Tim Cook dinner sums up Steve Jobs in simply 4 phrases

Apple boss Tim Cook dinner joined the corporate in 1998, and has achieved a rare quantity within the years since: he has pushed Apple’s earnings into the stratosphere, and turn into a billionaire within the course of. Nevertheless it seems that the choice to take the job wasn’t as apparent on the time because it now appears on reflection.

In a 2024 letter which the Steve Jobs Archive has this week revealed for the primary time, Cook dinner describes the blended emotions with which he weighed up the prospects of working at Cupertino. In these days the corporate wasn’t the reliable company behemoth of 2026.

“On the time,” he writes, “Apple had been struggling and Steve was working to proper a ship that had drifted in his absence. Many individuals doubted the corporate might survive, and I used to be warned that accepting a job there would include dangers.”

That “Steve,” in fact, refers back to the Apple founder who solely the yr earlier than had returned from exile to be Apple’s sixth CEO. Cook dinner describes his first assembly with Steve Jobs as a fateful day when “my need to be a part of one thing really inspiring would lastly meet its second.” What follows is an interesting glimpse of the primary encounter between Apple’s two nice leaders.

“When Steve spoke,” Cook dinner remembers, “any trepidation I harbored immediately dissolved. I had by no means met somebody with a lot ardour and imaginative and prescient.

“He spoke with charisma and readability—a few future the place expertise might unlock a wellspring of human creativity and potential, connecting us and uplifting us in methods even he had but to think about. In Steve, I discovered an unimaginable mentor who impressed me to develop and problem myself in new and vital methods.”

And the remaining is historical past. Jobs invited Cook dinner to hitch his group of “deeply curious people prepared to work onerous for one thing larger than themselves” (these are the latter’s phrases, not the previous’s), and he accepted. Some 13 years later, Cook dinner adopted in Jobs’ footsteps and have become Apple’s seventh CEO.

Cook dinner’s letter, together with others by numerous leaders and creators with a connection to Apple, was initially shared solely with fellows of the Steve Jobs Archive. They’re launched this week as a part of a celebration of what would have been Jobs’ 71st birthday.