A new analysis by Bloomberg finds that Apple CEO Tim Cook’s net worth has passed the $ 1 billion mark, making him officially a billionaire. It’s certainly an impressive number, but assumed it is exactly more than $ 1 billion, he has a long way to go before he catches up with the other CEOs Bloomberg Billionaires list. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tops the list at $ 187 billion, followed by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates at $ 121 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at $ 102 billion. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is only no. 10 on the list, but even he is good for Cook at $ 68.7 billion.
Yes, these are obscene amounts of money, and it’s hard to understand how rich Bezos is (especially during a pandemic with a 10 percent unemployment rate and economic relief evaporating). Who cares? It’s a bunch of rich guys getting richer, right? That, these are the boys – and the list is overwhelmingly men; the first woman on the list is Alice Walton at no. 16, with $ 57.1 billion – which runs the world’s most valuable businesses and affects our lives in many ways. As reporter Kashmir Hill has documented, it is almost impossible to completely remove yourself from the economies that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple have built.
Cook, however, is a bit of an unusual affair among the three-comma club because he did not find Apple, and it is rare that no founder’s CEO becomes a billionaire. But Cook probably built Apple into the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, and just this July knocked out the Saudi Arabian oil company. Cook worked his way up through the company and rebuilt its supply chain using “just-in-time” manufacturing principles, such as reducing inventory, after Steve Jobs hired him from Compaq to become Apple’s COO. By most accounts, Cook has taken a more measured, cautious approach than his predecessor, but Apple’s revenue and profits have both more than doubled since he became CEO.
How the legacy of Apple building will continue over time is not clear; Currently, Apple and other companies with large manufacturing companies and customer bases in China are trying to determine how President Trump’s ban on some Chinese companies will affect them. But Apple is going straight ahead; its recent third quarter revealed that it is booming amid the pandemic that has plagued many other businesses. In its third quarter, Apple had revenue of $ 59.7 billion, up 11 percent from a year ago. And it approaches a market cap of $ 2 trillion.
