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John Ternus has said that on his first day at Apple, as an engineer on the design team, “I wasn’t sure I belonged there.” He told Penn’s engineering graduates in 2024 that the people he met knew so much more than he did, and that he’s grateful he wasn’t afraid to ask for help. Twenty-five years after that first day, on September 1, he took over from Tim Cook as Apple’s chief executive.
Eight days later he borrowed Steve Jobs’s old one-more-thing line and unveiled an iPhone that folds like a book. NPR said the iPhone’s shape hadn’t changed this much since the first one. That’s his home turf. He’s spent most of his career on the side of Apple that makes things, and in a 2023 interview with CNBC, the technology was what he talked about: chips, battery life, memory.
The part of the job with no keynote
The job covers a lot more than products. As CNBC noted the morning he started, it runs all the way to finance and legal. And the finance part never gets a stage: what Apple does with all the cash its products bring in.
He talked about that part on Apple’s earnings call in April, ten days after Apple named him, and told investors that he and the finance chief, Kevan Parekh, intend to keep the discipline Cook brought to money decisions. On the same call, Parekh laid out the order Apple spends its cash in. The business gets every investment it needs, and the cash left after that goes back to shareholders over time.
So that’s why a company buys back its own stock. Once the business has what it needs, there’s still cash left over, and there are two ways to hand it back. The company can pay a dividend, or it can buy its own shares in the market and cancel them. Apple does both, and most of the money goes into buying shares.
What the money bought
The company Ternus took over has been canceling its own shares for years. A canceled share stops existing, so every share that’s left is a bigger piece of the company. Apple spent $577,838 million doing that in the seven fiscal years through 2025, by my sum of its annual reports, and over those seven years the share count fell about 22 percent. Since September 2021, the year Ternus joined the executive team, it’s down about 11 percent.
The count falls slower than the cash would suggest, because Apple pays part of its people in stock, and those are new shares. Some of the buying just cancels them out.
Fewer shares also move the numbers people quote. In fiscal 2023, with Ternus running hardware engineering, Apple’s profit fell and profit per share still went up, from $6.11 to $6.13, because it was split over fewer shares. So when profit per share grows, I check the share count before I give the business the credit.
The nine weeks Apple bought nothing
A dividend that goes up every year turns into a promise, and cutting it reads as bad news. A buyback can be turned up or down whenever the company wants, and Apple’s filings say its programs don’t oblige it to buy any minimum number of shares.
From March 1 to May 2, nine weeks that took in the day Apple named Ternus, it bought no shares at all. In the same weeks a year earlier it had been buying. On the April call Parekh said buyback activity can be affected by a number of things, and in the same breath he mentioned the CEO transition.
What Apple paid
When Apple started again in May, with Ternus already named, it paid an average of $297.18 a share on the open market. A buyback pays whatever the market asks that day, like any other buyer, and the higher the price, the fewer shares each dollar takes off the count.
The cash has to come from somewhere too. In the seven years I added up, what Apple’s business brought in after paying for its buildings and equipment came up short of what it handed back in buybacks and dividends.
Where this breaks
The cash Apple pays shows up in the cash flow statement, the shares it cancels show up in the share count, and in any given year the two don’t line up exactly. Trades made near the end of a period get paid in the next one, and some of the buying runs through contracts where Apple pays a bank up front and gets the shares over the following months, like the ones it signed in May. There’s also a one-time tax inside those seven years. In fiscal 2025 Apple paid Ireland back taxes out of an escrow it had set aside years before, and that payment comes out of what the business brought in. Put it back and the business still falls short. And fiscal 2023 had 53 weeks instead of 52, which flatters the comparison with 2022 a little.
Buybacks also take money off the balance sheet, which is part of why Apple’s equity, what its books say belongs to the owners, looks small next to everything it owns. It’s why I don’t lean on a debt ratio built on equity at a company like this. I wrote about that at McDonald’s. If the company overpays, the owners who stay get an extra slice worth less than the cash that went out to buy it. And none of this says the shares were worth what Apple paid for them. Apple doesn’t publish what it thinks they’re worth.
The savings Ternus inherited
The part the business didn’t cover came out of savings, and on purpose. Since 2018 Apple had a goal it called net cash neutral: bring its net cash, the cash and investments it holds minus what it has borrowed, down to about zero. By its finance chief’s count, net cash has come down by more than $100 billion since then.
It had already started coming back. By my arithmetic from Apple’s filings, net cash was $33,763 million in September 2025 and $62,173 million at the end of June, two months before Ternus’s first day as CEO.
On that same April call, with Ternus on the line, Parekh said net cash neutral was no longer a target.