Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's CEO after 15 years at the helm, and the financial obituaries are rolling in. The headline-grabbing takeaway? Cook made San Francisco's elite richer. Employees saw their incomes and equity explode. A couple of major shareholders — Laurene Powell Jobs and Cook himself — did spectacularly well.

Cue the outrage machine.

Except... what exactly is the scandal here? A CEO ran one of the most valuable companies in human history, the stock appreciated massively, and the people who owned that stock — including thousands of rank-and-file employees with equity compensation — got wealthier. That's not a bug in the system. That's the system working.

Under Cook's leadership, Apple's market cap went from roughly $350 billion to over $3 trillion. If you were an early employee with stock options, congratulations — you probably own property in Pacific Heights now. If you were Laurene Powell Jobs, inheriting a massive stake from Steve Jobs, your net worth ballooned accordingly. As one Bay Area reader put it bluntly, pointing out that the two biggest winners were "the widow of the founder and the single most important employee whose last name isn't Jobs" — not exactly a shadowy cabal.

The real story isn't that Apple created wealth. It's the downstream effects on San Francisco itself. That Apple money — along with cash from Google, Meta, and the rest of the tech aristocracy — has reshaped neighborhoods, driven up housing costs, and widened the gap between the equity class and everyone else. Those are legitimate concerns worth grappling with.

But the solution isn't to demonize wealth creation. It's to stop letting City Hall fumble the response. Build more housing. Streamline permitting. Stop treating every new development like a hostage negotiation with fourteen neighborhood commissions. The problem was never that Apple employees got rich. The problem is that San Francisco made it nearly impossible for anyone else to keep up.

Tim Cook didn't break San Francisco. Our own policies did that just fine without him.