Cook

"Cook established exceedingly high expectations the first time he held an operations meeting of worldwide managers. In the weekly review, attendees went over what had gone wrong in the prior days, what needed to be fixed immediately, and what was coming up. These meetings were typically ninety minutes; sometimes they could stretch beyond two hours. On the day Cook took over, the weekly review went nearly thirteen hours. He insisted on a granular level of understanding and demanded fluency in the intricacies of every project. If a manager one week, in a lengthy presentation, projected that their team would ship 200,050 of something by Friday, Cook would remember. So the next week, if the manager said, “Yep, we met our numbers. We did two hundred thousand,” Cook would look at them and ask, with deadly seriousness: “And fifty?”"

"It’s no exaggeration to say the iPhone didn’t kill Nokia; Chinese imitators of the iPhone did. And the imitations were so good because Apple trained all their suppliers. Cook didn’t want Apple to be the developer of the world, and it wasn’t. It did, however, become the developer for China."

"Just twenty-two days after their meeting, Apple announced a $1 billion investment in the ride-hailing start-up. Liu said it happened “like lightning.” The investment stunned tech observers. Sure, Apple had acquired plenty of companies outright in the past, and it certainly had the cash, but the Cupertino behemoth almost never took a stake in a start-up—especially not an app developer that competed against rivals within its own ecosystem. It was the largest single investment Didi had ever received. Cook’s explanation didn’t exactly hold water: “We are extremely impressed by the business they’ve built and their excellent leadership team, and we look forward to supporting them as they grow.” His comments weren’t wrong so much as beside the point. Hundreds, even thousands of app companies would have been good investments since the App Store debuted in 2008, but Apple hadn’t bought a stake in any. Most observers had an inkling of what was really going on. “The deal seems like a calculated move by Apple to curry favor in China,” wrote *The Information*."

"The point, however, isn’t to condemn Cook or Apple. It’s to convey the predicament they’re in. At the turn of the millennium, Washington made a bet on China—a bet that free trade would liberalize the country and perhaps catalyze the creation of the world’s biggest democracy. Instead, trade enriched China and empowered its rulers. Cook shouldn’t be blamed by politicians for enmeshing Apple’s operations in China two decades ago, but he has erred by doubling down over the past decade despite mounting evidence that Xi has been ramping up repression at home and taking a more combative stance in international affairs. “You can say that we read them wrong, that we misunderstood China. But Jack Ma read China wrong, too. Every entrepreneur read China wrong,” says a supply chain expert who has lived in the country. “You look at what Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao were promoting—the [business class] didn’t see this coming. Xi changed the game completely. He’s another Putin in the making.” This person adds, “Look, I’m not a Cook fan. But you have to be sympathetic. He didn’t know what he was dealing with. Nobody did.”"

"Cook’s disdain for mediocrity was similar to that of Jobs, but it manifested itself in an entirely different way. He would persistently ask his managers for layer upon layer of information that flummoxed poor performers and exposed bullshitters. Parents know it takes only a few rounds of a toddler asking, “Why?” before their knowledge is exhausted, leading to frustration and made-up answers. Cook’s questioning was like that. He exhibited a memory and an understanding for data and planning that nobody in Cupertino had experienced before. A lower-level executive recalls Cook stopping people in the hallway ahead of a meeting to glance at their spreadsheets. Within a minute he might spot an error. “And if one number was wrong, he wouldn’t trust the whole spreadsheet,” this person says. “We just knew him as this Terminator machine. Like, he could tell if you were lying…. My boss would say: ‘If he calls on you and you get the number wrong, he’ll try again the next week. If that’s wrong, he’ll never call on you again.’ ”"

"By expecting precision, he was basically teaching it, instilling its importance in all of his colleagues so that his underlings would teach their underlings. As exceptional as that first thirteen-hour meeting was, the Friday meeting Cook held with top executives routinely became a four-hour review, a deep dive of spectacular detail into more than 120 pages of Excel numbers related to supply and demand across the global organization. There were so many rows and columns of numbers that the text was printed on special larger paper. Not everyone in these meetings wore glasses when Cook was hired; after a few years, they all did."

