Tim Cook was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1960 and trained as an industrial engineer at Auburn before earning an MBA at Duke. He spent more than a decade at IBM and a brief tenure at Compaq before being recruited by Steve Jobs in 1998 to rebuild Apple's then-broken supply chain — work that would, over the following decade, become the operational spine of the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Named chief executive in August 2011 weeks before Jobs's death, Cook inherited a company many expected to drift without its founder. Instead he engineered the longest sustained value creation in corporate history: deepening the services business, building Apple Silicon as a vertically integrated alternative to Intel, launching the Apple Watch and AirPods as new categories, and pushing the company past successive trillion-dollar milestones.
Cook's public profile is quieter than his predecessor's, but his policy footprint is substantial — on privacy as a product principle, on supply-chain reshoring to India and Vietnam, on environmental commitments and on the company's long, careful negotiation with the Chinese state. Inside Apple he is regarded as the discipline that lets the design organization remain ambitious.