It’s not unusual to feel some nerves on your first day in a new job.
Maybe your predecessor was a much-loved character in the office. Maybe they brought a homemade cake in whenever a colleague had a birthday. Or maybe they built your business into the world’s first trillion-dollar corporate behemoth.
That last one might be a bit specific, but it’s the reality faced by one man: John Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook as CEO of Apple tomorrow.
Cook is the man who turned one of the world’s most innovative companies into the world’s most ludicrously valuable company. (We can’t be certain about his cake-baking prowess, though his surname does raise expectations.)
In April, the CEO unexpectedly announced he was stepping down from the company he’s run since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011.
Those success-filled 15 years made him synonymous enough with the company that US President Donald Trump famously addressed him as ‘Tim Apple’ in 2019.
So, it feels a little meagre to simply say Ternus has big shoes to fill. These shoes are big enough to fit all those unsold Apple Vision Pro augmented reality headsets.
To set out why, let’s take a look at some of the numbers.
You may remember the moment in August 2018 that Apple became the first trillion-dollar company in history.
What you might not know is it was also the first company to hit a market capitalisation of $2 trillion and $3 trillion. Chip manufacturer Nvidia pipped it to the $4 trillion and $5 trillion milestones, but Apple soon caught up.
In fact, Apple and Nvidia are still the only two companies to have reached a value of $5 trillion – and it was all under Tim Cook’s watch.
For context – as if this makes such a whopping number any easier to process – there are only 14 countries in the world with total wealth above $5 trillion, according to analysis by Forbes.
All right, so that number might look a little weak compared to the ones above.
But consider this: that’s the average amount of value Cook added to Apple’s value while he was in charge, according to the Bank of America – the equivalent of £23.6 million.
In other words, if Cook worked nine or ten hours a day, that single shift would roughly be worth as much to Apple as an entire street of houses in Mayfair.
Or, y’know, roughly ten million times the typical hourly rate for a worker at the Chinese factory where iPhones are assembled.
3,100,000,000
The International Data Corporation reckons that’s the number of iPhones that have been shipped out since Cook became Apple’s CEO.
If you stacked them end to end from the Earth’s surface, they would comfortably make it to the Moon.
If you lined them up, they would circle the equator more than 11 times.
And if you threw all of them in the Marianas Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean – well, we’d probably all be a little happier.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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