Tim Cook Height 2026: How Tall Is Apple CEO Tim Cook?

Last updated: November 7, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

Tim Cook is widely reported to be 6 ft 3 in tall (191 cm). That is the figure most sources print — Bored Panda, TVOverMind in its November 1, 2026 update, FancyStar and EasyCleanCook all list 6 ft 3 in — and it is the number this article anchors on. But the honest answer is longer than one number, because the sources do not agree: IMDb lists him at 5 ft 10¾ in (1.80 m), HeightsBySide at 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m), Astrotheme at 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m), and Jagran Josh at 6 ft 0 in (1.83 m). Apple has never published his height. So the real answer is a range — 5 ft 10¾ in to 6 ft 3 in — with 6 ft 3 in as the most-cited figure, and this article shows you every source, dated, so you can judge the disagreement for yourself.

He is 66 years old in November 2026, born Timothy Donald Cook on November 1, 1960, in Mobile, Alabama, and he turned 66 six days before this article was written. He is worth an estimated $2.2–3.1 billion, anchored at Forbes’ real-time estimate of $3.1 billion from October 10, 2026. And he is no longer Apple’s chief executive: on September 1, 2026, after fifteen years in the job, he stepped down as CEO and became executive chairman, handing the company to John Ternus, the hardware chief who had run Apple’s engineering for years. The transition was announced on April 20, 2026, and it closed the longest CEO run in modern technology — a run that took Apple from the first trillion-dollar company to the first four-trillion-dollar company.

This is the full story behind the height search: the Alabama childhood, the Auburn engineering degree and the Duke MBA, the twelve years at IBM and the brief stop at Compaq, the 1998 arrival at a nearly bankrupt Apple, the operations machine he built, the three stints as interim chief executive, the fifteen years at the top, and the money he made from pay rather than founder stock. Every figure in this article carries its source and its date in the same sentence, and where the sources disagree, the disagreement is printed, not smoothed over.

How Tall Is Tim Cook? The Answer and the Disagreement

Tim Cook is widely reported to be 6 ft 3 in tall (191 cm). That is the answer most readers are looking for, and it is the answer most of the internet gives. Bored Panda lists him at 6 ft 3 in. TVOverMind, in an update dated November 1, 2026 — Cook’s 66th birthday — lists him at 6 ft 3 in. FancyStar lists him at 6 ft 3 in. EasyCleanCook lists him at 6 ft 3 in. Four outlets, one number, and that number has become the default answer on search results pages. If you ask a voice assistant how tall Tim Cook is, 6 ft 3 in is the number you will most likely hear back.

But the number is not settled, and a good answer says so. IMDb, the film database that also carries celebrity measurements, lists Cook at 5 ft 10¾ in (1.80 m) — more than four inches shorter than the 6 ft 3 in figure. HeightsBySide, a site built entirely around comparing people’s heights, lists him at 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m). Astrotheme lists him at 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m). Jagran Josh, the Indian news outlet, splits the difference at 6 ft 0 in (1.83 m). Put the sources side by side and the spread is over four inches — the difference between a man who towers over a room and a man who is simply tall. That spread is the real story of the height question, and it is why this article leads with the range rather than the anchor.

Why do the sources disagree by so much? Nobody has measured him. Apple has never published a height for its chief executive, and Cook has never stated one in an interview. The figures online are estimates built from photographs — Cook standing next to other people whose heights are known, Cook on stage in shoes with a lift, Cook in a keynote photograph taken from below, which adds inches to anyone. A man photographed next to a basketball player looks short; the same man photographed next to a jockey looks like a giant. Height sites that work from photographs inherit every error in the photograph, and when two sites work from different photographs, they land four inches apart. That is what has happened here.

There is also the question of what “6 ft 3 in” would mean if it were right. At 191 cm, Cook would be taller than Steve Jobs, taller than Elon Musk, and taller than almost every other chief executive in technology. At 5 ft 10¾ in, he would be roughly average for an American man of his generation, and a little shorter than Jobs. Both versions are plausible, because Cook’s public image does not settle the question: he is a large man in a suit, broad-shouldered, and photographs of him on Apple keynote stages — shot from below, in front of a giant screen — make him look taller than he may be.

