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- Apple is worth trillions of dollars.
- Current ownership data on Apple's shareholders is set to be released in January 2024.
- Apple's largest shareholder as of January 2023 was the firm Vanguard Group Inc.
Apple CEO Tim Cook's leadership has taken the company to new heights, including Apple's market cap peaking north of $3 trillion.
Cook himself has a large stake in Apple, but Apple's owners are mostly institutional investors.
Apple releases a proxy statement each year that reveals the institutions and individuals who hold 5% or more of the company's stock.
Who are the biggest owners of Apple?
Apple's latest proxy statement is set to be released in January 2024. Until then, we only know what the ownership looked like as of January 2023, almost a full year ago.
Lots could have changed since then, but at the time, the document revealed that Apple's largest shareholder was the firm Vanguard Group Inc., which held 7.96% of the company's shares, or more than 1.2 billion shares.
BlackRock Inc. owned about 1.1 billion shares, which was 6% of the shares issued, according to the document. The third largest holder of Apple stock was Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., with holdings amounting to approximately 5.73% of Apple's outstanding shares.
The largest individual investor in the company in January 2023 was Arthur Levinson, the proxy stated, with over 4.5 million shares. Levinson has been an Apple board member since 2000 and chair of the board since 2011.
Next in line after Levinson, as far as individuals went, was Apple CEO Tim Cook, followed by Jeff Williams, the company's Chief Operating Officer, according to the document.
How much of Apple does Tim Cook own?
Up-to-date information on Tim Cook's ownership of Apple shares is set to be released in January 2024.
He owned 3.3 million shares as of October 2023, according to an SEC filing.
What other companies are connected to Apple?
Steve Jobs created the company NeXT in the mid-1980s. Amid a sales slump for Apple, Jobs resigned, founded the company, and poached Apple talent to work for NeXT.
In 1996, Apple bought out NeXT, believing NeXT's operating system had a better chance at market success. Jobs was rehired, and by July 1997, he was back in as CEO following a leadership coup.
Does Bill Gates own Apple stock?
Within Jobs' first year back as CEO, he entered into a partnership with Bill Gates' Microsoft, which made a $150 million investment in Apple and committed to developing software for macOS. In 2003, Microsoft opted to sell all of its Apple stock for $550 million.
Do Apple's founders still own Apple?
Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in 1976. Wayne sold his 10% stake in Apple for $1,500 12 days after founding Apple.
It's unclear what Wozniak's current ownership looks like, but he and Steve Jobs both originally had a 45% stake in the company. Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, inherited 5.5 million shares of Apple stock, according to company documents from 2011. But in 2022, she vowed to give the majority of her wealth away through her philanthropic efforts, and it is unclear how much Apple stock she still holds.