"Cook would later describe his decision in almost mystical terms: “You have this voice in your ear that says, ‘Go west, young man, go west,’ ” he once recounted. “It didn’t make sense. And yet, my gut said, ‘go for it!’ And I listened to my gut.”"

"Cook would say in a calm, deliberative cadence: “Don’t… ever… be… afraid… to… be… unreasonable.”"

"Not prepping for a meeting with Cook was a surefire way to embarrass yourself. If a manager was explaining a situation, saying, “Look, if we can charter a 747, our problem will be solved,” Cook would reply icily: “If?” A deafening silence would follow. The manager who thought they’d be getting a pat on the back at this point would stumble into an attempted answer. “Well, there’s demand worldwide for 747s, and we’re looking for one at the moment.” Cook would interject: “So you don’t have the 747 chartered?” The manager would look down, mumble something until Cook would follow up: “You didn’t know you were going to produce a hundred thousand units that week? Why wouldn’t you know that?”"

"Cook was fond of teaching colleagues to “be aggressive and unreasonable” when negotiating with suppliers."

"To secure Apple’s China business, Cook amended its warranty policy in the country, pledging that eligible customers with broken phones would be given new units. The enhanced policy was like a godsend to the yellow cows. It turbocharged their illicit scheme to such an extent that Apple Stores in China soon had a separate line just for iPhone returns. When their turn came, some migrant workers would unpack entire backpacks filled with iPhones, returning each for a brand-new unit. The updated warranty policy had given the yellow cows a new source of iPhone supply: existing models. They began stealing them from consumers, in China and abroad, and then deployed special tools to amend the fifteen digit IMEI number—which in those days was printed on the back of the iPhone and again on the SIM tray inside. In some cases, the yellow cows would obtain a top-tier iPhone, take it apart and separately sell pricey components like the memory chip, replace them with inexpensive lookalike parts, and then return the tampered unit for a brand-new model. The yellow cows became so adept at this that even a well-trained Genius Bar worker couldn’t detect which phones had been tampered with."

"Cook departed into a senior position at PC wholesaler Intelligent Electronics, bringing order to a distressed business with bloated costs and wasted assets. In 1997 he graduated into a vice president position at Compaq—a dream role. Compaq, whose origins trace back to three friends scribbling their business plans on a napkin in a Houston pie shop, was the first company to clone the IBM PC in 1982. By 1997 it was King of the Clones, with $34 billion of revenue. Cook had been there only a matter of months when recruiters from Apple began calling. He demurred, so they delivered what was quickly becoming a signature move: They offered a personal interview with Steve Jobs."

"Cook could make grown men and women cry. A few screamed at him, leaving the room, never to come back. He was unapologetic about these episodes. Like Jobs, Cook wanted only A-list players. No hard feelings if you didn’t fit in. Those who stayed, adapted. It might not have been fun. But it was effective."

"Cook, risk-averse by temperament, wasn’t so sure. But prior to the meeting, Gou had already met with Apple engineers in China, who were feeding him details and forecasts that were more optimistic than the views in Cupertino. So Gou made a handshake deal on the spot. He offered to personally facilitate the necessary actions to establish mass production, in exchange for taking all the orders when—he believed—they inevitably emerged. “Foxconn is going to underwrite the investment,” he told Cook. “I’ll build two campuses with Chinese government partners, along with the provincial and central government. And when your volume is there, I’m going to build the products for you.”"

