Saturday, September 5, 2026

Foreword

Alyson Shontell

Editor-in-Chief

Earlier this week, Apple (No. 4) CEO Tim Cook officially passed the baton to his successor, John Ternus. Cook had a legendary run as a diplomatic operator-CEO, and Apple was one of the most valuable companies in the world for most of Cook’s tenure. Cook will stay on as Apple’s executive chairman.

But in the AI era, being a good dealmaker and operator won’t be enough. In almost every Fortune 500 CEO meeting I’ve had over the past six months, I’ve heard the same message: Companies need to innovate right now, or they are toast. As FedEx (No. 50) CEO Raj Subramaniam recently put it to me: "If you don’t like change, you’re going to hate extinction.”

Ternus is a longtime product guy, which is exactly the profile Apple needs to see its profit-printing dynasty continue in an era of unprecedented disruption. His tall task will be to bring Apple’s innovation mojo back. We know the days of the iPhone—the cash cow Apple has been milking for nearly two decades—are numbered. Qualcomm (No. 108) CEO Cristiano Amon told me he thinks phones will fall in favor of a future AI consumer device within the next few years. Ternus’s competitors are gunning to unseat the iPhone too, with Meta (No. 17) going all-in on smart glasses and OpenAI cooking up a suite of yet-to-be-unveiled futuristic devices too.

We’ll get a taste of Apple’s new hardware vision on Wednesday, when the company holds an event in which it’s expected to introduce its first foldable iPhone. But the real test for Ternus will come in the months and years to come, as he steers the company into the new era of AI-centric devices.

Meanwhile, I’m preparing for a trip to San Francisco next week, where I’ll be spending time with a couple tech founder-CEOs and recording episodes of my Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. Lots of our conversations will center on how the CEOs are operating like they did in the early days—creating a sense of urgency throughout their orgs, flattening management, and focusing their bets to ensure they don’t just survive, but that they come out on top.

To learn more about new Apple boss John Ternus, check out Sebastian Herrera’s feature for Fortune.

Follow Alyson on X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and the Titans and Disruptors vodcast.

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Deals & Developments

The FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon (No. 1), alleging the company secretly raised prices in auctions that determine which ads appear in its search results through a “soft reserve price” introduced in 2019. “These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers,” FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. Regulators say the practice cost advertisers more than $20 billion, but Amazon disputes the claims, saying its changes improved ad relevance without increasing advertisers’ overall costs.
A federal judge said Google, owned by Alphabet (No. 5), can keep AdX, its online ad exchange, rather than sell it after the Justice Department found that the company illegally monopolized parts of the publisher ad-tech market. The judge instead ordered Google to make changes that give competitors more access to its ad-auction data.
Nvidia (No. 16) officially agreed to acquire Hugging Face, a platform for open-source AI models and datasets, for about $12.9 billion. The deal gives Nvidia a closer link to developers building AI applications, which could help drive use of its chips and software. Read more: Hugging Face goes from a ‘scrappy’ startup named after an emoji to $13 billion Nvidia acquisition
Chevron (No. 21) confirmed plans to invest more than $7 billion in its Venezuelan joint ventures over the next five years, with the aim of more than doubling its output there to about 600,000 barrels a day. The move follows a separate U.S.-Venezuela agreement that gives North American Blue Energy Partners 100-year rights to oil fields holding an estimated 65 billion barrels in reserves, with the U.S. government also taking a 35% stake in the venture. Read more: Trump’s ‘biggest oil deal in world history’ in Venezuela reeks of ‘colonial cronyism’ and could easily fall apart, experts say
The management and supervisory boards of German food-delivery company Delivery Hero officially backed a $14.8 billion bid by Uber Technologies (No. 92), an important step toward finalizing the deal that would give Uber a stronger grip on the European delivery market. The deal is expected to close in the second half of next year.