Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) shares fell 1.73% on Monday as the company transitions to its first new chief executive in 15 years, unsettling investors despite a broadly mixed session for tech stocks.
Tim Cook officially steps down as CEO on September 1, passing leadership to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, who will inherit one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Cook grew Apple’s market value from $350 billion when he took the helm in 2011 to more than $4 trillion, a milestone that stands as one of the most remarkable runs in corporate history.
During his tenure, Cook oversaw the launch of landmark products including the Apple Watch, AirPods, and, more recently, the MacBook Neo, while steering the company through tariffs and supply chain disruptions.
He also built Apple’s Services segment into a business generating more than $100 billion in revenue annually, making it the company’s second-largest division behind the iPhone.
Cook will not leave Apple entirely, remaining with the company as executive chair and assisting with policy engagement around the world, according to a company statement.
Steve Jobs first hired Cook in 1998, promoted him to executive vice president of worldwide sales in 2002, and appointed him chief operating officer in 2005 before Cook succeeded Jobs as CEO in 2011.
Elsewhere in tech, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) bucked the market’s uncertainty, with shares rising roughly 1% after the company announced a $3.5 billion investment in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek on Monday morning.
The two companies said the deal deepens a longstanding partnership, with MediaTek set to use Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion technology to allow hyperscalers, cloud providers, and AI developers to build custom chips integrated into Nvidia’s data center architecture.
“NVIDIA and MediaTek today announced a deepening of their longstanding collaboration to build the next generations of AI computing platforms, spanning AI infrastructure, local AI computing and automotive,” the companies said in a joint statement.
NVLink Fusion will allow MediaTek to “provide hyperscalers, cloud service providers and frontier model developers with a prevalidated path to develop custom XPUs and bring them into NVIDIA NVLink-connected, rack-scale AI factories,” the companies added.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking on the company’s second quarter earnings call, described his company’s position in the AI buildout in expansive terms, noting its unique role in delivering a complete platform.
“The part that people don’t see about our growth because we’re practically singular because of the nature of how we deliver products. I mean we’re the only company in the world that creates and builds, offers an entire AI factory platform, a full-stack system,” Huang said.
The MediaTek investment adds to the billions of dollars Nvidia has already deployed across the broader AI ecosystem as it works to position its architecture as the foundational layer for next-generation AI infrastructure.
Also in focus on Monday was SpaceX, after OpenAI announced it would terminate Cursor’s access to its AI models, citing concerns about contractual compliance with Elon Musk’s companies following SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor earlier this month.
“We notified SpaceX that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026,” OpenAI said, adding that the decision was based on its experience with “Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts.”
Despite the OpenAI fallout, SpaceX stock was trading higher in early Monday trading, suggesting investors viewed the development as manageable for the broader business.
The wider tech sector remained volatile as optimism from Nvidia’s strong recent earnings clashed with growing expectations of a Federal Reserve interest rate hike in September, putting pressure on several of the Magnificent Seven hyperscaler stocks.
