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Hey, I'm Cramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to CNBC America. I hope my friends, I'm just about trying to make you some money. My job is not just to entertain, but to teach. So, call me at 1-800-743-CBC or tweet me at Jim Cramer.
Tonight, we're hosting a Mad Money Master Class. We are cracking open the vault so you can learn from a legend. We want to shine a light on one of America's greatest business people and a fantastic story: Tim Cook's remarkable run at Apple. Tim's extraordinary tenure as CEO ended September 1st, 2026. And I'm looking back at more than a decade of our conversations because if you want to understand what terrific leadership really looks like, you can learn a lot from watching Tim Cook. So tonight, as part of our Invest in America series, we're revisiting some of my favorite moments with Tim and the lessons investors can take from one of the great CEOs of our time. And our story starts in 2015. For Mad Money's 10th anniversary, Tim surprised me by calling into the show. I had no idea that phone call would begin a decade of conversations on this set, at Apple headquarters, inside Apple stores, and on American factory floors. This is where it all began. Take a look. Let's take a call. Go to Tim in California. Tim.
Hey Jim. I'm calling from Cupertino, California to be exact. This is Tim Cook at Apple and I want to congratulate you on 10 great years of Mad Money.
Well, wow. That's a good call. I want to congratulate you for running the greatest company on earth and for creating such amazing wealth and the best products on earth for everybody. You have done a remarkable job, Tim. I am honored that you're calling in.
It's a great team here that does it. Jim, you've been a champion for American innovation and of course Apple feels the same way and we love the fact that you highlight innovation as a centerpiece of your show.
Well, you know what? You make us proud and you do such incredible, incredible innovation yourself every time. You know, I am totally involved with what you're doing for the phone, but of course for the watch and for the ResearchKit. I basically am looking at your company as being the health company of the future. I'm looking at you as being the credit card company of the future. There really are the great growth areas you are in charge of right now, Tim. You know, it's really incredible. Since in the first 24 hours of ResearchKit, we've had 11,000 people sign up for a study in cardiovascular disease through Stanford University's app. And to put that in perspective, Stanford has told us that it would have taken normally 50 medical centers an entire year to sign up that many participants.
So this ResearchKit is an absolute game changer. I think that this is the most... but people don't understand why you absolutely have to have this device, which is why I can't wait till it comes out. I also am focused on the fact, Tim, that your product for retail with Apple Pay is by far the best. I have to believe that given the banks, given Visa, given Mastercard, it's perfectly realistic to believe that the customers will demand it from every major retailer in the world. Do you think I'm right?
I totally think you're right. You said last year, I think when it first came out, that it would take the country by storm and it's doing it. We've already got 700,000 locations accepting Apple Pay. And by the way, we really want to add your bar, San Miguel, to that list.
And if you do that, I'm joining you there for dinner.
You are too much. Tim, I got to ask you, Tim, we always hear that the company is so big, whatever. I mean, I look at your company and I think it's not that expensive. You've got the best balance sheet in the world. Country, company, doesn't matter. You know my mantra: people should own Apple, not trade it. Do you think that eventually people will understand what I'm talking about?
I think eventually they will. Yes. I mean, you know, for people that have owned the stock for 10 years or so, our stock price 10 years ago when you started Mad Money was less than $6 on a split-adjusted basis.
And so you can bet those people are extremely happy right now.
Well, everyone's thrilled with what you've done. When you come to work every day, I know you come in hungry. The competition, are you feeling like you've kind of left it behind or do you just every day come in and say someone might have a better mousetrap?
We're always paranoid. We live paranoid and we always want the very best product and so if we're not beating someone else, we're trying to beat the thing that we have currently shipping.
Do you... everybody here lives on edge?
Well, do you think that you people are worried about the world, people worried about Europe, people worried about currency? Are those just the kind of things that Wall Street worries about? And if you're at home or you're watching and you own 100 shares of Apple, you should just be thinking that Tim Cook and the team are ready for pretty much anything that the world might throw at us.
Currency is clearly a problem, but frankly the best companies will figure out a way to manage it.