"The second function the Didi investment served related to Apple’s surprise at how slowly its digital payments platform, Apple Pay, was taking hold. It saw Didi as a solid platform for expansion. At the time, WeChat Pay and Alipay were vying for dominance, spending as much as RMB 40 million ($7 million) per day to acquire new customers. Apple was looking for a way to compete. An investment in Didi and a relationship with Liu helped Apple establish *guanxi*—political relationships—in two budding industries, aided by Apple taking a seat on the board. Meanwhile, the Apple investment gave Didi international name recognition, further fueled by Cook. The week Apple’s investment was announced—five days before his secret meeting at the CCP headquarters—Cook met with Liu in Beijing, where they hailed a ride together and visited an Apple Store. The next year Liu was named one of *Time* magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Her profile was penned by Cook."

"Cook had cautiously chosen to broadcast Apple’s $275 billion deal with Beijing quietly, so Cupertino needed to take other action as well. In effect it deployed a two-track approach. The private investment demonstrated its positive impact across multiple industrial clusters, while a second track would more publicly showcase new partnerships, more job creation, and the local R&D hubs. Liu might not have known all the details of Apple’s predicament, but she was no amateur in getting deals done with strategic rivals and potential partners."

"Wang (pronounced “Wong”) had two major audiences in mind. One was the capital markets. Wang and her older brother founded the company in 2004 and hold at least 39 percent of its shares. Over the prior ten years, Luxshare had earned $782 million of net profit. Its owners stood to make far more in the stock market than from low margins on final assembly. By turning Cook’s visit into a media event, Wang delivered a message to investors: Luxshare was on the up-and-up, and its rise would come at the expense of Foxconn. On the day Cook visited, Luxshare was worth $12 billion—validating how successful it had become from supplying components to Apple for nearly a decade. Still, that was only one-fifth of Foxconn’s $57 billion valuation. Within two and a half years, Luxshare’s market value would soar to $38 billion, overtaking Foxconn’s own dented market value at a time when the Taiwanese group was bringing in thirteen times more revenue. Any financial analysis would struggle to reconcile how that could be. The two companies were in the same low-margin business, using the same techniques, and servicing similar clients. But Chinese investors know their own country’s politics well, and they saw the writing on the wall. Foxconn, too, understood the challenge, and in 2019 it set up a task force to study its Chinese rival to understand its technology, expansion plans, hiring strategy, and whether the company was supported by any Chinese government entity."

"Cupertino understands that openly supporting Xi’s plan for tech supremacy is politically taboo. But Apple’s message in Chinese media is, if not wildly supportive of the effort, then at least in sync with it. When *China Daily* reporters met Isabel Mahe in 2023, they quoted her saying: “Apple is happy and willing to help the country’s transition to smart manufacturing.” It paraphrased her, saying: “Previously, smart manufacturing equipment in Apple’s supply chains came mainly from non-Chinese companies, but now such equipment of local origin has become more common.” Mahe, like Cook, has portrayed these partnerships as “win-win,” seemingly oblivious to a quip that goes back at least a decade: “In China, ‘win-win’ means China wins twice.”"

"Close readers of Cook’s letter pointed out that the reasons he cited didn’t really add up. “Cook said two months ago that Apple’s China business was ‘very strong,’ even amid signs of an economic slowdown and months of headlines about trade tensions with the US,” wrote Bloomberg columnist Shira Ovide. She said the trends Cook pointed to were obvious to anyone outside the Cupertino bubble. “Apple failed in the No. 1 mission of being a public company: being honest with investors about its business,” she concluded. “The company simply denied the reality that was staring it in the face, until denial was no longer an option.” At Yahoo Finance, Brian Sozzi said Cook now had “a major credibility problem” with investors. Daniel Ives, a Wedbush Securities analyst known for his bullish takes on Apple, titled his note to investors: “Apple’s Darkest Day in the iPhone Era.”"

"One supply chain executive characterized the confrontation as “the worst forty-five seconds of Cook’s career.” But his biggest, most astute critic might have been… himself. In 2017, explaining why corporate executives should be more up-front about their values and “lead accordingly,” Cook had told journalist Megan Murphy that “silence is the ultimate consent.” He went on:"