John Ternus, Apple’s hardware expert, will lead the company into the AI era

John Ternus is about to take charge of Apple with a $3 million annual salary and a $55 million stock package. The sum is enormous, but it remains far below the compensation Elon Musk is expected to receive over the next decade, or Cristiano Ronaldo’s reported annual pay in Saudi football. Ternus, however, does not project the image of a star. He is a reserved executive known more for making few mistakes than for seeking attention.

He will replace Tim Cook, who took over after Steve Jobs and leaves behind a company whose market value has multiplied 13 times during his tenure. The transition is expected to be smoother than the shift from Jobs to Cook. Cook will remain executive chairman and continue handling diplomatic duties, including relations with Donald Trump and visits to China and Europe. That arrangement is expected to last, at least initially, until the next US presidential election.

The company Ternus inherits has a market capitalization of around $4.7 trillion and has just reported a record quarter for net profit. Yet two of its most important challenges involve artificial intelligence. Data centers have become priority customers for chip and memory manufacturers because they buy in huge volumes and pay more, creating a market far different from the one Ternus knew earlier in his career.

The other challenge concerns Apple’s place in the AI revolution. If OpenAI, Anthropic and Google develop the most powerful models, Apple will need to find the simplest, most elegant and most useful way to put that intelligence into the hands of millions of people.

Very little is publicly known about Ternus’s private life. The media have had to rely on details such as his past as a strong swimmer and an episode in which he became angry because someone had failed to put screws in the right place. He has no social media presence. His obscurity is relatively common among executives who have spent their entire careers at one company. What is clear is why Apple chose him: Ternus is a hardware expert with strong relationships among veteran executives. He lacks Jobs’s product-design vision and Cook’s supply-chain reputation, but he may understand Apple’s products and the internal machinery behind them better than anyone.