When Steve Jobs resigned from his position as Apple CEO on August 24, 2011, the stock market reaction was surprisingly muted. After all, Jobs was considered the visionary behind Apple’s resurgence from near bankruptcy in the late 1990s, and yet, Apple’s share price dropped by less than 1 percent on the day following the change of the guard.
10 years later, it’s safe to say that shareholders were right in trusting Jobs’ judgement that the company would be in good hands with Tim Cook, who had long been groomed as Jobs’ heir apparent. And while Cook has yet to prove that he can inspire Apple to come up with the next big thing after the iPhone, he did manage to build on the foundation laid by Jobs in remarkable fashion. Under Cook’s leadership, Apple went through a decade of relentless growth, bringing the company’s market capitalization to almost $2.5 trillion as of today.
As the following chart shows, Apple outperformed the broader market (indicated by the S&P 500 here) more than 3 to 1 over the past ten years, as the company’s share price increased by more than 1,000 percent adjusted for two stock splits that occurred during that period.
