Jerome York, a director of Apple Inc., former chief financial officer at Chrysler Corp. and International Business Machines Corp., and adviser to investor Kirk Kerkorian, died in Pontiac, Michigan. He was 71.
Apple announced the death in a statement today. York collapsed the night of March 16 at his home in Oakland Township, Michigan, according to his wife, Eilene York. Doctors at Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital said he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, she said.
York helped lead turnarounds at Chrysler and IBM, and provided counsel to Steve Jobs during Apple’s renaissance as a consumer-electronics giant. As an adviser to billionaire Kerkorian, he served as a frontman in takeover battles and fought for management changes.
“Jerry had the guts and brains to identify the needed changes at many of America’s greatest companies, including Chrysler, IBM, General Motors and Apple, helping them to reach their greater potential,” said Steve Miller, a director of UAL Corp., who worked with York at Chrysler.
York was born June 22, 1938. He graduated from West Point, earned an MBA at the University of Michigan and a master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in Chrysler’s finance department in the early 1980s under then- Chief Executive Officer Lee Iacocca during the automaker’s brush with bankruptcy and recovery to health.
Saving Chrysler
“From the moment I met him 30 years ago, it was clear that he was brilliant, even-paced and had great judgment,” said Gerald Greenwald, a former Chrysler vice chairman and a founding partner of the Greenbriar Equity Group LLC, a private-equity firm. “He had lots to do with saving Chrysler. Industrial America is going to miss him.”
He rose in Chrysler’s ranks to become executive vice president of finance. In 1993, Louis Gerstner, then IBM’s CEO, recruited him to be senior vice president and chief financial officer as part of the turnaround of the computer company. He gained a reputation as a relentless cost-cutter.
He left IBM to join Kerkorian’s Tracinda Corp. months after the private investment company began an unsuccessful attempt to take over Chrysler in 1995. In 2005, York advised Kerkorian as Tracinda began buying shares of General Motors Corp. Tracinda eventually amassed 9.9 percent of GM, whose management in early 2006 invited York to join the board.
Nissan Fight
Kerkorian and York aimed to create an alliance between GM and the alliance that already existed by Nissan Motor Co. and Renault SA, headed by Carlos Ghosn. Rick Wagoner, then GM’s CEO, rejected the idea as expensive and impractical. In the fall of 2006, disappointed by Wagoner’s rejection, York resigned from GM’s board. A few months later, Tracinda sold its GM stake.
York was nominated as a director at Apple in 1997 by Jobs, who had just returned to the company as CEO after a 12-year hiatus.
York and Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit Inc., have been Apple’s longest-serving board members. For most of the year York joined Apple, its shares were selling for less than $5 a share, a far cry from yesterday’s closing price of $224.12.
During York’s tenure on Apple’s board, the company transformed itself from a computer-industry also-ran into a dominant maker of portable devices. The company’s sales soared to more than $40 billion a year, fueled by the iMac, iPod and iPhone.
York also served on the board of Dana Holding Corp., an auto-parts supplier in Toledo, Ohio.
“He was an enormous contributor, based on his vast experience,” said John Devine, Dana’s chairman. “There wasn’t anything that he hadn’t seen before several times.”
