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Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Tim Cook Has Increased Apple’s Value by More Than $1 Trillion. No Other CEO Can Say That. - Barron's

Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple since August 2011. Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Tim Cook has accomplished something unmatched in the history of American business. Since he became Apple CEO in August 2011, the company’s market capitalization has increased by more than $1 trillion.

Even more remarkably, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella might do him one better.

There are only two U.S. companies with a valuation above $1 trillion: Apple (ticker: AAPL), at $1.3 trillion, and Microsoft (MSFT) at $1.2 trillion. Cook became Apple’s CEO on Aug. 24, 2011. Over the past 8-plus years, the stock has soared from a split-adjusted $53.74 to a recent $290 and change, boosting the company’s valuation by more than $1 trillion.

Satya Nadella was named Microsoft’s CEO on Feb. 4, 2014, not quite six years ago. Over than span, Microsoft’s valuation has soared by $930 billion. So while he hasn’t quite joined the trillion-dollar value-creation club, he might get there in less time than Cook did.

There aren’t many other obvious candidates for trillion-dollar CEO status, other than Amazon (AMZN) founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Amazon previously touched the $1 trillion level, and has a current valuation of about $925 billion. Alphabet (GOOGL) has a $920 billion valuation, and recently named Sundar Pichai to succeed Larry Page as CEO.

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Cook’s trillion-dollar run is all the more remarkable given that Apple was already 35 years old by the time he took the reins in Cupertino—and that he succeeded Apple’s legendary co-founder Steve Jobs in the job. Likewise, Nadella took the reins at Microsoft almost 39 years after the company was created.

A substantial portion of Apple’s $1 trillion run has unfolded over the past 12 months. With just a few hours in 2019 to go, Apple shares sport a year-to-date gain of 85%, increasing the company’s market cap by close to $600 billion. (As a point of comparison, Facebook’s total market cap is a little less than $600 billion.)

Apple shares were off 0.1% Tuesday morning to $291.17, in line with the performance of the Nasdaq Composite Index.

Nadella gets widespread credit for reviving Microsoft’s fortunes, in particular by fully embracing cloud computing, in which the company’s Azure service is competing head-to-head with Amazon Web Services. Microsoft shares have rallied 58% in 2019.

Cook periodically gets knocked as lacking the imagination of his predecessor—as a caretaker CEO. Critics complain that Apple has been less innovative under Cook than when Jobs was at the helm. That is both unfair, and untrue. During his run as CEO, Apple expanded sales of the iPhone and introduced new products including Apple Watch and the red-hot AirPods, and broadened the company’s push into services. And the bottom line is this, about 80% of the current value of Apple shares was created while Cook, not Jobs, was running the company.

Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com

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Tim Cook Has Increased Apple’s Value by More Than $1 Trillion. No Other CEO Can Say That. - Barron's
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