In a tragic moment for Steve Jobs, there is a bright spot: Tim Cook, who will succeed Jobs as Apple's CEO, is an incredibly thorough and detail oriented boss who has revolutionized the way computers are assembled and steadily held the confidence of Apple's employees and partners. He is also, as we reported in January, destined to become an icon for gay advancement.
As chief operating officer, Cook has been running day to day operations since Jobs's most recent medical leave began in January, deferring strategic decisions and other CEO prerogatives to Jobs. Apple's growth and stellar financial performance have continued unabated under his watch.

When Jobs resigned as Apple CEO today, he said he'd like to stay on as chairman, where he would retain substantial authority at the company.

And we're told by a well placed source that Jobs actually went into Apple headquarters all day today and attended the board meeting at which he presumably presented his letter of resignation, an indication that his health problems will not keep him from participating in key decisions.

That said, it's clear Cook decision making authority will grow significantly—and that Apple is his show to run now. In the seven months since we profiled him, Cook's profile has only grown. Cook, who has not publicly discussed his sexuality, was named to the top of Out's list of powerful gays, yes, but he's also received greater recognition in the press for the incredible dividends Apple is reaping from its supply chain strategy, led by Cook, of using Apple's cash hoard to lock up crucial components for months or years, protecting products like the iPad from shortages, ensuring strong growth and margins for Apple and locking out would be rivals.

Today, Cook has graduated from a high profile tech executive serving as caretaker of the world's biggest tech company to the head of what, on some days, is now the biggest company in the world, period. He's also gone from being the most powerful gay man in Silicon Valley to the most powerful gay man in the world, bar none.

Below, we revisit our January profile of Cook. If you haven't read up on the man, now is the time.

Basics



Age: 50

Job: Chief Executive Office, Apple. Former CEO Steve Jobs has asked to become chairman, a move the board seems likely to approve.

Background: Cook grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama, the son of a retired shipyard worker. He earned a Bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982 and an MBA from Duke University in 1988. Before Apple, he did a stint at a computer reseller called Intelligent Electronics, worked in PC logistics for 12 years at IBM, and spent six months as VP for Corporate Materials at Compaq. He joined Apple in 1998 as senior vice president of operations, overseeing computer manufacturing. Cook was later promoted to chief of worldwide sales and of the Macintosh division.

Wealth: Cook has sold or accumulated upwards of $136 million in Apple shares.

Professional



How he got the job: Cook joined Apple in 1998, shortly after Jobs' return to the company, after withstanding Jobs' withering interview gauntlet. Jobs had rejected a string of other operations managers before meeting with Cook. In fact, one other executive from Cook's old company, Compaq, reportedly lasted only five minutes before Jobs walked out on him. Cook's "unflappable" demeanor may have been what sealed the deal with Jobs. "Steve is very focused on people he can connect to emotionally," a recruiter present at the meeting later said.

His successes: Cook made his mark early on by fixing Apple's notorious manufacturing inefficiencies: He arranged to have suppliers physically adjacent to Apple factories, thereby reducing inventory—which he considers "fundamentally evil"—to six days from 31. He closed far-flung Apple factories and warehouses and shifted to contract manufacturers. And he helped the company accurately predict demand for unreleased products, as when he prepaid $1.25 billion to corner the market for years to come on a particular type of flash memory that would prove crucial in forthcoming Apple devices. These operational improvements have given Apple the agility necessary to make quick, dramatic changes to its products, like when it switched the entire computer line to Intel chips in 2006.

Cook also kept the company on track as Apple's interim leader during Jobs' 2004 two month medical leave and during his six month leave in 2009. His steady hand kept iPhone 4 and iPad development on track, grew Macintosh sales and strongly rallied the stock.

His temperament: Calm, quiet — and deadly. His southern accent and "courtly demeanor" can disarm subordinates, and Cook never raises his voice, but his default frown and long, uncomfortable silent stares hint at the demanding leader underneath. He is said to keep an exhaustive catalog of details of Apple's operations in his head and expects his charges to do the same. "I've seen him shred people," a former colleague told Fortune in a lengthy 2008 profile. "He asks you the questions he knows you can't answer, and he keeps going and going. It isn't funny, and it's not fun."

Work habits: Voracious. Cook is described as a workaholic who begins emailing his underlings at 4:30 am each morning and eschews Apple's famously good cafes for an endless series of energy bars, which he'll often devour during meetings. The COO prides himself on being the first into the office and the last one out. At IBM, he volunteered to work in the factory on Christmas and New Year's day. He expects similar commitment from others; Cook once dispatched an underling straight from a meeting at Apple headquarters in Cupertino to the airport bound for China, without time even to pack a change of clothes or figure out a return date. "Why are you still here?" was Cook's goodbye, delivered in the middle of the meeting.

