Tim Cook will soon have 280,000 more Apple shares
It is going to be a good week for Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. He is about to collect Apple shares worth around $120m (about £93,627,600) because of the strong performance of the smartphone manufacturer.
Cook will receive 280,000 shares later today, related to his ongoing service as CEO of Apple. This is if Apple’s growth on the stock market exceeds at least 67% of the other companies in the S&P 500.
The fact is that the company’s stock price increased by 119% over the last three years, which is better than 80% of other firms in the S&P. Barring an asteroid hitting Cupertino, this basically ensures that Tim Cook will get his fifth payout in a row for top-notch performance.
Three years ago, Cook promised to give the bulk of his fortune to charity. This week, Apple said in a regulatory filing that he had donated 23,215 of his shares so far. The 57-year-old CEO gets yearly instalments from a huge award of restricted shares, which he received seven years ago when he became Steve Jobs’ successor.
This was at first set to vest in two increments over a ten-year period, but five years ago the board, responding to a request from Cook, tied around 33% of the shares to the company’s relative share performance compared to the wider stock market.
In August 2018, Apple became the first American company to reach a market cap of $1tn. (When Cook took over from Jobs, it stood at around $350bn.) Yet in February, Cook said to Bloomberg: “I still view Apple as a pretty small company, the way that we operate.”
In 2017, nearly 50% of Cook’s 560,000 stocks were withheld for tax purposes, and the rest netted him around $43m. According to Bloomberg, he is presently worth nearly $700m.