00:00 Speaker A
your your take on Tim Cook. Um, you know, I was talking to Dan Halle about it. I got his thoughts on on his leadership. I’m interested to get your take. What kind of what kind of grade you would give him?
00:13 Speaker B
I I think that Tim has done a good job of sort of maintaining. Um, the question obviously is going to be is that enough. Um, I think you look around and you say, look, Apple is exactly where we all want to be at 50, right? Sort of wildly successful, universally beloved, had Paul McCartney playing at its birthday party, but where do you go from here? And obviously, in the next kind of handful of years, there’s also going to be a big question internally of who can take over from Tim and not just sort of maintain, but really innovate and and whatever that, whatever form that takes, uh we do know that we’re probably at the start of a new form factor cycle over the next decade or so. And so, I think there are really big questions for yes, Tim has been great. Um but how good will he be at grooming the next CEO and and also handing it over gracefully.
1:00 Speaker A
Cook is the Trump whisper. He knows Trump. Um he has a good relationship with Trump. He’s got to want to see this administration through, but then he steps down. I guess I’m curious to get your take on that. And also Gil, who you think will take the reigns from Cook.
1:12 Gil
It’s hard to pick up on what Sarah said. I I think Tim Cook’s done a great job maintaining what was handed to him and and and dealing more with non-product topics like how big of a dividend, how many share buybacks, how to push margins forward, to your point, how to interact with the political class at a time where that’s been absolutely critical, how to manage the supply chain. He’s done a very good job managing that process and maybe that does expire at the end of of this current administration. Uh but the next level again, will have to be product innovation on the form factor side and on the AI side. The we’re we keep going back and forth between is it good that they stayed out of the AI race? Is it a bad thing they stayed out of the AI race? At some point, whatever device and whatever service they’re providing us is going to have to be AI integrated and AI native and that’s the challenge for his replacement. I don’t want to speculate too much, but I always think it’s a good sign to see who has a speaking part during Worldwide Developer Conference in that video. That usually tells you who’s at least in the running.