Shortcomings: Cook is not known as a product visionary or for shepherding projects through Apple's rigorous development pipeline. For those sorts of tasks, Jobs' heir apparent is design chief Jonathan Ive, principal designer for the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, among other groundbreaking products. Cook is also not known as a compelling public speaker; look to Jobs (if he's well enough) or marketing chief Phil Schiller to handle future keynotes.

The future: Cook has been with Apple for 13 years now and given his new role at the company, it's not expected that he's making plans to leave in the future. That said, he's reportedly been wooed by both Motorola and Dell, and possibly HP.

Personal

Interests: Cook is a "fitness nut," in the gym by 5 am, often on the hiking trail and even more often on his bike. The avid cyclist is an admirer of Lance Armstrong, quoting the seven-time Tour de France winner regularly during Apple meetings and even reportedly modeling his close-cropped haircut after the rider. Like Jobs, Cook is a Bob Dylan fan, and at one point, at least, kept a picture of the singer in his office, alongside a shot of Bobby Kennedy. His truest loyalty, beyond even Apple, may be to the Auburn Tigers football team, whose memorabilia is said to stud his home and office.

Social style: Cook is relatively withdrawn. A former college classmate described him as "not a real social person...He just never seemed that interested in other people. I'm a hugger and a kisser, but I'd never feel comfortable giving Tim a hug or a kiss."

Romantic interests: After Cook was profiled as a "lifelong bachelor" and "intensely private" elsewhere, we wondered if he might be gay. We've since heard from two well-placed sources that this is indeed the case, and it sounds like Cook's sexual orientation has been the topic of at least some discussion within the company. One tech executive who has spoken to multiple Apple management veterans about Cook was told executives there would support Cook if he publicly acknowledged his orientation, and even would encourage him to do so as he steps up his leadership role, but that they also had concerns about whether his coming out would impact the perception of the Apple brand.

Cook would be, by far, the most powerful openly gay executive in tech, trailed by Microsoft's openly lesbian HR chief Lisa Brummel and by Megan Smith, the former PlanetOut CEO now working as Google's vice president of new business development.

Relationships: If Cook is in a long term partnership, he's kept it well hidden. Given his brutal work schedule, though, it's hard to imagine how he'd find time. Still, he's got enough experience to have developed some preferences; our tech executive source claims Cook is into Asian guys, a tidbit that prompted another tech observer, with whom we shared the item, to propose some strategic matchmaking that would pair Cook with Google hotshot Ben Ling. It's an inspired match: Perhaps the coupling could build a bridge between two corporate nemeses.

Darkest moment: Cook was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996, an experience he later said made him "see the world in a different way." He now helps raise money for the disease.

Signature look: Cook serves on Nike's board, which is why you'll see him sporting Nike shoes under his jeans around the Apple office.

[Photos via Getty]
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[size=15pt]Don’t ignore Tim Cook’s sexuality[/size]
By Felix Salmon AUGUST 25, 2011

Tim Cook is now the most powerful gay man in the world. This is newsworthy, no? But you won’t find it reported in any legacy/mainstream outlet. And when the FT‘s Tim Bradshaw did no more than broach the subject in a single tweet, he instantly found himself fielding a barrage of responses criticizing him from so much as mentioning the subject. Similarly, when Gawker first reported Cook’s sexuality in January, MacDailyNews called their actions “petty, vindictive, and just plain sad.”

But surely this is something we can and should be celebrating, if only in the name of diversity — that a company which by some measures the largest and most important in the world is now being run by a gay man. Certainly when it comes to gay role models, Cook is great: he’s the boring systems-and-processes guy, not the flashy design guru, and as such he cuts sharply against stereotype. He’s like Barney Frank in that sense: a super-smart, powerful and non-effeminate man who shows that being gay is no obstacle to any career you might want.

One of the issues here is that most news outlets cover Cook as part of their Apple story, and Cook’s sexuality is irrelevant to his role at Apple. And so the other story — the fact that the ranks of big-company CEOs have just become significantly more diverse — is being overlooked and ignored. And that’s bad for the gay and lesbian community more broadly.

The institution of the closet is one of fear — one where people would rather be ignored than noticed, because they fear the negative repercussions of being known to be gay. It’s an institution which Cook, like any gay man born in 1960, knows at first hand. But now the risk of being ignored is bigger in the other direction: if the world can’t see gay men and women in all their true diversity, if the only homosexuals they know of are the flamboyant ones on TV, then that only serves to perpetuate stereotypes.

As the Apple story moves away from being about Steve Jobs and becomes much more about Tim Cook, we’re going to see a lot of coverage of Cook, the man. He is, after all, not just one of the most powerful gay men in the world; he’s one of the most powerful people in the world, period. The first instinct of many journalists writing about Cook will be to ignore the issue of his sexuality. It’s not germane to his job, they’re only writing about him because of the job he holds, and therefore they shouldn’t write about it.

