Biography | Tim Cook — The Day the Board Named Him Apple's CEO

On 24 August 2011 Apple published a letter.

Steve Jobs resigned as chief executive and asked the board to carry out its succession plan. The board named Timothy D. Cook, then fifty, as CEO the same day.

Jobs stayed as chairman. He died on 5 October 2011.

The appointment was not a surprise inside the company. Cook had already run Apple as interim chief executive in 2009, while Jobs had a liver transplant, and again after January 2011, when Jobs took an extended medical leave.

On 11 August 2011 Jobs asked Cook to come to his house and told him the job would be permanent. That conversation is not the pin. The house was private.

The public fact belongs to the campus where Cook already worked: 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino.

He was the seventh chief executive in Apple's history and the first since the 1997 return of Jobs who was not the company's co-founder.

The photograph of this building taken on 4 September 2011, eleven days after the announcement, is the campus as the press and the employees saw it that month.

Cook did not try to play Jobs on stage. His first decade as CEO is measurable in other units: revenue, the watch and the services line, a supplier-responsibility report that grew thicker every year, and a campus two miles away that opened in 2017 as Apple Park.

Infinite Loop remained the legal and postal headquarters through the transition.

A visitor today finds a quieter complex than the visitor-center ring at Apple Park. The older campus is the one that was operating on the Wednesday the letter went out.

The life up to this date is a sequence of public schools and employers: Mobile, Robertsdale, Auburn, IBM, Duke, Intelligent Electronics, Compaq, then thirteen years as Apple's operations chief.

24 August 2011 is the date the title on the door matched the work he had already been doing.

Photo: Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Apple headquarters at Infinite Loop, 4 September 2011)