Hey guys, it’s Greg with Apple Explained,
and today we’re going to explore the history of Tim Cook. Where he grew up, some of his career achievements,
and how he ended up as CEO of the most valuable company in the world. This topic was the winner of last weeks voting
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polls will show up right in your activity feed and you can let me know which video you’d
like to see next. So as you may know, Tim Cook is the current
CEO of Apple who replaced Steve Jobs in 2011. And while Cook may not be as famous, he’s
just as interesting and has contributed just as much to the company over his tenure. We’ll start off by covering his early life,
then explain his career path, and finally we’ll discuss his major achievements within
Apple. So, Timothy Donald Cook was born on November
1st, 1960 in Mobile, Alabama. Now Mobile isn’t a big place, and it’s
not exactly known for producing the most famous people in the world – although there have
been a few big names, including Jeff Sessions, Laverne Cox, and quite a few major league
baseball and NFL football players. Cook, though, wasn’t really set up for fame
in his early life. His mother worked in a pharmacy, his dad worked
in a shipyard, and he had two brothers that his parents also supported. He was always known as a bright student, though,
and he graduated high school second in his class. He eventually left Mobile in 1982 for Auburn
University in Alabama where he earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering. At this point, Cook’s story starts to take
shape. After Auburn, he started working for IBM. He spent twelve years there, from 1982 to
1994, and climbed the ranks to director of North American fulfillment. During this time, he also earned his master’s
degree from Duke University in business administration. He was awarded a title as a Fuqua Scholar,
given to the top ten percent of business administration graduates at Duke. After leaving IBM, he briefly jumped around
to a few more high-level positions with companies like Compaq and Intelligent Electronics. In 1998, Cook met Steve Jobs who offered Cook
a position at Apple, but it wasn’t same Apple we know of today. At that time, Apple was losing money fast
and nearing bankruptcy. Many in the tech industry felt Apple was doomed
to failure with no chance of recovery. Including Steve Jobs, but that didn’t prevent
Jobs from trying to save the company anyway. Because Apple was essentially a sinking ship,
many people tried to dissuade Cook from taking the job, but he felt that it was the right
choice. He described in as an intuitive decision,
and during a commencement speech at Auburn University, he said that “on that day in
early 1998 I listened to my intuition, not the left side of my brain or for that matter
even the people who knew me best… no more than five minutes into my initial interview
with Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join Apple.” He described Jobs as a creative genius and
felt that he could make a huge impact at Apple – one that would turn the company from a
sinking ship into a successful tech giant. And as we now know, that was the right decision. Cook did end up making some crucial contributions
that brought Apple into the global limelight and really allowed Jobs’s creative genius
to shine through. At the start, Cook took a position as the
Senior Vice President for worldwide operations. He was in charge of supplier relationships,
supply chain operations, and leading the Macintosh division. One of the first actions he took was shutting
down Macintosh factories and signing new contracts with manufacturers to take some of the pressure
off the internal supply chain. He reduced inventory significantly by successfully
implementing something called just-in-time manufacturing. An inventory strategy borrowed from Toyota
that reduced flow times within production systems as well as response times from suppliers. He negotiated new deals with suppliers and
within a year of his hiring, Apple began to see profits for the first time in years. Cook served as Apple’s Senior Vice President
until 2007, and in that time he made a lot of important decisions that seriously affected
the future of the company. He predicted that flash memory would be central
to new technology in 2005, and his decision to invest in it early payed off big with products
like iPods, iPads, and iPhones. He helped create the current image of the
company which allowed higher market prices for products – all while keeping production
costs low. He was promoted to lead operations in 2007,
and then as interim Chief Executive in 2009. As Steve Jobs battled with pancreatic cancer,
Cook took over more and more of the daily operations of Apple – and Jobs eventually
appointed Cook Chief Executive Officer on August 24th, 2011 – just a few weeks before
Jobs passed away. At that point, Cook had a lot of pressure
and responsibility on his shoulders since Steve Jobs was obviously a tough act to follow. But Cook delivered a successful first year
as CEO and earned the title of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, but he was only
getting started. In the third fiscal quarter of 2012, Apple’s
revenue didn’t look as good as expected, and infighting among executives was reaching
a boiling point. In response, Cook rearranged the leadership
team of Apple pretty significantly. First, Scott Forstall stepped down as the
senior vice president of iOS in 2012 and then left the company for good a year later in
2013. Cook and the board of directors asked the
vice president of retail John Browett to step down only a few months after he started, and
his role was divvied up to other high-ranking individuals. This rearrangement was controversial for both
Apple employees and outsiders, who thought that most of Apple’s success came from allowing
tension to exist between senior executives. And this wouldn’t be the last controversial
event involving Tim Cook. In 2014, he made some waves by issuing what
some people thought was a more than sharp remark to shareholders. As part of an ongoing commitment to making
Apple a more sustainable company, he announced that Apple was increasing its investment in
renewable energy sources and in making sure that their raw materials were obtained ethically. But some shareholders, like the National Center
for Public Policy Research, weren’t happy with these endeavors. They asked Cook to only pursue investments