And I regard your company with the highest ideals and the greatest manufacturing. I know every day when you come to work, I feel you must think that you have a stewardship that you've got to fulfill because of Steve Jobs. I want you to know that you have far exceeded what anyone I think could have done, but you still walk in his footsteps. How do you feel about the legacy?
You know, there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about Steve and he is still the core part of Apple. His DNA is deep in the company and his office is still next to mine with his name on the door and the values that he placed in here and sort of the spirit that we are here to make the very best products in the world that enrich people's lives, that is still the centerpiece of this company.
And do you think that there are... I know that from Walter Isaacson, that the pipeline that you're using really is, while it definitely had good things in it from Steve, a lot of these devices are yours and your team's, aren't they?
Oh, absolutely. Yes. I mean, we're now quite a ways away from unfortunately his passing. And so there's been a lot of things that have started in creation after his passing.
And let me ask you about where you think things are going. I mean, I know that the car, the home, do you think of them as connectivity, social, mobile, cloud connectivity? Do you think these are the next frontiers or is there a frontier that I'm missing? I'm not thinking big enough.
Well, I think those are two big ones that you talked about. I think health may be the biggest one of all. Because for years, people have depended on strictly somebody else to determine their health. And now these devices in essence empower people to manage and track their own health and fitness. And so I think that market is probably significantly underestimated.
Well, let's go there because I know my cardiologist, well, working on the Stanford project, knows about it and told me that it's within our lifetime that we will have your watch and your watch will show whether my blood pressure spiked, which it did by the way when you called because I had no idea you were calling. But we will have from your watch diabetes, maybe blood pressure, maybe even cancer detection because of the great app system you have and because of the healthcare. Do you think this is within the realm of our lifetime?
Oh, I absolutely do. I absolutely do. And you know, if discovering and curing some of these diseases will push our life expectancy much longer than it currently is, then we'll be able to enjoy Mad Money 50 years from now.
Tim, Tim, I got to tell you, I am deeply honored that you called in. I think you're the best we have. Maybe the best it's ever been. Thank you so much, Tim Cook.
I really appreciate that. You know, Jim, you say that some people want to make friends. I just want to make money. But let me tell you, you've made at least one friend in me. And I wish you all the best. So, happy anniversary.
Thank you so much, Tim Cook, CEO of the biggest company in the world, Apple. Great to talk to you, sir.
Bye-bye. Wow.
Coming up, we'll turn back the clock a full decade. When Tim Cook visited Cramer on the Mad Money set next, don't miss a second of Mad Money. Follow Jim Cramer on X. Have a question? Tweet Cramer #madmentions. Send Jim an email to
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Welcome back to our Mad Money Master Class. A year after our first phone call, Tim Cook joined me for our first sit-down interview on the Mad Money set. Apple was at an inflection point. The watch was brand new. The iPhone was changing the world. And while Wall Street focused on each tick in the stock, Tim was focused on the customer and where Apple could go next. And there's a lesson in that. Great CEOs build for the long term. It's one reason I spent all these years saying the same thing: own Apple, don't trade it. You can hear the beginnings of that story right here. Take a look.
The smartphone market. Eventually, everyone in the world will have a smartphone. Penetration today is in the 40s. Long way to go. Emerging markets like India, the LTE penetration is zero. We've got great innovation in the pipeline from new iPhones that will incent you and other people that have iPhones today to upgrade to new iPhones.
I will need something else because I don't think... but I can't think of anything else that I need.
But we're going to give you things that you can't live without that you just don't know that you need today.
Okay, that's what I want.
And that has always been the objective of Apple, is to do things that really enrich people's lives that you look back on and you wonder how did I live without this?
Now why is the story not talked about nearly as much that this is also a service, that it's become... it's viewed as a device. You're a hardware company. Oh, 60% hardware's can't go to the sky. It's done. Versus what we know, which is that other than say the Netflix bill, maybe the Amazon bill, you can put things on this, whether it be my music, I've got the family plan, whether it be because I've got a lot of pictures and I do the iCloud backup, the Apple Pay. Why do people not talk about the fact that this is not a dead device?
It's something that we belong to.