The anchor this article uses is 6 ft 3 in (191 cm), because it is the figure the most sources print and the freshest dated source — TVOverMind, November 1, 2026 — supports it. But the anchor is not the whole answer. The whole answer is the range: 5 ft 10¾ in to 6 ft 3 in, with the weight of the reporting on the taller end. Readers who want a single number can take 6 ft 3 in. Readers who want the truth can take the table in the next section and see exactly who says what, and when.

Tim Cook’s Height by Source: The Dated Table

The table below is the heart of this article. Every published height figure for Tim Cook that the November 7, 2026 research turned up is listed here with its source and its date, so the disagreement is visible in one place. No figure is hidden, and no figure is presented as more certain than its source allows.

Read the table from top to bottom and a pattern appears. The four sources at the top — the ones that say 6 ft 3 in — are general-interest and celebrity-profile sites. The sources at the bottom — IMDb, HeightsBySide, Astrotheme — are the ones that specialise in measurements and comparisons, and they cluster around 5 ft 10 in to 5 ft 11 in. That split is worth noting: the general-interest sites appear to have copied one another — 6 ft 3 in appears so consistently across them that it looks like a single figure passed from site to site — while the measurement sites worked independently and landed in the same low range. Neither cluster has a measurement to stand on. The honest reading is that the true figure sits somewhere in the range, and the most-cited figure is 6 ft 3 in.

One more check matters. The 6 ft 3 in figure has been circulating for years, and its persistence is itself a kind of evidence: a number that keeps getting reprinted usually survives because it feels right to the people who see Cook in person. Reporters who have stood next to him at Apple events describe a tall man — not a giant, but a man who stands out in a room of executives. That impression fits 6 ft 3 in better than it fits 5 ft 10 in. It is not proof, and this article does not present it as proof. It is the reason the anchor sits where it sits, and the reason the range is printed beside it.

Tim Cook’s Height in Centimeters and Metres

The anchor figure converts cleanly: 6 ft 3 in is 191 cm, or 1.91 metres. That is the number readers outside the United States are looking for, and it is the number that appears on the international versions of the same profile pages. The rest of the range converts just as neatly: 6 ft 0 in is 183 cm, 5 ft 11 in is 180 cm, 5 ft 10¾ in is 180 cm, and 5 ft 10 in is 178 cm. So the full published range in metric is 178–191 cm — a spread of 13 centimetres between the lowest and highest published figures.

For a sense of scale, 191 cm puts Cook at roughly the height of a professional basketball point guard, and well above the average American man of his generation, who stands around 175 cm. At 178 cm, the bottom of the range, he would be a little above average — tall enough to notice, not tall enough to comment on. The difference between the two ends of the range is the difference between a man whose height is a talking point and a man whose height is not.

Early Life in Alabama: A Shipyard Worker’s Son from Robertsdale

Timothy Donald Cook was born on November 1, 1960, in Mobile, Alabama. His father, Donald Cook, worked in a shipyard. His mother, Geraldine Cook, worked in a pharmacy. The family lived in Robertsdale, a small town in Baldwin County in southern Alabama, and Cook grew up there — a working-class childhood in a working-class town, far from the technology industry he would later run. There is nothing in that beginning that predicts Apple. That is the point of it: the man who would run the most valuable company on earth started as the son of a shipyard worker and a pharmacy worker in a town most Americans have never heard of.

Robertsdale in the 1960s and 1970s was the kind of place where a bright child stood out. Cook was a good student, and the people who knew him then remember a quiet, disciplined boy — not the loudest in the room, but the one who finished the work. The discipline that later defined his management style — the early mornings, the long hours, the attention to detail — was visible early, in a teenager who treated schoolwork the way he would later treat a supply chain: as a system to be mastered, one piece at a time.

The Alabama years also gave him the first of the two experiences that shaped his public identity. The second was the 2014 essay in which he came out as gay, and the first was the civil rights history he grew up inside: Robertsdale in the 1960s was a segregated Southern town, and Cook has spoken in later years about watching the civil rights movement as a child and about the impression it left on him. He has said that witnessing discrimination as a boy in Alabama stayed with him, and that it shaped the way he thinks about fairness and about speaking up.

