Tyler Crowe

I'm Tyler Crowe.

Today, I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors, Matt Frankel and Lou Whiteman.

We've been asking for questions from listeners all along.

First, thanks to everyone who's been sitting, we love it and we're getting a ton of them.

We're going to actually tackle a couple of mailbag questions today related to the SpaceX IPO and our thoughts on AST Space Mobile.

But first, we want to discuss the big news that came out yesterday, and that's Tim Cook is stepping down.

Yesterday, Apple announced a transition plan

where Cook will become the executive chairman of Apple, and John Ternes, who was the head of engineering for hardware, will take over for the CEO role starting in September.

Now, I'm not going to say this came completely out of the blue.

Cook had been the CEO for close to 16 years,

He was in operating roles at the company since the dot-com days.

There were some breadcrumbs that Ternus would be the next in line.

For a company that seems like a rock of stability, it had quite a few retirements and transitions in the C-suite over the past year.

Less than a month ago, there was a long Bloomberg article published that was talking about Ternus being the heir apparent.

Now, we're not eulogizing Cook here.

But as we think about Apple under Tim Cook's leadership, what do you see as his lasting legacy, Lou?

Stability.

He kept the plan on course.

Yeah, on that profits going up thing, since Tim Cook took over and it was September of 2011, shares of Apple on a total return basis has generated about 3,100% returns for investors, compared to 731% for the S&P 500 on a total return basis.

So, absolutely speaking, Cook's tenure has been a resounding success for anyone invested in the company.