Tim Cook, Apple’s former CEO and now its executive chairman, has said Steve Jobs gave him this advice before he took over the company: “Never ask what I would do, just do the right thing.” Cook recounted it in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning earlier this year, and Fortune republished its story on the interview on Oct. 18.
Advice That Freed a Successor
Jobs wanted to spare Apple what happened at Walt Disney Co. after its founder’s death. “He had watched Disney go through this paralysis of sitting around and talking about what Walt would do,” Cook told CBS. “And he did not want that for Apple.”
“I’ll never forget that and it was such a gift for me, because he took off of my shoulder this question of, ‘What would Steve do?’” Cook said. “I just put my head down and thought, ‘I’m going to be the best version of myself.’”
Cook has told the story publicly since 2011. At a memorial tribute to Jobs on Apple’s campus that October, weeks after Jobs died, he told those gathered: “Among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right,’” Bloomberg reported on Oct. 25, 2011.
He gave a fuller account to Bloomberg Businessweek in December 2012. Cook recalled Jobs saying that after Walt Disney died, “The business was paralyzed, and people just sat around in meetings and talked about what Walt would have done.” Then Jobs told him: “I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what’s right,” according to the interview, which Bloomberg published on Dec. 6, 2012.
Cook has said he would give his own successor the same advice. Apple announced on April 20, 2026, that John Ternus, its senior vice president of hardware engineering, would become CEO and Cook executive chairman, effective Sept. 1. In a March interview with the Wall Street Journal, published April 21, Cook said the company’s next leader will need to “keep a firm north star.”
“You can get in paralysis if you start trying to port yourself into somebody else’s thinking,” he told the Journal. His advice to the next CEO: “Be yourself, keep a firm North Star on the values of the company.” If the values are right, he said, “you may be blown off course a little bit, but eventually you will come back to the right path.”
Cook joined Apple in 1998 after stints at Compaq and IBM, became chief operating officer in 2005 and took over as CEO in August 2011. Jobs died on Oct. 5 that year.