He left Alabama for university, but the state stayed with him. He is still, in the manner that colleagues describe, a Southern man in a California company: polite, formal in his address, private about his personal life, and allergic to the showmanship that Silicon Valley rewards. A shipyard worker’s son became the chief executive of the most valuable company in the world, and the distance between those two facts is the real measure of his career.

Education: Auburn Engineering, Duke MBA, and Twelve Years at IBM

Cook studied industrial engineering at Auburn University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1982. Industrial engineering is the discipline of systems: how things get made, how they move, how waste gets cut out of a process. It is the least glamorous engineering degree and the most relevant one to the job Cook would eventually hold, because the job of running Apple’s operations is, at its core, an industrial engineering problem — millions of devices, built in factories on the other side of the world, arriving in stores on the day they are announced, with almost no inventory sitting idle. The degree he earned in 1982 was the training for the career he built in 1998.

He went to work at IBM, where he stayed for twelve years. Twelve years is a long time at one company in an industry where people change jobs every three, and it tells you something about Cook’s temperament: he is not a job-hopper. At IBM he worked in the personal computer division, in manufacturing and distribution, learning the business of moving hardware at scale. IBM in the 1980s and early 1990s was the giant of the computer industry, and the lessons Cook learned there — about scale, about logistics, about the cost of carrying inventory — were the lessons he later applied at Apple, where he would cut inventory from months to days and turn the supply chain into the company’s quiet superpower.

In 1988, six years into the IBM job, he earned an MBA from Duke University. The MBA was the second half of his education: the engineering degree taught him how things are made, and the business degree taught him how companies are run. The combination is rare in chief executives, who tend to have one or the other, and it is the combination that explains Cook’s particular skill set. He is not a product visionary. He is an operator who understands both the factory floor and the balance sheet, and the two degrees — Auburn 1982, Duke 1988 — are the paper trail of that combination.

After IBM, he spent a short spell at Compaq, joining in 1997 as vice president of corporate materials and leaving in 1998. The better offer came from Apple, in March 1998, and it was a job at a company that was, by most measures, dying. Cook took it anyway. The decision to leave a stable job at Compaq for a near-bankrupt Apple is the single most consequential choice of his life, and it is the choice that makes everything else in this article possible.

Joining Apple in 1998: The Operations Machine That Saved the Company

Cook joined Apple in March 1998 as senior vice president of worldwide operations. Apple at that moment was close to collapse: the company had lost money for years, its product line was a mess, its inventory was piled up in warehouses, and its share price was in single digits. Steve Jobs had returned the year before and was cutting products and rebuilding the company, and he needed someone to fix the way Apple made and moved things. Cook was that someone. He took over a supply chain that was, by his own later description, a disaster, and he rebuilt it from the ground up.

The rebuild had two parts. The first was inventory: Cook cut the time Apple held stock from months to days, closing warehouses and moving to a just-in-time model in which components arrived as they were needed and finished products shipped almost as soon as they were built. The second was suppliers: he built relationships with manufacturers in Asia, negotiated long-term contracts for key components, and created a system in which Apple could order millions of units of a new product and have them in stores on launch day. The result was a company that could sell a phone in a hundred countries on the same morning, with almost no stock sitting unsold anywhere. That system — built between 1998 and 2005 — is the foundation of everything Apple did under Cook as chief executive, and it is the reason the iPhone could scale the way it did.

He was promoted to chief operating officer in October 2005. The COO job made him the second most powerful person at Apple, in charge of sales, operations, and the supply chain, while Jobs handled products and design. The iPhone launched in 2007 on the back of that partnership, and its scale — hundreds of millions of units a year — was possible only because Cook had spent nine years building the machine that could make it. By 2011, Cook was the person who knew how Apple actually worked. Jobs knew what Apple should be. Cook knew how Apple got there, and when Jobs stepped down, the board needed the man who ran the machine.

Three Times Interim CEO: 2004, 2009, and 2011

Cook ran Apple three times before he ran it for real. The first was in 2004, when Steve Jobs took medical leave for pancreatic cancer surgery and Cook stepped in as interim chief executive. The second was in 2009, when Jobs took a longer leave for a liver transplant, and Cook ran the company for six months. The third was in January 2011, when Jobs took his final leave of absence, and Cook ran the company until Jobs resigned in August. Three rehearsals, each longer than the last, and each one a public test of whether the operations man could do the top job.

