Apple’s New CEO Owns One Of The Rarest Porsches Ever Built
John Ternus became Apple’s CEO on September 1, 2026, and the most interesting thing about him isn’t on his LinkedIn profile. The mechanical engineer who spent 25 years building the hardware inside iPhones and MacBooks spends his weekends at Laguna Seca, turning laps in one of only 77 Porsche 935s ever built — a 700-horsepower, track-only machine that started at over $800,000 and now trades hands well north of a million dollars.
This isn’t a garage queen bought for a photo opportunity. Ternus is reportedly posting lap times under 1 minute 40 seconds at the 3.602-kilometer, eleven-turn circuit in Monterey, California — genuinely quick territory for an amateur driver in a car this extreme. The Wall Street Journal first reported the lap times, and Apple’s own services chief Eddy Cue confirmed at the Miami Grand Prix earlier this year that Ternus drives a Porsche and does amateur racing, noting he’d gone to Laguna Seca rather than the race.
What Makes the Porsche 935 So Extreme
The modern 935 is built on the bones of the 991-generation 911 GT2 RS — already one of the most violent road cars Porsche has ever produced — and then taken considerably further. Porsche replaced the GT2 RS’s body with a full carbon-fiber shell styled as a direct tribute to the 935/78 “Moby Dick,” the long-tailed Le Mans prototype that terrorized endurance racing in the late 1970s. The extended rear deck, the massive fixed wing, the titanium tailpipes, the tail lights borrowed from the 919 Hybrid LMP1 car — every detail signals that this machine has no interest in road manners.
Under that dramatic bodywork sits the GT2 RS’s 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six, tuned to 700 hp and 553 lb-ft of torque, channeled through a seven-speed PDK to the rear wheels. The 935 tips the scales at just 3,042 pounds — light for a car packing this much power, and a direct result of the carbon-fiber construction throughout. That power-to-weight ratio puts it in a conversation with Ferrari’s most focused halo machines, and the price tag confirmed it: each of the 77 examples started at more than $800,000 when Porsche opened the order books in 2018.
Why a Sub-1:40 Lap at Laguna Seca Actually Means Something
Laguna Seca is not a forgiving circuit. The Corkscrew — a near-blind, 59-foot elevation drop through a left-right combination at the top of the hill — has humbled professional drivers for decades. A sub-1:40 lap in a non-homologated track car, driven by someone whose primary job is running a two-and-a-half-billion-device technology company, is a legitimate benchmark. For context, the outright lap record at Laguna Seca belongs to purpose-built prototype machinery; a private driver threading a 700-hp rear-wheel-drive car through the circuit’s eleven turns in under 100 seconds is the kind of result that earns respect in any paddock.
The 935 makes that achievement harder, not easier. It is not road legal and cannot enter any sanctioned racing series — Porsche built it specifically for club-sport track days and private use. There is no safety net of a race engineer coaching from a pit wall, no data team optimizing the setup between sessions. Ternus is doing this on his own time, at his own pace, and apparently getting it right.
The Moby Dick Heritage Behind the Car
The 935’s lineage runs directly to one of Porsche’s most audacious factory race cars. The 935/78 — nicknamed “Moby Dick” for its vast, whale-like body — was Porsche’s interpretation of the Group 5 silhouette regulations taken to their absolute limit. The car ran a 3.2-liter twin-turbocharged flat-six producing over 750 hp in race trim, wrapped in a body so long and so low it barely resembled the 911 it was theoretically based on. It raced at Le Mans in 1978 and set fastest lap before retiring, and it remains one of the defining machines of Porsche’s motorsport identity.
The modern 935 borrows more than just the shape. The mirrors come from the 911 RSR, the tail lights from the 919 Hybrid, and the overall proportions deliberately echo the original’s stretched silhouette. Porsche revealed the car at Rennsport Reunion VI in 2018 — held, fittingly, at Laguna Seca — before delivering the first examples in June 2019. That the circuit where the 935 was unveiled is the same one Ternus now laps regularly is a coincidence that writes itself.
One of the Rarest Track Machines Porsche Has Ever Sold
Seventy-seven examples. That production number puts the 935 in rarefied company even within Porsche’s own catalog of limited-run machines. For comparison, Porsche builds around 500 examples of the GT3 RS per model cycle, and even the ultra-exclusive 918 Spyder reached 918 units. The 935’s run of 77 cars is closer to a bespoke coachbuilt project than a production car — each one accounted for, each owner known to the factory.
That scarcity, combined with the car’s track-only status and its direct lineage to one of Porsche’s most celebrated race cars, has pushed values well above the original asking price. Current market estimates put clean examples north of one million dollars, and the trajectory is unlikely to reverse as the pool of available cars stays fixed at 77 forever. Ternus isn’t just driving one of the most extreme cars Porsche has ever sold to a private customer — he’s driving an appreciating asset that most collectors would be afraid to scratch.
The stereotype of the California tech executive with a trophy car collection doesn’t quite fit here. Ternus has a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania, spent his career solving hardware reliability problems at scale, and apparently applies the same seriousness to his track days. The 935 isn’t a status symbol sitting under a cover in a climate-controlled garage. It’s a working race car, and its owner is working it.
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