Is Apple losing another board member?
Bill Campbell. Photo: Intuit
According to an SEC Form 4 filed Friday, Bill Campbell, a key Apple (AAPL) board member and a close friend and adviser to Steve Jobs, executed a "non-sale transfer" of 60,000 shares of Apple stock worth more than $7.7 million in late August — including directors options he'd been holding for eight years.
It's not clear where Campbell transferred those shares or for what purpose. In 2007 Campbell sold 160,000 shares with an average strike price of $5.75, clearing nearly $17 million in the sale. But those options were approaching their expiration date. Some of the options he transferred on Aug. 27 weren't going to expire until 2018.
It's also not clear how many — if any — Apple shares Campbell retained. But the size and timing of the transfer could be significant. One possibility — and this is purely speculative — is that he is reconsidering his position on Apple's board.
Campbell, who is chairman of Intuit (INTU), is also a close adviser to Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, who resigned his position on Apple's board on Aug. 3 because of growing conflicts of interest. (See here.) Although not a member of Google's board of directors, Campbell attends its board meetings — the only outsider who does so.
Campbell keeps a low profile; unless you work in high tech, you've probably never heard of him. But behind the scenes, he is one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley. Most of what we know about him comes from the only profile ever published in a major magazine — Jennifer Reingold's 2008 story in Fortune.
Who will replace Eric Schmidt on Apple's board?
Tim Cook. Photo: Apple Inc.
Now that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's (AAPL) board of directors — something that actually happened last Friday, according to Apple's form 8-K filing with the SEC — who will replace him?
Names of potential nominees have already started to pour in. Tim Cook — who ran Apple during both of Steve Jobs' medical leaves — would be our first choice, and he's the leading vote getter in 9to5Mac's reader poll (with 674 of 1,994 votes as of Tuesday morning).
Meanwhile, the newly revived Fake Steve Jobs spent Monday pretending to take calls from an even wider (and a lot funnier) field of candidates, from Henry Louis Gates (looking pretty silly on a Martha's Vineyard trike) to former Apple hardware chief and current Palm (PALM) CEO Jon Rubinstein (pictured with a Pre).
Below the fold: our handcapping some of the more serious the names we've seen so far.