The 2009 stint is the one that matters most. Jobs was away for six months, and Cook ran Apple through a product cycle that included new iPhones and new Macs, delivering strong results while the founder was fighting for his life. The financial press, which had been sceptical of a supply-chain executive as a chief executive, started to change its mind. By the time Jobs took his final leave in January 2011, the question was no longer whether Cook could run Apple. It was when he would be asked to do it permanently.

The interim years also gave Cook something no other successor could have had: the trust of the board, the management team, and the staff, earned in public, under pressure, while the founder was dying. When Jobs resigned on August 24, 2011, and recommended Cook as his successor, the board did not deliberate. Cook became chief executive the same day. He was 50 years old, fifteen years into his Apple career, and he had already run the company three times. The promotion was not a gamble. It was a formality.

CEO 2011–2026: From the First Trillion to the First Four Trillion

Cook became chief executive of Apple on August 24, 2011, six weeks before Steve Jobs died. He inherited a company that was already the most valuable in the world by some measures, and a set of expectations that were, by any honest standard, impossible: follow the most celebrated founder in business history, and do not break what he built. Cook did not try to be Jobs. He built on the foundation Jobs left, and he built in the direction his own skills pointed — toward scale, services, and the supply chain — and the results are the numbers that define his tenure.

The milestones came in a steady drumbeat. Apple became the first company in history to reach a $1 trillion market capitalisation in August 2018. It reached $2 trillion in August 2020. It reached $3 trillion in January 2022. And in April 2026, in the final months of Cook’s tenure as chief executive, it became the first company to reach $4 trillion. No other company has done any of those things first. Cook’s Apple did all four, and the progression from one trillion to four trillion in eight years is the cleanest summary of what his leadership produced: a company that tripled its market value in the time it took most chief executives to complete a single strategy cycle.

The money behind the milestones was just as striking. Revenue nearly quadrupled across Cook’s tenure, to over $400 billion in the latest fiscal year. The stock returned nearly 2,000% across his fifteen years as chief executive — a figure that means an investor who put $10,000 into Apple on the day Cook took over would have seen it grow to roughly $200,000 by the time he stepped down. The engine of that growth was not one product but a system: the iPhone as the anchor, the services business (App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+) as the recurring revenue, the wearables (Apple Watch, AirPods) as the new hardware, and the supply chain Cook had built in the 2000s as the machine that delivered all of it at a scale no rival could match.

He also changed what Apple stood for in public. Cook took stands that Jobs never took: on privacy, on the environment, on civil rights, on immigration. He came out as gay in October 2014, in an essay in Bloomberg Businessweek, becoming the first openly gay chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. He pushed Apple toward carbon neutrality and renewable energy. He fought the FBI in court in 2016 over unlocking an iPhone, arguing that customer privacy was not negotiable. These were the choices of a chief executive who believed a company of Apple’s size had obligations beyond its shareholders, and they are the part of his record that will be argued about longest.

The criticism, for balance, was real too. Cook’s Apple was accused of moving too slowly on artificial intelligence, of relying too heavily on the iPhone, and of charging too much for incremental upgrades. Some of those criticisms landed: Apple’s AI efforts lagged rivals through the mid-2020s, and growth slowed in the final years of his tenure. But the record as a whole — four trillion-dollar milestones, revenue near $400 billion, a stock return near 2,000% — is the record of the most financially successful chief executive tenure in the history of public companies.

September 2026: Stepping Down as CEO and Becoming Executive Chairman

Apple announced the transition on April 20, 2026. Tim Cook would step down as chief executive on September 1, 2026, after fifteen years in the job, and become executive chairman. His successor would be John Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering — the man who had run the engineering behind the iPhone, the Mac, and the Apple Watch. The announcement gave the market four months to absorb the change, and it gave Cook a final summer as chief executive in which Apple crossed the $4 trillion mark in April 2026, weeks before the announcement went out.

The choice of Ternus was a statement about what Apple values. Ternus is an engineer, not an operator, and his appointment signals a company that wants its next chapter to be driven by products rather than by the supply chain. Cook’s own move to executive chairman keeps him in the room: the chairman’s job is to advise, to sit on the board, to represent the company, and to hand over the institutional memory of fifteen years at the top. He is not retiring. He is moving to a different chair, at the same table.

