amped up pro wrestling character. I'm supposed to come out here and tell you about some bullshit new iPhone pad pod dick pussy shit. You've seen it. Boring.
In so many ways, Steve Jobs set the template for what we think a great tech CEO should be. He was a showman who always wore the same outfit. So leaders like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes cultivated their own uniforms, too. Holmes even wore a Jobsian black turtleneck. Jobs was the guy who unveiled his company's products in dramatic presentations. So every other tech leader did their own show and tell.
Dressing like Steve Jobs doesn't give you stage presence, and being a jerk doesn't mean you're a genius leader. But that's what a generation of techies watch Jobs do. Cook doesn't fit that model. Leander Caney has been watching Cook for years as editor of Cult of Mac. I think people looked at Jobs and they were like, oh, how can Tim Cook, you know, fill those shoes? And they were looking at all of the wrong attributes. In their defense, it's kind of hard to know where to look.
Tim is kind of a mystery to people in the outside world. What's it like working with him day to day? It's kind of a mystery on the inside, too. John Rubenstein again. We had a very close relationship and we got along very, very well. But, you know, Tim plays his cards very close to his vest. We know that Cook grew up in small town Robertsdale, Alabama. His dad was a foreman at a shipyard and his mom worked at a pharmacy. Cook was a middle child, one brother on each side. A kid who loved riding his bike when he wasn't studying.
And Cook has a story he tells about biking home in sixth or seventh grade. This image was permanently imprinted in my brain, and it would change my life forever. He saw a cross being burned on his neighbor's lawn, neighbors who were black. When he tells this story, Cook says he yelled at the men and told them to stop. It was this moment, he says, when he realized that speaking out against hate was important, something he's held on to his entire life.
Since these early days, I have seen and I've experienced many other types of discrimination. This is Cook accepting an achievement award from his alma mater, Auburn University. And all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority. As Cook's stature rose within and outside Apple, the fact that he was gay became something people mentioned quietly in Silicon Valley, but that he never discussed publicly.
But in 2014, he came out via a first-person essay in Bloomberg Business. "'I don't consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I've benefited from the sacrifice of others,' he wrote. "'So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, then it's worth the trade-off with my own privacy.'"
Reading that essay today, it seems unremarkable. But it's worth remembering that seven years ago, there was a reasonable concern that if the CEO of a company selling consumer goods around the world came out, that the company could be harmed. There were and still are dozens of countries around the world where it's illegal to be gay. That's certainly something that weighed on Cook before he wrote that.
That's the outsider's glimpse of Tim Cook, the man, not an acid-dropping guru following showman, just a private guy who, when he surfaces in the public sphere, is there to talk about Apple products, or in some rare cases, something related to social justice. Inside Apple, he's got a different reputation, a manager who's just as intense as Steve Jobs, but one who shows it in a very different way.
Anyone who's been in a meeting with Tim Cook knows to show up prepared. Very prepared. He would drill holes
Steve Chow was famous for yelling, screaming, crying, emotional excess as management. Cook manages differently.
In one meeting, Cook noticed an empty chair at the table. He was upset that somebody who was supposed to be there wasn't there. And instead of saying anything, he slowly crushed an empty can of soda. Occasionally people ask me if I would rather work for Steve or Tim. And it's such a tough question. I think, like, Tim would be very, very difficult to work for.
There's no way Cook is ever getting out of Jobs' shadow, literally. When Cook takes the stage to show off new products at Apple's headquarters, he's doing it in the Steve Jobs theater. Jobs and the Jobs myth are infused in Apple. But Cook still has the ability to do things Jobs never did, like philanthropy. Jobs never believed in it. He always said he was making the world a better place with his products. Cook, on the other hand, has made a point of giving publicly.
He donates about $5 million of his own money each year, and he said he plans to eventually give away his entire fortune. Apple itself now gives away money by matching employees' donations. But Apple may be changing in ways that have nothing to do with Tim Cook's management style, because there's a larger cultural shift happening in corporate America, and specifically in tech companies. The way Cook responds to those changes may be as important as the way he grapples with Jobs' legacy.
Catalyzed by the Me Too movement, the pandemic, and the murder of George Floyd, there's now a generation of workers who want a bigger say in the way we work. And they want their employers to publicly embrace their values. And they're saying all of this out loud, in and outside of work. Over the last few years, we've seen employees raise their voices, leak memos, and even walk out of work at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
But at Apple, until recently, we haven't heard a peep, which seemed like a direct extension of the Steve Jobs era, where the only Apple employee who spoke outside of the company was named Steve Jobs. Now there are hundreds and maybe thousands of Apple employees speaking out about the way they work and the way they want that to change, and that could be a major test for Cook. My colleague, Shereen Ghaffari, has been closely following tech worker activism, and she talked to me about what she's been hearing from Apple's workforce.
She told me about one of the more vocal Apple employees she's been talking to. Yeah, so Cher Scarlett is an engineer at Apple. She's a non-traditional hire in many ways. She's self-taught. She's a woman, which is, you know, women are unfortunately a minority of Apple's technical talent. And she had a big social media following in the coding community before she got there. And how did she end up on your radar? What brought you to her?
So when I was seeing Apple employees like publicly venting their frustration for the first time on social media, Scarlett was one of those people. And in particular, they were upset about the hiring of one person, Antonio Garcia Martinez. He was a high profile former Facebook employee who had caused a stir with his book, Chaos Monkeys, which was a memoir about his time working in tech.