I think in fairness, we didn't talk about it a lot until recently. And so I take that. But as you say, services now is the second largest revenue segment at Apple. It was for last quarter, it was for the first half of the year as far as that goes. And so last quarter we were at $6 billion, up 20%. It's fast growing. And you look at what it is, it's things like the App Store. You go and you buy apps far after the sale. You might subscribe to Apple Music. You might use Apple Pay. You might buy songs. You might rent movies. And so it's all of these things and it really adds up.
and that of course is based on how many people are using our devices, how many devices out there, and there's over a billion devices in use.
I want to talk about the stock a little bit. It is Mad Money. Huge buyback. A lot of people saying, well, wait, they keep buying back one of the company. But what has it done? Your stock is down below where you bought the average amount, you know, much higher price. Is it a waste versus innovation or is it not really a trade-off?
It's not a trade-off is the answer to that. We first look at all the money that we need to invest in the company and R&D, in stores, in the supply chain, all of the areas we need to do including M&A.
Okay. And we take the money that's left over if we have some, and we do at this point, right?
And we give it back to our shareholders. And we do that in terms of dividends and buybacks. And so if you look at dividends, we just raised it for the... every year since the beginning. We raised it to 57 cents this time. And we're very happy to give that to our shareholders. And on the buyback side, we're... I didn't see how the stock performed today, but we were still below... the last time I looked, we were still below the average that we paid. And we tend to be opportunistic in buying it. And so we don't have some regimented program that you know is X shares a day or whatever.
But if you talk about macro headwinds dominant on the theme on the conference call, difficult compares, dominant currency, no new iteration yet, why not wait? What's the urgency? If you're going to be opportunistic, wouldn't that say let all the negativity come out, let all these hedge funds blow it out, and then we'll make a statement?
Well, opportunistic to me means you buy it when you think the company's undervalued, and we believe the company's undervalued.
Fair enough. When we talk about innovation there again, I don't want to beat the dead horse, but you know the rap, the rap because they're not innovating, and yet we find ourselves wanting to buy the new iteration. I mean, you are a surprise company. It would be ridiculous for you to talk about what's going to be in the seven because it's a statement and it's also a play. It's a drama. There's drama to Apple. No, there's no drama to Whirlpool. I mean, there was never any drama to Ulip Pack. How important is drama to you? Because I also happen to know that you're a thoughtful guy who likes literature, likes movies, likes TV, and you like an arc.
Yeah, we don't talk about futures as a company. As you say, we're fairly secretive. We don't talk about products that are in the roadmap, but I would tell you that we're incredibly excited about things you're working on. Incredibly excited. And so I don't want to be more specific than that, but I think that the other thing maybe that's worth pointing out is if you kind of look at all the things Apple has done over time, at the time they were done, they were rarely ever seen like they were in retrospect.
Well, this bust you're talking about, the bust of the phone, of the watch. I think the watch would be like that too because if you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success, right? The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard, obviously nobody would want it. And so I think that in a few years we will look back and people would say how could I have ever thought about not wearing this watch because it's doing so much for you, and then it will all of a sudden be an overnight success.
Then I went to the second letter that Icahn sent you about doing a buy. By the way, that was in the mid-120s. It was obviously in retrospect a trader, I think, saying this is the time to buy. But he talked about 20 million watches and then 40 million watches. When we see these things in fiscal year 2016, we see these things. We say, 'How did they get them?' I just want to be making it clear. It is not your guidance. You never talked about numbers like 20 and 40 million, right? That is just other people running with the ball. And why do they run with it when you say, 'Listen, we're not making any projections like that?'
I don't know. The way that we look at the watch though, our first goal is to establish a new category.
Smartwatch category wasn't really established. So, we needed to establish the category and we wanted to roll out slowly. Well, today to put it in perspective, you can buy Apple Watch in 14,000 locations. You can buy the iPhone at over 200,000. And so we're still in learning mode. We're learning fairly quickly, though. We know a lot more than we did a year ago. And you'll see the Apple Watch get better and better.
Stick around. Our Mad Money Master Class continues with Cramer's trip to Apple HQ in California next.