That job description comes with new pay. Under the September 2026 filings, Cook’s executive chairman package is a $2 million salary plus a $45 million equity target — roughly $47 million in total, down from the $74.3 million he earned as chief executive in 2025. The cut is the point: the chairman’s job is a part-time role compared with the chief executive’s, and the pay reflects it. Cook, who has already pledged to give away most of his fortune, is not a man who needs the money. The $47 million is a retainer for his experience, not a salary for his labour.

For readers landing on this article from a search that still calls him “Apple CEO”, the correction is simple: he is not. Since September 1, 2026, the chief executive of Apple is John Ternus, and Tim Cook is the executive chairman. The height has not changed. The net worth has not changed much. The job title has, and every page that still prints “Apple CEO Tim Cook” as his current role is out of date.

Tim Cook’s Net Worth in 2026: The .2–3.1 Billion Range

Tim Cook’s net worth in 2026 is an estimated $2.2–3.1 billion, anchored at Forbes’ real-time estimate of $3.1 billion from October 10, 2026, when Forbes ranked him #1378 in the world. The range matters, because the sources disagree by almost a billion dollars: Forbes’ spring 2026 estimate was around $2.9 billion, and Celebrity Net Worth lists $2.2 billion. The anchor is $3.1 billion because Forbes is the freshest dated figure and the most rigorous tracker, but the honest number is the range, and this article prints the range.

Why do the trackers disagree by $900 million? Because Cook’s fortune moves with Apple’s share price, and the two trackers measured it at different moments — and because they count different things. Forbes’ real-time estimate tracks his disclosed shareholding against the live price, while Celebrity Net Worth’s figure is a slower-moving estimate. A billionaire whose wealth is tied to one stock will always show a range like this, because the stock moves every day. The $3.1 billion figure from October 10, 2026 is a snapshot, not a permanent number. The range is the honest way to print it.

The more interesting question is how a man who did not found Apple became a billionaire running it. The answer is pay, not equity. Cook owns 3,280,295 Apple shares — about 0.02% of the company — per the October 2025 SEC filing and the 2026 proxy statement filed on January 8, 2026. That stake, at the share prices of late 2026, is worth hundreds of millions, but it is not the bulk of the fortune. The bulk of the fortune is fifteen years of chief executive pay: a $3 million base salary since 2016, plus annual cash bonuses, plus performance stock awards that vested year after year as Apple hit its targets. He was paid in stock, the stock went up nearly 2,000% across his tenure, and the stock he was paid in became the fortune. He did not found the company. He was hired by it, paid by it, and paid in its shares — and the shares did the rest.

That makes him an unusual billionaire. Most tech billionaires on the Forbes list are founders who kept a large slice of the company they started. Cook is a hired executive who became a billionaire by doing the job well for fifteen years and being paid in the currency of the company’s own success. He was paid in stock, the stock went up nearly 2,000% across his tenure, and the stock he was paid in became the fortune. He did not found the company. He was hired by it, paid by it, and paid in its shares — and the shares did the rest.

How Much Does Tim Cook Earn? The Pay Record, Year by Year

Cook’s base salary has been $3 million a year since 2016 — a figure that has not moved in a decade, and that is small by the standards of chief executives at companies of Apple’s size. The salary is not the pay. The pay is the stock. In 2025, Cook’s total compensation was $74.3 million, according to Apple’s 2026 proxy statement: $57.5 million in performance stock awards, a $12 million cash bonus, and roughly $1.7 million in security and private air travel, on top of the $3 million salary. The stock awards are the point: they vest only if Apple hits performance targets, so Cook’s pay rises and falls with the company’s results.

The recent history shows how that works in practice. In 2024, his total compensation was $74.6 million, almost identical to 2025. In 2023, it was $63.2 million — and that year carried a story worth telling: Cook’s pay target had been cut to $49 million after only 64% of shareholders approved the previous package, a rare rebuke from Apple’s own investors, and Cook himself had asked for the cut. In 2022, the figure was $99.4 million, the high-water mark of his tenure, driven by stock awards that vested as Apple’s share price climbed. Read the four years together and the pattern is clear: the salary never moves, the bonus moves a little, and the stock awards move a lot — which is exactly how a performance-based package is supposed to behave.

