Cramer Says Tim Cook Deserves More Credit as Apple CEO Era Ends

"This is about, once again, people just not giving Tim his due," Cramer said during the Investing Club's "Morning Meeting." "The long knives never went away for Tim Cook." Since Cook took over in August 2011, Apple shares have gained roughly 2,280%, compared with about 555% for the S&P 500. Apple's market capitalization has ballooned from about $350 billion when Cook started to more than $4.7 trillion, at one point topping $5 trillion, becoming the second stock ever to do so after Nvidia.

Cramer pushed back on the notion that Cook was merely a skilled operator who kept Apple's machine running. "There's this completely bogus narrative about Tim, which is that all he did was keep the trains running on time," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." "That's ridiculous." He credited Cook with sustaining the iPhone's appeal through successive generations, noting the iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and has been "updated so many times that it's just such a different phone." Cramer said Cook expanded Apple into new devices, including the Apple Watch and AirPods, and created a sticky ecosystem feeding a high-margin services business. In fiscal 2025, Apple's services business was about 20% of revenue, an $82 billion business alone, comparable to Wells Fargo's $83 billion in revenue last year.

Cramer acknowledged some failures, such as the Vision Pro virtual reality headset, and noted Cook's supply-chain mastery in navigating choppy political waters and absorbing skyrocketing memory costs for quarters before finally hiking prices on Macs and iPads in June. No iPhone price changes were announced yet, but they are expected at the Sept. 9 launch event, the first under Ternus. Cook's decision not to spend hundreds of billions on AI that peers have made will give Ternus some time, but AI and memory are among many issues Ternus must navigate while demonstrating to Wall Street he has a plan to build on Cook's successes.