There may be a different way to look at what could happen to Apple’s top leadership over the next few years.
A bit of context
A couple of months ago, Spotify announced that Daniel Ek, the company’s founder and CEO, will step down in January. He’ll become Spotify’s executive chairman and will be replaced by co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström.
Interestingly, Spotify’s announcement came just a week after Oracle announced that long-time CEO Safra Catz would be succeeded by co-CEOs Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, in what is the company’s second crack at the dual-CEO strategy.
While uncommon, the co-CEO arrangement is hardly new. In recent years, perhaps the most high-profile example was Netflix, which has had Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters as co-CEOs since 2023.
When companies decide to take the dual leadership route, each CEO is tasked with a very specific set of responsibilities.
At Netflix, while Sarandos handles the company’s content and other market-facing areas such as marketing and communications, Peters leads product, technology, and other operational functions.
At Oracle, Magouyrk will lead cloud infrastructure and platform, while Sicilia’s purview will focus on industry applications and other business-facing products.
At Spotify, Söderström will handle product and technology, as Norström focuses on the commercial side, including subscriptions, advertising, and broader business operations.
These are hardly the only tech companies that have experimented with a dual-CEO structure. Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday have also had, or still have, co-CEOs, with similar split-responsibility arrangements.
Perhaps what allows companies to experiment with the CEO role is the fact that, in reality, the title “CEO” is not legally mandatory, at least in most jurisdictions.
In the U.S., specifically for public companies, the law requires disclosure of a company’s principal executive officer (and principal financial and accounting officers), but it does not require the top executive to carry the title “CEO”. What matters is that an officer performs the leadership function and the appropriate disclosures are made.
Sure, but what does that have to do with Apple?
In 2021, as Cook commented on his first decade as Apple’s CEO, he told journalist Kara Swisher that he would “probably not” be the company’s CEO for 10 more years.
Since then, there has been no lack of speculation, reporting, and flat-out wishcasting regarding Apple’s succession plans.
And for the record, this whole piece is also a speculative exercise, purely for argument’s sake. No judgment there.
But here’s the thing: a lot has happened, and a lot has changed since that 2021 interview. Chief among them is Trump’s second term, and Apple’s relationship with him.
And as Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, John Ternus, is increasingly viewed as the frontrunner to be Tim Cook’s successor, we might be placing too much weight on that single word when we talk about this move.
Given Cook’s recent and increasingly frequent appearances alongside President Trump at the White House and around the world, it sounds unlikely that he would simply hand Ternus the baton and leave.
First, because even if (or when) he actually leaves as CEO, the most likely and obvious path for him will be to become Apple’s executive chairman. Under normal conditions, that tends to be the textbook and Wall Street-approved succession for companies like Apple.
Second, because, well, Apple isn’t under normal conditions. Whatever Ternus’ leadership and negotiation skills may be, do you see Trump deferring to the new guy on anything? It is highly unlikely that he will suddenly treat Ternus as Cook’s equal just because his title says CEO, and Cook is probably painfully aware of that.
Trump is clearly comfortable dealing with Cook. At official events, he’ll take any chance to name-drop him or highlight that Cook is in the room. And more importantly, Trump knows how having Cook in tow plays out on camera, even among other tech CEOs.
A shared structure, with Cook and Ternus both holding the CEO title, could prove to be the sweet spot Apple needs for the next few years. Ternus would run Apple internally, while coordinating with Cook’s handling of government affairs.
Would this be a potentially challenging arrangement for Ternus? Absolutely. First, because it wouldn’t take much for this to be framed as a lack of confidence in him. Second, because how free would he actually be to steer Apple in a new direction he saw fit, if the person who set the current direction is still there with exactly the same title, even if in name only?
As for Cook, granted, the new role wouldn’t exactly be the highlight of his career. But frankly, that is the job now, and he can’t escape it. For better or worse, he put himself in this situation, even though the circumstances were well beyond his control.
Yes, in practical terms, Cook could play exactly the same part at government events as Apple’s chairman, or any other role. But the CEO title looks a lot better on a place card at a state dinner.
And while I’m the first to admit that having co-CEOs doesn’t sound very Apple-like, one could argue that a lot of what Cook has found himself doing over the past year hasn’t felt all that Apple-like either.
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