Tim Cook sums up Steve Jobs in just four words

Macworld Apple boss Tim Cook joined the company in 1998, and has achieved an extraordinary amount in the years since: he has pushed Apple’s profits into the stratosphere, and become a billionaire in the process. But it turns out that the decision to take the job wasn’t as obvious at the time as it now seems in retrospect. In a 2024 letter which the Steve Jobs Archive has this week published for the first time, Cook describes the mixed feelings with which he weighed up the prospects of working at Cupertino. In those days the company wasn’t the dependable corporate behemoth of 2026. “At the time,” he writes, “Apple had been struggling and Steve was working to right a ship that had drifted in his absence. Many people doubted the company could survive, and I was warned that accepting a job there would come with risks.” That “Steve,” of course, refers to the Apple founder who only the year before had returned from exile to be Apple’s sixth CEO. Cook descri