Mad Money Master Class continues. In 2017, I had brought Tim Cook into my world. Now he was bringing me into his. I went out to Apple Park in Cupertino where I got to see the bigger picture of what Apple was building. The company wasn't simply selling devices. It was creating an ecosystem of hardware, software, and services with extraordinary reach. Tim was thinking beyond what Apple was to what it could become. Take a look. Tim, last year at this time we sat down, the stock was at 93. The headlines were all about how the company's best days were behind it. You said that the customers love the product. As long as they do, then I'm not going to worry. Do you feel vindicated?
You know, I didn't really worry about what people were saying then because I care very much about our users and I strongly believe that if they're happy over the long term, other things will take care of itself. And so we had a lot of confidence and it's good to be here today, but we don't really look at the stock, you know, because for us it's about the long term.
And so we're very much focused on long-term shareholder value, but not the short-term kind of stuff.
But there has to be a sense that when you read that the company is dead, that it just seems like it's a bit unfair.
Well, I just thought it was absurd.
And people just not understanding the company. I think the iPhone is the best consumer product ever. That's what I feel about it. And it's become so integrated and integral to our lives. You just wouldn't think about leaving home without it. It's your health data is there. It's you're paying with it from an Apple Pay point of view. Your messaging your friends, the community that you're a part of, it's your navigation system, it's your news. For many people, they've moved all of their video to watching on a mobile product and you know, the iPhone is at the center of that.
Clearly is a cord cutter.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so there's so many of these things that it has, that it's so integrated into all aspects of your life that I don't know that there's a consumer product that's made such a profound change in people and with the ecosystem behind it. The fact that it's unleashed millions of developers to develop their passion and provide to customers something that maybe it's been a hobby for them, but now they're unleashing it around the world and it's unbelievable.
On video in particular, what we see that the video world has kind of hit an air pocket and where cord cutting has been happening on some kind of basis. We think it's accelerating massively and that it's clear what the end story looks like here. The trajectory is a debate, but we'd like to play in this. Okay? Because we do think that the best experience for a customer is to view things when they want, the way they want and have many different additional information around what they're watching, you know, not just the linear TV feed. And so yeah, we are working on some original content now.
We're learning and we'll see where this takes us.
Tim, let's talk about Apple's role in the world. You're a huge company. What are you doing to create jobs?
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, a lot of people ask me, do you think it's a company's job to create jobs? And my response is a company should have values because a company is a collection of people and people should have values. So, by extension, a company should. And one of the things you do is give back. So, how do you give back? We give back through our work in the environment and running the company on renewable energy. We give back in job creation. And so if you look at job creation in particular, we've now created two million jobs in America.
Give me that.
And so let me give you a little bit of information on this. And this doesn't include the multiplier effect, by the way. That would make it a ton more. That's as you look around this campus, we now have 80,000 people in the United States. About 25,000 are here doing R&D. But we have a huge facility in Austin as well that has 6,000 people that does everything from engineering to customer support to financial services etc. And of course we have stores across the United States. In addition to this, we buy a lot from US suppliers and this includes things like we manufacture here, our suppliers manufacture here. You know, Corning is an example of this. We buy the glass from iPhone and iPad from Corning. But there's many other examples. We buy adhesives from 3M.
3M manufactures in my home state of Alabama and many other places as well.
And so we actually spent over $50 billion last year in this country. I mean, this is incredible. And then we have a developer community. These are folks from really small businesses, a party of one to larger companies and they're writing apps that change the world. And we're giving them the platform and we've created an incredible store that allows them to sell their product in 155 countries in the world. It's a really unbelievable empowering experience as a new business. And so each of these areas, Jim, we ask ourselves, how can we increase it further? How can we create even more? You know, we're not satisfied with just two million. And so, you can bet we're going to be hiring thousands of employees in the future, thousands more employees in the future. On the developer community, we're asking ourselves, how can we empower the next generation of developers? How can we touch even more people? How can we train more people to code so they can pursue their passion?
Would you ever put money behind that to make...
We would. We would and we will and you'll be hearing more about that across the summer. In the other category, manufacturing, we ask ourselves, how can we get more people to do advanced manufacturing in the United States? And I'm proud to tell you that we're creating an advanced manufacturing fund. We're initially putting $1 billion in the fund.
This I did not know about.