He said, most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive, despite their claims of worldliness and are generally full of shit. So Scarlett joined several other of her colleagues who were angry about this and wrote a letter to Apple management demanding that they explain why Garcia Martinez was even hired in the first place. They posted this open internal letter and distributed it widely within Apple Slack channels.
Why is this person being hired despite supposedly not matching who we claim that we hire? And that's all we really wanted to know. How if you're going to hire somebody like this, not just him, how are you going to protect the people that work with this person? Right after that, the letter got leaked publicly. And I think within the same day, Antonio Garcia Martinez was fired.
It's very difficult to imagine employees publicly or even semi-publicly complaining about other employees in open letters back when Steve Jobs ran Apple. What happened to Sheriff Scarlett after this letter came out? I mean, basically nothing. I've also been told that, you know, I would have been Steve Jobbed, which is like apparently a term that gets thrown around about people who do try to raise workplace issues getting fired and then paid to go away, basically.
Since then, Scarlett has been continuing to organize her colleagues and she's been really active on issues like pay disparity, remote work, and harassment and discrimination at the company. Well, now I'm finding out that there's hundreds of people who feel the way that I do, not only that feel the way that I do, but that are willing to come together, which means there's probably a lot more who do feel this way that are scared like I've been scared.
All unusual to hear Apple employees talking about this stuff internally, publicly, and not to be too meta about here, but she's talking to us.
On the record, using her real name, I cannot imagine a time previous to this when you'd hear an Apple employee talking to reporters this publicly. That's right. I mean, I think it's notable for even one person to talk to the press who works at Apple about these serious issues at the company. But it's another thing for, you know, that person to then have the support of hundreds, maybe thousands of their colleagues and start actually organizing on, you know,
social media channels about it. And by the way, Shereen, Tim Cook has put out a memo recently promising to hunt down leakers. He was upset that an all-hands meeting, some details came out from that. And for years and years and years, we've been hearing about Apple products before they're formally announced. He's promising to sort of hunt down the leakers and then find them
Do you think that memo is a response to people like Sheriff Scarlett talking in public about workplace issues? I don't know what's in Cook's head, but I will say that there's a difference between employees like Scarlett coming out and talking about issues in the workplace, which is actually, mind you, protected under U.S. labor law, versus someone going out and giving the latest iPhone product design to a reporter or to the competition. And I think, of course, Cook is going to try to put all these people under the same umbrella of being leakers, but there's a big difference.
So what do we make of this? We don't know how many people are as active as Sherry Scarlett. We don't know how many sort of folks agree or disagree with her at Apple. We know she's doing it. Is this a reflection of the way the world has changed or the way Apple has changed? I think it's a little bit of both, right? These kinds of issues are things that get talked about in every workplace.
But I think that, you know, Cook's anger about leaks aside, he is being more tolerant of just open employee discussion, even within the company, than Jobs probably would have ever been. Thanks, Shereen. Thank you. Cher Scarlett's story is a work in progress. We don't know what, if anything, will happen to her at Apple or if she'll get the changes she wants. We only know that she's still working there.
We also don't know how Tim Cook really feels about Sheriff Scarlett and other employees speaking up in and outside of the company. We do know that it's happening and that we've never seen or heard anything like this before. And that means the culture of secrecy that Steve Jobs created at Apple is changing under Tim Cook. One thing we do know is that Apple in the Tim Cook era is boring.
All those people who worried Tim Cook wouldn't have the same verve that Steve Jobs brought to the company, they were right. Apple has rolled out some cool products under Cook like AirPods and Apple Watches, but those are iPhone accessories, and each new iPhone is like the last iPhone. The big change to this year's iPhone is literally the size of the notch at the top of the screen.
Here's Guy Kawasaki again. There used to be every two or three years a story about, yeah, you know, people in Australia where it's 18 hours earlier are standing in line sleeping in front of the Apple Sydney store. Well, I don't know who's standing in line sleeping outside an Apple store in the last few years. Nobody. But also, who cares if Apple isn't exciting? Under Cook's leadership, it has thrived.
Apple's annual revenue has increased from $108 billion to $275 billion. It now sells 10 iPhones per second. And it's the most valuable company in the world. It's worth more than $2 trillion. Cook has yet to come up with a dent the world product like the iPhone, and maybe he never will. But for now, that's not a problem at all. The system that Cook built to get the iPhone and all the products in its ecosystem into customers' hands is humming along.
Steve Jobs built the iPhone. Tim Cook built the company that made the iPhone possible. Now it's time for Cook to start thinking about his legacy, who he may pass the baton to when he steps down. Part of that legacy will be a contradiction. Cook, a man who reveres Martin Luther King Jr., says he cares deeply about human rights, has built a company that's deeply enmeshed in China, an authoritarian regime where ideas like human rights just don't register.
For years, Apple and Cook have been able to live with that tension, but that may not always be the case. I think when we look back on Tim Cook's handling of Apple through what is admittedly an extraordinarily challenging time, the compromises he has made will look worse and worse with every passing year. We'll talk about that on the next episode of Land of the Giants. Land of the Giants, the Apple revolution is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Audio clips discussing the resignation of Steve Jobs are from ABC, CNN, and NBC Bay Area. I'm Peter Kafka. If you like this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you want to do that. And tell a friend. Subscribe to hear our next episode when it drops. Quick disclosure, Vox Media creates content for and does business with Apple. None of the people creatively involved with this season of Land of the Giants are involved with those projects.