Is a software engineer really that valuable than a hourly retail wager? You know the answer to that question because of your craft. Similar skill and perspective gaps exists between c-suite and associate employees.

As COO, Tim was responsible for reorganising Apple's supply chain. Before him, Apple had awful execution and would regularly overproduce some models that would end up unsaleable, while having shortages of other models. I'm pretty sure this was a substantial factor of the operating losses of the 1990s.

Under Tim, this changed radically. Initially Apple solved the problem by drastically reducing the number of different models, but by the time the company managed to produce iMacs in 5 different colours without noticeable misproduction of numbers, it was evident that it it had become much better at execution. And around that time, Apple also started turning a profit again.

So I'd argue that Tim may have been one of the key drivers of Apple's profitability. I'm not sure how much value he added over a hypothetical replacement level COO, but empirically, he was an enormous improvement over his predecessors.

So his big insight that makes him worth 1400x the average employee was "We make more of these phones than we sell and less of those other phones than we could sell, let's do something about that"?

*Macs, at the time. Apple did not even make iPods back then.

And it was not that insight. Lots of people knew that. But not a lot of people had the skill to "do something about that".

Seems the board of directors disagrees with you.

How much would the stock drop if he were to leave Apple today?

Given what happened to the stock when steve jobs, nothing ?

https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-the-Apple-stocks-when...

By that logic, the members of the Fed should be on every tech company's payroll.

It would probably drop 10% or so (out of investor uncertainty) and in 1 to 2 months be back to where it was, regardless of successor.

What if they replaced him with someone currently making the average compensation at Apple?

There are probably many adequate CEOs already within Apple, making average compensation. You seem to believe CEOs are minted; they all move up the ranks like the rest of us. If the skills are there to lead a company, investors don't care what their last pay scale or job title was and trust the Board or Directors in who is appointed.