Money well earned!
Tim Cook has a hard job. He has Steve's reputation to live up to, while he nevertheless has to find his own management style, and he is entrusted, in part, with maintaining the success of one of the worlds largest and most successful corporations.
Someone made a comment about there being 1 in 10000 people who could do this. Perhaps one might make an argument that there's 1 in 10000 people who, when they're first born, might have the raw potential to spend decades in school and business to learn to do this job. But far far fewer actually go through the necessary training and experience. Instead, those people go through training and experience in other fields, and so they're capable of doing things that Tim Cook is not, even if he was born with the raw potential.
I know a professor at Ohio State who is like a clone of Steve Jobs. Seriously. All the same personality quirks, same intelligence and wit and impatience and sometimes grating personality. But instead of founding Apple, he was one of the earliest major contributors to the discipline of Cognitive Ergonomics. He's brilliant at it. But I would not recommend that Apple hire him as a replacement CEO. Besides the fact that he contributes best to the world continuing in his own area, he simply lacks the expertise (in business and other things) necessary to run a company like Apple. He may behave like Steve Jobs, think like Steve Jobs, and even a little bit look like Steve Jobs, but he is NOT Steve Jobs.
One in some tens of thousands of people may have the same basic cognitive style as Tim Cook, but only Tim Cook was the right person in the right places at the right times. No one else has the SAME experience, and exceedingly few other people in the world have comparable experience such that they could trivially fill his role.
Certainly not any of the people HP has hired to be CEO in the past several years.
(To be fair, all of them were hamstrung by HP's messed up corporate culture, but a really great leader with the right passion might have been able to bust through some of that.)
The next several years will demonstrate whether or not Tim Cook can keep things going as well as they have in the past. But Steve Jobs liked very few people, and those he did like, he liked for good reason. And he really liked Tim Cook.
