After nearly 15 years steering Apple to a $4 trillion valuation, Tim Cook is stepping down, and the engineer who built the hardware behind the iPhone, iPad and Mac is stepping up.
, will become the technology giant’s chief executive officer on 1 September 2026, the company announced on Monday. Cook, 65, will move into the newly defined role of executive chairman, ending one of the most celebrated leadership tenures in the history of American business.
Who Is John Ternus, Apple’s Next CEO?
Ternus is not a name that dominates headlines the way that Steve Jobs or Cook did, but inside Apple’s secretive corridors, his reputation has been ironclad for years. A mechanical engineering graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (class of 1997), he joined Apple in 2001 after a four-year stint as an engineer at Virtual Research Systems — arriving quietly at a company that was only just beginning its remarkable turnaround.
He started on the product design team, working on screens for Apple’s Mac line, before becoming a key lieutenant to Dan Riccio, the company’s longtime engineering chief. As Riccio’s influence grew, so did — eventually encompassing the hardware engineering teams responsible for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods and Vision Pro. When Riccio stepped back in 2021, Ternus stepped forward, taking the senior vice president title and, with it, oversight of the physical architecture of nearly everything Apple makes.
He will be Apple’s eighth chief executive since its founding 50 years ago, and only its third since Steve Jobs returned in 1997 to rescue the company from near-bankruptcy.
From Engineer to Chief Executive: Ternus’s Rise Through Apple
What distinguishes Ternus from the archetypal Silicon Valley CEO is precisely his engineering grounding. He has spent more than two decades immersed in the tactile, painstaking craft of making hardware — the tolerances, the materials, the manufacturing decisions that determine whether a product feels like a miracle or merely a gadget.
In 2013, he was elevated to vice president of hardware engineering. By 2021, he had the top hardware role at the world’s most valuable consumer electronics company. Colleagues describe a leader who leads with clarity rather than charisma — a good communicator who, in the words of those who have worked with him, “empowers employees.” His management style is said to echo Cook’s: steady, collaborative, averse to unnecessary risk.
Away from the office, , known to take colleagues to upstate Washington for off-road racing weekends. It is, perhaps, a telling hobby — controlled aggression, precision under pressure, the ability to read conditions in real time.
“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honour. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future,” Cook said in a statement.
John Ternus Net Worth: How Much Is Apple’s Incoming CEO Worth?
Ternus has spent his entire career inside one of the world’s most valuable companies, and his finances reflect it — though he remains considerably less wealthy than the man he is replacing.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, Ternus has an estimated net worth of $75 million, accumulated over more than two decades at Apple through salary, bonuses and stock compensation.
That figure is set to grow substantially. As CEO, he will inherit a compensation structure comparable to Cook’s — who took home $74.6 million in total remuneration last year alone, comprising a $3 million base salary and significant stock awards, according to regulatory filings.
Forbes estimates , a fortune built largely through Apple equity accrued over 28 years.
Tim Cook’s Legacy: From Supply Chain Genius to Statesman CEO
When Cook took the helm from Jobs in 2011, Apple’s market capitalisation stood at roughly $350 billion. It closes this week at $4 trillion, a more than tenfold increase.
Annual profit has quadrupled to more than $110 billion. Revenue has nearly quadrupled to over $400 billion in the most recent fiscal year. Apple now operates in more than 200 countries and territories, with over 500 retail stores across five continents.
“He stepped into the world’s biggest shoes — the biggest shoes that anybody on the planet has ever had to step into — and he’s done an amazing job,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer from 2004 to 2014.
Tim Cook’s genius was operational. He arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq — before that, 12 years at IBM — and immediately set about rebuilding a supply chain that had been haemorrhaging the company’s cash. He became Jobs’s most trusted lieutenant, was named chief operating officer in 2007, and took over the CEO role in August 2011, weeks before Jobs’s death.
Under his watch, Apple launched the Apple Watch, AirPods and the Vision Pro headset, expanded aggressively into services – iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple TV+, Apple Music – and quietly became as much a software and services company as a hardware one, with services now accounting for roughly a quarter of annual revenue.
Cook also became, out of necessity, the technology industry’s foremost corporate diplomat. He made regular visits to both Washington and Beijing, navigating the often contradictory demands of US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping – a geopolitical tightrope act unlike anything a technology CEO had previously been asked to perform.
Last August, Cook appeared alongside Trump at the White House to announce that Apple would invest $600 billion in the US over five years. As executive chairman, he will continue to engage with policymakers globally.
“This is not goodbye,” Cook wrote on Apple’s website. But, he acknowledged, it is a “moment of transition.”
The Challenges Awaiting Apple’s New CEO
Ternus steps into a role that carries enormous prestige and equally enormous pressure. Apple has not launched a genuinely new mainstream product category in years. Its much-anticipated push into artificial intelligence has repeatedly stumbled, a planned upgrade to its was delayed, its AI chief departed at the end of 2025, and the company has now said it will launch a revamped Siri powered by Google’s Gemini model.
The rest of the technology industry, meanwhile, has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to AI development while Apple has remained largely on the sidelines.
Several senior executives have departed in recent months, raising questions among investors about the depth of Apple’s next generation of leadership and the coherence of its long-term strategy.
Apple also faces a complex geopolitical environment. An estimated 80 per cent of its iPhones are manufactured in China, a dependency that has become a strategic vulnerability as US-China tensions persist and the Trump administration’s tariff policies continue to shift. An antitrust trial looms on the domestic front.
“John is going to have to find a way to have Apple make products that make a dent in the universe again,” said Cameron Rogers, who worked at Apple in product marketing from 2005 to 2022. “Big companies don’t die, they become irrelevant.”
“It’s very difficult to innovate when you’re the size of Apple,” added Mike Slade, who advised Apple and Jobs on product and marketing strategy from 1998 to 2004. He noted that Cook’s legacy was “continuous improvement in every aspect and fantastic new products.”
Apple’s Leadership Reshuffle: Johny Srouji Gets a Promotion
Alongside the CEO succession, Apple announced that Johny Srouji — the executive who has led the company’s celebrated work on its own chips — has been promoted to the newly created role of chief hardware officer.
Srouji, most recently senior vice president of hardware technologies, will assume expanded responsibilities covering both hardware technologies and hardware engineering, the role Ternus is vacating.
Apple’s current non-executive chairman Arthur Levinson will become the company’s lead independent director on 1 September, the same day Ternus officially joins the board.
What Kind of CEO Will John Ternus Be?
The question that now hangs over Apple — and over Silicon Valley — is whether a hardware engineer who has spent his career perfecting existing product lines can become the kind of leader who imagines entirely new ones.
The historical record offers little comfort. Since the designer Jony Ive departed in 2019, Apple has been operating without one of its defining creative voices. Ive has since joined OpenAI, which acquired his startup in a deal valued at roughly $6.4 billion in May 2025.
Ternus is aware of the weight of expectation. “I am filled with optimism about what we can achieve in the years to come,” he said in a statement. “I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century.”
Whether Apple under Ternus can recapture the product imagination that defined the Jobs era — or even the operational excellence of the Cook era — remains to be seen. What is certain is that on 1 September 2026, a man who has spent 25 years building the physical objects that billions of people hold in their hands will take responsibility for the company that makes them.
(John Ternus becomes Apple’s CEO on 1 September 2026. Tim Cook will serve as executive chairman.)