Apple’s Changing of the Guard

Tim Cook winds up 15 years as Apple CEO tomorrow, succeeded by John Ternus, which is probably the most significant event of the week in tech. We can’t call it news, as it was announced a few months ago, but it’s worth taking note of now that it’s actually happening. After all, while CEOs of small to midsize tech companies come and go fairly often—PayPal has had three in the past five years, for instance—we don’t get a CEO changeover at the half-dozen biggest tech companies very often.

The last CEO transition at one of those big companies was Andy Jassy, who took the reins at Amazon in 2021 (yes, five years ago!). You have to go back to 2015 for the one before that, when Sundar Pichai took over at Google, and a year before that, when Satya Nadella became Microsoft CEO. It may be a few years before we get another one. With Cook’s exit, the oldest big tech CEO is Jensen Huang, who is reportedly 63, while his counterparts at other companies aren’t yet 60. It’s hard to imagine Huang stepping down anytime soon: He seems to have the energy of a 25-year-old.