It must be pretty sweet when you get told that you will head up the world’s most valuable brand. You know it’s going to come with a decent pay packet (maybe decent doesn’t do it justice), you don’t have to answer to many people and I’m guessing you get an office fit for a king.

The news might be somewhat sullied, however, when the man giving you the good news is dying from pancreatic cancer. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently opened up about the moment he received the news, as told on Fortune:

On August 11 [2011], a Sunday, Steve called Tim Cook and asked him to come over to the house. “He said, ‘I want to talk to you about something,’ ” remembers Cook. “This was when he was home all the time, and I asked when, and he said, ‘Now.’ So I came right over. He told me he had decided that I should be CEO. I thought then that he thought he was going to live a lot longer when he said this, because we got into a whole level of discussion about what would it mean for me to be CEO with him as a chairman. I asked him, ‘What do you really not want to do that you’re doing?’

“It was an interesting conversation,” Cook says, with a wistful laugh. “He says, ‘You make all the decisions.’ I go, ‘Wait. Let me ask you a question.’ I tried to pick something that would incite him. So I said, ‘You mean that if I review an ad and I like it, it should just run without your okay?’ And he laughed and said, ‘Well, I hope you’d at least ask me!’ I asked him two or three times, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ because I saw him getting better at that point in time. I went over there often during the week, and sometimes on the weekends. Every time I saw him he seemed to be getting better. He felt that way as well. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.”

It wouldn’t have come as much as a shock to Tim that he would become the CEO, having taken the reins twice before when Jobs fell ill. Some in the know would go as far as to say that he has done a better job of it than the often-polarising Jobs but that’s up for debate. The way Apple is going I reckon one of our politicians could head the place and it would still rake in crazy money.

[source:fortune]