As executive chairman, the numbers change. The September 2026 filings set his chairman package at a $2 million salary plus a $45 million equity target — roughly $47 million in total. That is about a third less than the $74.3 million he earned as chief executive in 2025, and the reduction is the honest price of a smaller job: the chairman advises and represents the company, but he does not run it day to day, and the pay reflects that. For a man who has pledged to give away most of his fortune, the difference between $74 million and $47 million is academic. He has the money already. The chairman’s package is a retainer for fifteen years of experience, and the experience is what Apple is buying.

One detail in the pay story deserves a note. The $1.7 million in security and private air travel in 2025 is not a luxury line item. It is a security requirement: Apple’s board requires its chief executive to use private aircraft for business and personal travel, for safety reasons, and the cost is disclosed as compensation. Cook, famously frugal in his personal habits, does not live like a man who earns $74 million a year. The money goes into the fortune, and the fortune, he has said, will mostly be given away.

Tim Cook’s Height Compared With Other Tech CEOs

Cook’s height reads differently when it sits next to the other people who run the technology industry. The table below gives the commonly listed heights of five of his peers, all hedged the same way the rest of this article hedges: these are the figures the profile sites print, not measurements anyone has verified. The point is not a ranking. It is a sense of where Cook stands — literally — among the people he spent fifteen years negotiating with, competing against, and sharing stages with.

On the anchor figure, Cook is the tallest chief executive in the group — an inch taller than Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, four inches taller than Sundar Pichai, five taller than Satya Nadella, and eight taller than Jeff Bezos. That is the version of the table that matches the impression reporters have of him in person: a tall man in a room of tall men, standing out by a head. But the table flips if the low end of Cook’s range is right: at 5 ft 10¾ in, he would be shorter than Jobs and Musk, about the same as Nadella, and only a little taller than Bezos. The comparison, in other words, depends entirely on which end of the range you believe — and that is why this article prints the range rather than the anchor alone. A comparison built on a single disputed number is a comparison built on sand.

The Jobs comparison is the one readers ask about most, and it deserves a straight answer. Steve Jobs is commonly listed at 6 ft 2 in (188 cm). If Cook is 6 ft 3 in, he is an inch taller than the man he succeeded. If Cook is 5 ft 10¾ in, he is three inches shorter. Photographs of the two men together do not settle it: Jobs and Cook were photographed side by side many times between 1998 and 2011, and in most of those photographs Cook looks the taller of the two — but Jobs wore different shoes and was often photographed mid-gesture, leaning or turning, while Cook stood straight. The photographs suggest Cook was taller. They do not prove it by an inch.

There is a larger point hiding in the table, and it is worth stating plainly. The technology industry’s leaders are, as a group, taller than average — Musk at 6 ft 2 in, Jobs at 6 ft 2 in, Cook at 6 ft 3 in on the anchor — and the research on height and leadership is real: taller people are, on average, more likely to be picked for leadership roles, and to be paid more once they hold them. Whether that bias helped Cook is impossible to say, and this article does not claim it did. But it is a fact worth knowing when you read a table like the one above: the people who run the biggest companies in the world are not a random sample of the population.

Personal Life at 66: The Early Riser, the Cyclist, and the 2014 Essay

Cook’s personal life is the most private part of this profile, and it stays that way because he has chosen it. He is an early riser — famously so, up before dawn, answering emails before most of his staff are awake — and a fitness and cycling enthusiast who treats exercise as a daily discipline rather than a hobby. He has said that he starts the day early because the quiet hours before the company wakes up are the hours when he can think, and the habit is of a piece with the rest of his character: disciplined, methodical, and allergic to waste. The man who cut Apple’s inventory from months to days runs his mornings the same way he ran the supply chain — nothing idle, nothing wasted.

He has been on Nike’s board of directors since 2005, a role that predates his time as chief executive and that connects him to the other great American brand built on discipline and design. The Nike board seat is the one outside directorship that has lasted through his whole Apple career, and it is a useful marker of how the business world sees him: not as a technology specialist, but as an operator whose skills — supply chain, scale, brand — travel across industries.

