Motley Fool Money - Tim Cook’s Leap of Faith

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Even before he became CEO of Apple, Tim Cook was known as a steady operator who was both thoughtful and, at times, cautious. Best-selling author Leander Kahney shares how joining Apple in the late 1990s might have been the biggest risk Tim Cook has taken in his professional life.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're a small business owner, you already know what it takes to keep everything moving. You're juggling customers, invoices, and about 100 decisions every day. Thankfully, taxes don't have to be one more thing on that list. With Intuit TurboTax, you can get your business taxes done for you with a full service expert. TurboTax matches you with your dedicated tax expert, who knows your industry understands your business write-offs, and gives you the personalized advice your business deserves. upload your documents right in the app, hand everything off, and still feel like you're in the loop

the whole way through. You can even get real-time updates on your expert's progress right in the app, which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full service experts. With the Motleyful Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. Anytime Apple unveils the newest version of the iPhone, the spotlight is on Tim Cook. As CEO, he's led Apple to a market cap of $2 trillion, and he's been a model of stability along the way. Even before becoming CEO, he made his bones as a great operations manager.

He wasn't known for taking risks, except one time. Before joining Apple, Tim Cook was at I. IBM for more than a decade, and then joined Compact as a senior executive in 1997. And the following year, he went to work at Apple. Keep in mind, at that point in time, Apple was pretty close to the bottom of its fortunes. Cook had a good job at a stable company. So why did he do it? Best-selling author Leander Cayney has written the book on Tim Cook, literally, and when we

talked last year, he shared why Cook, despite friends telling him not to go work. at Apple made the leap anyway. Because Steve Jobs mesmerized him. He was in Steve Jobs' pocket in the first five minutes, or on board, rather. He was seduced by Jobs, and he felt that Jobs was a legend, obviously, in Silicon Valley, and it was just a great opportunity. He brought into the vision. He felt like jobs that the company could be saved and that he could play a crucial role in that.

on that. So he was on board, like, almost immediately, and he's actually talked about this a couple of times and said that it wasn't a rational decision, you know, like rationally on paper, if he'd written out in a list of pros and cons. I mean, there would be hardly any pros. It would just be a long list of cons. And like he said, you know, the company was nearly, it was at the bottom. It was, about six months from bankruptcy. So they had, you know, they had a lot to do. But, you know, I think, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, it's obviously been super successful. It's been unbelievably successful. But yeah, at the time, it was a very, very risky move.

But I think, you know, Jobs is very, very persuasive. But Jobs is also very rational, too, I think, as well. And I think that definitely appeals to Cook's character. I think he laid out a plan that was smart, that was rational, smart, and, you know, achievable. If you want to learn more about the man running Apple, check out Keeney's best-selling book. Tim Cook, the genius who took Apple to the next level. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.