On top of that, Cook is not exactly open about his sexuality, and Apple has never said anything about it. Cook’s formative years, professionally speaking, were the 12 years he spent at IBM between 1982 and 1994 — and at that company, in those days, coming out was contraindicated from a career-development perspective. Mike Fuller, a gay VP at IBM, told the Advocate in 2001 that he knew “IBM employees who worked for the company in the 1980s who told me they left IBM because they weren’t comfortable coming out at work”; this comes as little surprise. After all, the years that Cook spent at straight-laced IBM coincided with the height of the AIDS panic, when people were worried about sharing toilet seats with homosexuals. It would be hard to come out at any company in that kind of atmosphere.

But thankfully we’ve moved a very long way from those days. Homosexuality is no longer something shameful, to be coy or secretive about — especially not when you’ve risen to the very top of your profession. In fact, it’s incumbent upon a public-company CEO not to be in the closet.

Four years ago — a long time itself, in the history of gay rights and public acceptance thereof — John Browne resigned as CEO of BP under a shameful cloud. The reason for his downfall was not that he was gay, but rather that he was in the closet. As I explained at the time, in trying desperately to remain comfortably in the closet, he ended up lying repeatedly to the UK High Court – and that is why he had to resign.

Back then, there were no public-company CEOs on Out magazine’s gay power list; this year, Cook topped the list even before he became CEO of Apple. Keeping his sexuality a secret is no longer an option. And so the press shouldn’t treat it as though it’s something to be avoided at all costs. There’s no ethical dilemma when it comes to reporting on Cook’s sexuality: rather, the ethical dilemma comes in not reporting it, thereby perpetuating the idea that there’s some kind of stigma associated with being gay. Yes, the stigma does still exist in much of society. But it’s not the job of the press to perpetuate it. Quite the opposite.

Update: For a better and more heartfelt version of this post, read Joe Clark from back in February: “When you tell us it’s wrong to report on gay public figures,” he writes, “you are telling gays not to come out of the closet and journalists not to report the truth.”
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[size=15pt]Apple's Tim Cook isn't the only gay person in the IT village[/size]



Tim Cook's appointment as head of Apple hangs the official "Gay people welcome!" sign above the tech-industry door – but the truth is that they have never been unwelcome here. They love us! Well, actually, they're totally ambivalent to us. Because, in the geek world, the normal rules of society have never applied, for the simple reason that they don't make sense.

Geeks love rules, particularly the kinds of programming geeks (such as me) that are taking over the world one line of code at a time. But we like the rules to be based on logic, or at least some sort of pragmatic interpretation of concrete outcomes based on real-world experiments (known in the non-geek world as common sense). There is no logical rule connecting sexuality to the ability to model the world as equations or untangle a sequence of user actions. Thus it is a non-factor. Noise. Safely ignored.

For many geeks this is largely how the world breaks down: things that matter and things that can be ignored. We have less interest than your classic non-geek in attributing value to non-correlated factors. The things that are important are really important. For me: prime numbers, correct use of statistics and apostrophes, the direction the content moves when you scroll, whether you always change batteries as a complete set, not verbing your nouns, and not making statements that are illogical or can't be substantiated (ever). I care deeply about working with smart people who combine flexibility and creativity with rigorous thinking and attention to detail. I don't care who they want to sleep with.

And yet my little company is three-for-three on the queer counter. One lesbian (me), one gay man and one asexual woman. It seems that gay men and women are over-represented in our industry in a way that can't simply be down to not being rejected; we're quietly, actively welcomed because the tech world is full of people who have first-hand experience of being socially excluded.

Some were too smart, some couldn't grasp the social norms around conversation, but the majority of us spent our childhoods well outside the group. My wife is a psychotherapist and tells me that everybody has an experience of spending their childhood outside of the group, but when you're an eight-year-old carrying a packet of cards with physics questions around in your pocket, believe me, this is a different kind of "outside".

Those who were lucky, like John who works with me, or Bill Gates himself, found like-minded folk who also wanted to roll dice or tinker with electronics. Most of us were a mix of bored, terrified and frustrated until we hit our stride in university or stumbled into the tech industry, where we met other people who were even more socially inept, and even more intellectually brilliant, than we were. Ridicule was replaced by collaboration.

It goes further than simple tolerance though. The tech industry folk I know are passionately against discrimination in any form. Perhaps out of painful experience, or maybe we're still collectively smarting from the pointless loss of one of our most brilliant minds: Alan Turing. You can't deny the human sadness of his story, but for those of us who value logic there's an additional level of tragedy to the way our country treated the father of modern computing. We not only made his life unliveable – prosecuting him for being gay, pushing him to accept chemical castration as an alternative to prison – we also denied the world another 30 or 40 years of output of one of the greatest problem-solving minds in history. For being gay. That's just dumb, and I've never met a tech person who wasn't against dumb things.

It's both brilliant and irrelevant that Tim Cook has replaced Steve Jobs at Apple. His appointment will trigger plenty of vicious debate among the tech community on Twitter, but the battle lines will be the usual ones: Apple Rock vs Apple Suck. Tim's gay? Whatever. When's he gonna fix the screwed-up scrolling in Lion?
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