After Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, John Sculley is perhaps the best-known head of Apple. AppleInsider looks back at his tenure with the company and at how history has treated him since. When he resigned on October 15, 1993, Sculley left with the equivalent of $23 million in 2026 money. That package included severance pay, a one-year consulting fee, and Apple's commitment to buy his mansion and his private Lear jet.
Sculley is most famous for firing Steve Jobs, or so it appeared. In 2009, CNBC named him the 14th worst American CEO of all time, though he did not even top that list; Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers took first place. Large payouts are not uncommon for CEOs, and nobody should criticise Tim Cook's retirement package after he grew Apple into a $3 trillion company. Sculley, however, did not leave on a high. He resigned the day after Apple announced quarterly results that technically showed a profit and higher sales, but only just enough to beat analysts' gloomy forecasts. Fourth-quarter earnings were still down 97 percent from the year before.
The decline contrasted sharply with Sculley's arrival a decade earlier. Jobs had persuaded him to leave Pepsi with the line, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" At Pepsi, Sculley was known for commissioning the research behind the Pepsi Challenge, a blind taste-test campaign that ran only the ads in which Pepsi won.
Sculley's story is a reminder to negotiate exit terms carefully. His leaving package was generous, but his reputation at Apple was far less secure.
Source: AppleInsider · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing