Technology and AI
Apple's succession takes effect today, and the pay terms have still not been filed
By Staff Writer | 1 September 2026
John Ternus becomes chief executive of Apple on 1 September and Tim Cook becomes executive chairman, on a timetable the board fixed in April. The filing that announced it promised an amendment carrying the new chief executive's compensation terms within four business days of their being settled, and no such amendment has appeared.
The mechanics were settled four and a half months ago. The board appointed Ternus on 17 April, the company announced the change on 20 April, and every element of it was expressed to take effect on a single date. On that date Ternus becomes chief executive and joins the board, Cook becomes executive chairman, and Art Levinson, who has chaired the board for 15 years, becomes lead independent director. That date is today.
It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company.
Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple until 1 September 2026 and Executive Chairman from that date
Ternus is 50. He joined the product design team in 2001, became a vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and joined the executive team in 2021 as senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. He came to the company from a mechanical engineering job and holds a mechanical engineering degree, which makes him an unusual appointment at this scale: the succession has gone to the person who ran the hardware rather than to a finance or operations executive.
Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor. It has been a privilege to help shape the products and experiences that have changed so much of how we interact with the world and with one another.
John Ternus, Chief Executive Officer of Apple from 1 September 2026
The line in the filing that has not been closed
The current report filed with the securities regulator on 20 April sets out the appointment, records that there are no family relationships and no reportable transactions, and notes that the company and Ternus will enter into its standard indemnification agreement for directors and officers. It then says that Apple intends to file an amendment containing the information called for by Item 5.02(c)(3) of the form within four business days after that information is determined or becomes available.
Item 5.02(c)(3) is the compensation limb: salary, bonus arrangements and the material terms of any employment agreement for a newly appointed principal executive officer. The company's index of filings was read on 1 September and shows current reports on 20 April, 30 April and 30 July, and no amendment to the April report. On the face of the public record, therefore, the terms on which the incoming chief executive is engaged either have not been determined or have not yet triggered the four day clock.
A four business day undertaking is not a deadline for settling the terms. It runs from the moment they are settled, so silence on the register is a statement that the settling has not happened.
What is being handed over
The company's own account of the outgoing tenure gives the scale. Market capitalisation is stated to have gone from about 350 billion dollars in 2011 to 4 trillion dollars, a rise of more than 1,000 per cent. Yearly revenue is stated to have grown from 108 billion dollars in fiscal 2011 to more than 416 billion dollars in fiscal 2025. There are over 500 retail stores and an active installed base of more than 2.5 billion devices.
Those are the numbers a successor inherits rather than the ones he will be judged on. The more useful figure, for anyone reading the governance rather than the story, is still missing from the register: what the board has agreed to pay the person who now runs it.