I've been on both sides. You can think of the main people involved as: - internal executive sponsor (for a company the size of Apple there are probably 100 peo

I've been on both sides. You can think of the main people involved as: - internal executive sponsor (for a company the size of Apple there are probably 100 people who might be able to sponsor an acquisition and shepard it through, it's definitely at least 10). So this means for the sponsor it's more likely 1 a year or less. While Tim Cook is almost certainly involved in some way in each transaction, it is likely limited to a couple of hours. - corporate development people, who help source deals and strategize, more scalable and are capable of working on multiple deals at once - lawyers, who are easy to scale So it's not in my opinion too hard, particularly for the small acquisitions Apple makes. It's the big acquisitions that are real organizational time sucks, because there you are limited by the CEO. Apple hasn't done one of those since NEXT.