Apple’s CEO Succession Plan Gets Murkier As Top Exec Is Poached

A once-leading candidate to replace Tim Cook as Apple’s CEO has instead announced his retirement, raising fresh questions about the tech giant’s succession plan.

Williams has spent 27 years at Apple. I Photo: Apple

Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams will be succeeded as planned by Sabih Khan, senior vice president of operations, who has been with the company for 30 years, Adam Levine, Angela Palumbo, and Janet H. Cho reported for Barron’s Daily.

Williams has spent 27 years at Apple. Speculation about his potential to succeed Cook intensified in 2016, when he began leading Apple Watch presentations, and in 2019, when the design team began reporting to him.

But Cook, now 64, shows no signs of stepping down. Williams turned 61 in January.

The announcement comes amid slowing iPhone 16 sales in June, following a surge driven by buyers trying to get ahead of possible tariff-induced price hikes. KeyBanc Capital Markets found that iPhone sales fell 6% in June compared to a year earlier.

Counterpoint Research reported in June that iPhone sell-through in April and May rose 15% year-on-year to a record high, fueled by “tariff dodgers.” However, KeyBanc’s John Vinh noted that this momentum didn’t carry into June.

Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poached Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s AI and machine-learning foundation model team, for Meta’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs unit.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg offered Pang a pay package worth tens of millions of dollars.