Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken about the sense of denial he lived with for years regarding Steve Jobs’ illness. He said that he struggled to accept where the situation was heading despite its progression.
Speaking at an interview around Apple’s 50-year anniversary with Esquire, Cook reflected on the period leading up to the company’s co-founder’s death.
He said that he believed Jobs would continue in a leadership role, even as his health declined, describing how repeated recoveries shaped that perception. “By that time, unfortunately, there was an inevitability to it. But I was in denial for so long about the disease and where it would go, because I had watched him bounce back so many times, I assumed he always would,” he told Esquire.Cook added that he had expected Jobs to remain involved with the company. “When I took the CEO role, I thought he was going to be executive chairman forever—that’s what I thought literally six weeks earlier. Looking back, I know somebody could say, How could you think that, given the circumstances? But that’s not the way I was wired in that moment,” he noted.
What Tim Cook said about Steve Jobs’ death
Cook was at Jobs’s home on the day he died. As he drove back to the office to inform employees and, in turn, the whole world, he experienced a sense of shock, despite Jobs having been ill for a long time, he said.
Jobs had initially declined medical treatment after his diagnosis, attempting instead to manage the disease with fruit juices, which made the reaction feel unexpected.Cook, who has led Apple since shortly before Steve Jobs died at fifty-six from pancreatic cancer in 2011, said, “It’s definitely still his company.”“I think about him often—and in the last few months, thinking about the fiftieth anniversary, even more so, honestly. You think about the things he believed in. He believed in the simple, not the complex. He believed in collaboration, that if you put a small group of people together, the output of that small group would be much greater than any individual among them,” Cook told Esquire.
