Apple has told regulators what it will cost to run Apple. John Ternus, who became chief executive on Tuesday, gets a $3 million annual base salary and a stock award targeted at $55 million for fiscal 2027, which puts his package at roughly $58 million. There is also a one-time prorated grant of restricted stock units worth about $2.5 million, covering the months of fiscal 2026 he spends in the chair.What makes the number interesting is how little of it is guaranteed. Three-quarters of that $55 million is performance stock, and it vests only if Apple’s total shareholder return beats the rest of the S&P 500. Keep pace with the index and the largest part of the new CEO’s pay never arrives. Bloomberg, which went through the SEC filing first, reported that Apple has stayed quiet on what the two men could earn in cash bonuses on top of all this.
Apple has to beat the S&P 500 before most of John Ternus’s pay lands
The remaining quarter of the annual award is time-based, vesting semiannually at 12.5 per cent a time over four years. None of these figures are fixed, because the value tracks Apple’s share price from here. At a market value of about $4.7 trillion, a few percentage points of drift against the index move the arithmetic by millions in either direction.
Tim Cook stays on, and the gap between his pay and his successor’s is small
Cook, who ran Apple for 15 years, becomes executive chairman with a $2 million salary from September 26 and a targeted equity award of $45 million, which comes to about $47 million. His conditions are gentler too, with only half the stock tied to S&P 500 performance against Ternus’s three-quarters. For scale, Cook’s 2025 compensation was $74.3 million, and he holds more than three million Apple shares, which makes the salary line close to a rounding error.
Ternus was promoted for products, and products are what he has to prove on September 9
Ternus, 51, led hardware engineering across every Apple product line before moving up, so the promotion reads as a bet on execution rather than strategy. He inherits the job a week before the annual iPhone launch, where a foldable iPhone is expected alongside refreshed Apple Watch and AirPods models, and a wider rollout of the rebuilt Siri that Apple needs to land after a year of falling behind. His first note to staff promised “a huge launch next week that’s going to be phenomenal.“Cook keeps the diplomacy, including Washington and Beijing. Ternus keeps the products, and collects most of his $58 million only if investors decide Apple is worth more than the market average.
