Apple CEO Tim Cook is now (probably) a billionaire
Tim Cook, the man who convinced you to spend half your salary on a new iPhone, is now a billionaire.
This is according to Bloomberg, which calculated that Cook's money stash has passed the magic $1 billion number as Apple stock hit the market value of nearly $2 trillion.
The number is far from exact and should be taken with a grain of salt. Bloomberg made the calculation based on regulatory filings and "applying the market performance of a typical wealthy investor" to Cook's proceeds from selling Apple stock. This means that Cook's net worth might be slightly over or under a billion dollars depending on charity contributions and other factors, but such estimates are never 100 percent correct, so we'll take it for what it is.
The news may sound somewhat pedestrian — who knew that the CEO of the world's most valuable company is very rich? However, there's a difference between Cook and a 'typical' billionaire of the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos ilk. Those guys founded their companies and owned a big chunk of them outright, whereas Cook went up the ranks to become Apple CEO, harvesting performance awards while he led the company for the past nine years. He did pretty good; when he was appointed CEO by Steve Jobs in 2011, Apple's market value was $348 billion, and now it's nearly six times as much.
According to Bloomberg, if Apple's stock price doesn't suddenly plummet, Cook will be receiving 560,000 Apple shares as a reward just this month, worth approximately $252.5 million.
Notably, in 2015, Cook said he plans to give most of his fortune away before he dies.
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Topics Apple
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
