Who said anything about that? I wanted to clarify that the money Cook is receiving isn’t paid out of Apple’s cash reserves. Although the question you raise is

Who said anything about that? I wanted to clarify that the money Cook is receiving isn’t paid out of Apple’s cash reserves. Although the question you raise is an interesting one in the sense that many buyers of Apple stock are indirectly depending on it to make a living after they’ve stopped working. For a blue chip giant like Apple, many of the buyers are index funds and pensions where the ultimate beneficiaries are retirees. They literally are buying Apple stock to survive, although through intermediaries.