There may be a different way to look at what could happen to Apple’s top leadership over the next few years.
A bit of context
A couple of months ago, Spotify announced that Daniel Ek, the company’s founder and CEO, will step down in January. He’ll become Spotify’s executive chairman and will be replaced by co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström.
Interestingly, Spotify’s announcement came just a week after Oracle announced that long-time CEO Safra Catz would be succeeded by co-CEOs Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, in what is the company’s second crack at the dual-CEO strategy.
While uncommon, the co-CEO arrangement is hardly new. In recent years, perhaps the most high-profile example was Netflix, which has had Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters as co-CEOs since 2023.
When companies decide to take the dual leadership route, each CEO is tasked with a very specific set of responsibilities.
At Netflix, while Sarandos handles the company’s content and other market-facing areas such as marketing and communications, Peters leads product, technology, and other operational functions.
At Oracle, Magouyrk will lead cloud infrastructure and platform, while Sicilia’s purview will focus on industry applications and other business-facing products.
At Spotify, Söderström will handle product and technology, as Norström focuses on the commercial side, including subscriptions, advertising, and broader business operations.
These are hardly the only tech companies that have experimented with a dual-CEO structure. Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday have also had, or still have, co-CEOs, with similar split-responsibility arrangements.
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