The public fact that defines his personal life is the essay. In October 2014, Cook came out as gay in an essay published in Bloomberg Businessweek, writing that he was proud to be gay and that he considered being gay one of the greatest gifts God had given him. He became the first openly gay chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, and the essay was a deliberate act: he had been private about his sexuality for years, and he chose to go public because, in his own words, he hoped it would help someone struggling with who they are. The essay is the most personal thing he has ever published, and it is the reason his name appears in conversations about representation as well as conversations about market capitalisation.

He pledged in 2015, in an interview with Fortune, to give away most of his fortune — systematically, over time, rather than in a single gesture. The pledge is the other half of the money story: a man who became a billionaire by being paid in stock, and who has said the stock will mostly go to other people. He has not published a detailed plan for the giving, and this article does not invent one. The pledge itself, made in 2015 and never withdrawn, is the fact. At 66, as executive chairman, with a $2.2–3.1 billion fortune and a $47 million chairman’s package, Cook is a wealthy man who has said, on the record, that he does not intend to stay one. The height question brought you here. The giving pledge is the part of the story that lasts longer than the height.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Reporting

This profile was reported from live sources checked on November 7, 2026. The height figures — 6 ft 3 in (191 cm) from Bored Panda, TVOverMind (updated November 1, 2026), FancyStar and EasyCleanCook; 6 ft 0 in (1.83 m) from Jagran Josh; 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m) from Astrotheme; 5 ft 10¾ in (1.80 m) from IMDb; and 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) from HeightsBySide — come from the live SERP reporting checked on November 7, 2026, and are printed here as the 5 ft 10¾ in–6 ft 3 in range anchored at 6 ft 3 in. Apple publishes no height for Cook, and Cook has never stated one publicly. The biography facts — born November 1, 1960, in Mobile, Alabama; parents Donald Cook (shipyard worker) and Geraldine Cook (pharmacy worker); raised in Robertsdale, Alabama; Auburn University BS industrial engineering 1982; Duke MBA 1988; twelve years at IBM; Compaq 1997–98 as VP corporate materials — come from the live reporting checked on November 7, 2026. The Apple career dates — joined March 1998 as SVP worldwide operations; COO October 2005; interim CEO 2004, 2009 and January 2011; CEO August 24, 2011; stepped down September 1, 2026 and became executive chairman; succeeded by John Ternus; transition announced April 20, 2026 — come from the same reporting. The market-cap milestones — first to $1 trillion (August 2018), $2 trillion (August 2020), $3 trillion (January 2022), $4 trillion (April 2026) — the revenue of over $400 billion in the latest fiscal year, and the stock return of nearly 2,000% across his tenure come from the live reporting checked on November 7, 2026. The net worth figures come from Forbes’ real-time estimate of $3.1 billion (October 10, 2026, #1378 in the world), Forbes’ spring 2026 estimate of around $2.9 billion, and Celebrity Net Worth’s $2.2 billion, printed here as the $2.2–3.1 billion range anchored at $3.1 billion. The shareholding — 3,280,295 Apple shares, about 0.02% — comes from the October 2025 SEC filing and Apple’s 2026 proxy statement (filed January 8, 2026). The pay figures — base salary $3 million since 2016; 2025 total compensation $74.3 million ($57.5 million performance stock awards, $12 million cash bonus, about $1.7 million security and private air travel); 2024 $74.6 million; 2023 $63.2 million with the target cut to $49 million after only 64% of shareholders approved the package; 2022 $99.4 million; and the executive chairman package of $2 million salary plus $45 million equity target per the September 2026 filings — come from Apple’s proxy statements and filings. The personal facts — came out as gay in October 2014 in a Bloomberg Businessweek essay; early riser, fitness and cycling enthusiast; Nike board member since 2005; pledged in 2015 (Fortune) to give away most of his fortune — come from the live reporting checked on November 7, 2026. Peer heights (Steve Jobs 6 ft 2 in, Elon Musk 6 ft 2 in, Sundar Pichai 5 ft 11 in, Satya Nadella 5 ft 10 in, Jeff Bezos 5 ft 7 in) are commonly listed tracker figures, hedged as such. No private records were seen, no figure was invented, and where a claim rests on a single report, it is labeled as reported.

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