Apple stock grew 2322.5% during Tim Cook's tenure from 08/24/2011 to 04/20/2026. CAGR approximately 24.29% per annum. Pretty incredible.
"Tim Cook took Apple from $350B to $4T"
So? That's a 11X market cap increase. In the same time, MSFT saw a 14X increase, Google saw a 20X increase, Amazon did 28X, Facebook did 35X. We're not even going to talk about NVidia.
Cook led Apple through a period where every tech company expanded. Yay for him?
(It keeps going at https://x.com/politicalmath/status/2046428057255211032 )
The business you mention are pure service / zero marginal cost businesses, and in that time internet usage has expanded both in reach and depth (it is being used for more things in more places), so their opportunity for profits has grown. Apple turns aluminium and silica into a laptop. They didn't even miss a beat during COVID.
Yay for Tim Cook for scaling this to the absolute behemoth of supply chain and manufacturing that modern Apple is.
We are talking about the third largest company in the world by market cap - growing an additional 3X isn't particularly feasible (that would have made them twice the size of the next largest company).
Particularly with the hardware category it's easier to drop the ball and fumble rather than stay on top - just see Nokia or Rim.