that were immediately profitable to Apple. And Cook responded with anger, saying, “When
we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody return
on investment. If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons,
you should get out of this stock.” Now, obviously Cook has been much more politically
outspoken than Jobs, but this event was one of many that emphasized his concern with business
ethics and the impact of Apple on the world – not only as a supplier of technology,
but as a manufacturer and distributer. Another example of this ethical concern happened
in 2016, a few months after the San Bernardino shooting. The FBI asked Apple to cooperate in the investigation
of Rizwan Farook, one of the shooting suspects, by unlocking his iPhone and allowing investigators
to search its contents. When Cook denied the request, a federal judge
ordered Apply to comply by creating special firmware to get around the phone’s security. Cook appealed the decision – not only in
the court of law, but in the court of public opinion with a scathing open letter that condemned
the governments’ actions. He called the consequences of their demands
“chilling” and predicted that, if Apple was forced to comply, there was no telling
what the future of privacy laws might hold. A day before the appeal on March 22nd, 2016,
the FBI found a third party to unlock the phone and dropped the case against Apple. Not all of the controversies surrounding Cook
paint him in a good light, however. In 2017, documents leaked that showed Apple
paying extremely low taxes to the Irish government before transferring their offshore accounts
to the Channel Islands. These “Paradise Papers”, as they were
called, resulted in Apple being asked to pay almost $15 billion in unpaid taxes to the
European Union. On top of potential tax evasion, Cook was
criticized personally for his business expenses, which amounted to almost $100,000 in personal
travel and $224,000 for personal security in 2017. Cook defended himself and Apple against both
of these criticisms, claiming that Apple paid taxes responsibly and that his personal bills
were so high only to preserve his safety. While Tim Cook is known for making some pretty
tough, and very public, decisions, he has been criticized by analysts for the amount
of innovation that Apple has produced since his time serving as CEO. He was criticized for the iPhone X, which
saw slow sales after its release in November 2017 – but he defended it fiercely as a
prime example of Apple innovation. Even though he may not have the same creative
genius Jobs was known for, he’s still an excellent businessman with a history of major
upgrades to the company product line. For instance, in 2014 he announced that Apple
was acquiring Beats Music and that its founders, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, were taking executive
roles at Apple. In that same year he announced features like
Apple Pay, Burst Selfies, the Apple Watch, and reliable Apple News. So, we’ve discussed Cook’s career at Apple
and some of the important decisions he’s made as both Senior Vice President and most
recently as CEO. But there’s a lot more to him than just
being a leader at Apple. His decisions for the future of the company
are often based in global ethical concerns, like hiring Lisa Jackson, the former head
of the Environmental Protection Agency, to help improve the company’s reliance on renewable
resources and an increased effort in creating accessibility features for people with disabilities. Those decisions come from a lifelong interest
in justice and his own personal values. When he was about 13 years old, growing up
in Alabama, he witnessed members of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross on a Black family’s
lawn. He cites this incident as a major influence
on his life and considers himself a human rights activist. He was also wrongly diagnosed with Multiple
Sclerosis in 1996 – a progressive, degenerative illness – which he says made him “see
the world in a different way” and motivated him to help others even more. This system of ethics and beliefs manifest
themselves in different ways with Cook. One example is in 2017, when President Trump
withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, Cook publicly voiced his disappointment
and spoke directly with the president about his concerns. But climate change and renewable energy aren’t
the only issues that Cook stands up for. In 2012, he donated $50 million dollars to
hospitals around Silicon Valley to help build infrastructure and a new children’s hospital
in the area. He donates almost annually to democratic politicians,
including Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton’s campaign
in the 2016 election. He also spoke out strongly in 2017 on the
discontinuation of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, defending
the children of undocumented immigrants’ right to stay, work, and get education in
the United States. Finally, and maybe most significantly, Cook
is passionate about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. He came out publicly as gay in 2014, although
he had been open about his sexuality in his private life years earlier. He now speaks publicly as a gay advocate and
was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor, where he spoke about the history of LGBT activism
in the south. He says that he plans to donate his fortune
when he passes away to charity. Overall, Cook has spent twenty years with
Apple and been through both some good and some bad. He’s credited with helping turn the company
around in the 90’s, and has since built Apple into an extremely profitable company
that brought in almost $50 billion in 2017. In 2018, he pledged to create 20,000 new jobs
and invest $350 billion into the American economy. And as a result of his ethical beliefs and
advocacy, Cook holds the honor of Financial Times Person of the Year, the Robert F. Kennedy
Ripple of Hope Award, Fortune Magazine’s World’s Greatest Leader, an honorary doctorate
from George Washington University, and the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award. Who knows how long he’ll serve as Apple’s
CEO, but one thing is certain. Steve Jobs left his company in very good hands. So that is the history of Tim Cook, and if
you want to vote for the next video topic, don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next
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