The decade of Steve
How Apple's imperious, brilliant CEO transformed American business.
It's Steve's world, we just live in it.
How's this for a gripping corporate story line: Youthful founder gets booted from his company in the 1980s, returns in the 1990s, and in the following decade survives two brushes with death, one securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup, and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries, a billionaire many times over, and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.
Sound too far-fetched to be true? Perhaps. Yet it happens to be the real-life story of Steve Jobs and his outsize impact on everything he touches.
The past decade in business belongs to Jobs. What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that barely a year ago it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back. Read the rest of the story here.
Fortune magazine names Apple's Steve Jobs CEO of the decade
Runners-up include Gates, Buffett, Page, Brin, Winfrey, Stewart and — wait for it –Â Madoff
Photo: Time Inc.
Steve Jobs is the CEO of the decade, according to the new issue of Fortune magazine.
"Jobs is back," writes Adam Lashinsky in the cover story published Thursday. "It's as if his signature 'one more thing' line now applies to him as well. After a six-month leave of absence in the early part of this year, during which he received a liver transplant, he is once again commanding a 34,000-strong corporate army that is as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant — and yes, profitable — as at any time since he and his chum Steve Wozniak founded Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) in 1976."
The piece includes the revelation that Jobs twice considered taking Apple private, once in a leveraged buyout with Silver Lake Partners and once a few years earlier with financing lined up by his old friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (ORCL).
Sure to stir controversy is Fortune's provocative list of also rans, which includes, along with some obvious contenders (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, for example), two convicted felons: Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff.
CNNMoney.com (which carries this blog) has put together an elaborate online editorial package that includes excerpts from Lashinsky's story, a video of him explaining the choice, praises of Jobs from the rich and famous, celebrities' favorite iPhones apps, an interactive timeline, rarely seen photographs and more. The entry point is here.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
The man who put the 'i' in iMac
Meet the creative director who named a generation of Apple products
Photo: Apple
The TBWA\Chiat\Day creative team was horrified in 1998 when Steve Jobs pulled back a cloth and revealed the bulbous teardrop that came to be known as the Bondi-Blue iMac.
But then Jobs wasn't so crazy at first about the name they proposed for it.
No one had ever seen anything like the new computer, veteran creative director Ken Segall tells Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney in an exclusive interview published Tuesday evening.
"We were pretty shocked but we couldn’t be frank," Segall recalls. "We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, 'Jesus, do they know what they are doing?' It was so radical."
Segall eventually came up with "iMac," a name that connected the original 1984 Macintosh with the rapidly expanding Internet. But Jobs took some convincing.
Below the fold, excerpts from the story as Kahney tells it:
Video: "Don't Cry for Me, Cupertino"
And now, for a musical interlude: David Pogue — Emmy-winning tech columnist, "Missing Manual" millionaire and Broadway composer manqué — belting out an Evita parody at the Boston Book Festival Saturday, with Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs cast in the role of the Argentinian temptress.
Thanks to Mashable's Pete Cashmore for the pointer.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
The Apple of Nokia's eye
The trouble with being number one in any industry is that you have nowhere to move but down. Few companies know this better than Nokia (NOK), the Finnish telecommunications giant that has dominated cell phones for so long that in some parts of the globe the brand itself has become synonymous with the device. More
Steve Jobs is $300 million richer
His net worth shot up to $5.4 billion Wednesday, only partly thanks to Apple
Image: Fortune
In September, Steve Jobs' $5.1 billion earned him the No. 43 spot on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans. Since then, Apple's shares have rocketed to a new all-time high, closing Wednesday at $204.92.
So Jobs was a lot richer Wednesday than he was in September — $300 million richer, at least on paper — but only 3/5 that increase is thanks to Apple (AAPL). The rest is Disney's (DIS) doing.
[Jobs was even richer before the market gave up most of its gains in the last hour of trading. See below.]
According to the two companies' proxy statements, the bulk of Jobs' net worth is in the form of preferentially owned stock:
- 5.426 million shares of Apple (most of it from a 2003 grant of 10 million shares, later reduced to pay taxes)
- 138 million shares of Disney (from when Disney acquired Pixar)
In the six weeks since Forbes took its financial snapshot, Apple has gained 32.42 points (as of Wednesday's close) while Disney inched up 87 cents. But because Jobs' net worth is so much more closely tied to Disney than to Apple, those 87 cents carry a lot of weight in his portfolio. Bottom line: by Wednesday night, Jobs' holdings had increased in value …
The Street awaits Apple's earnings
What's Wall Street expecting this quarter? The 22 analysts we polled are all over the lot
Merck, McDonalds, Microsoft, Boeing, Coca Cola, Dupont and AT&T are among the bellwether companies reporting earnings next week, but when the markets close on Monday, all eyes will be on Apple (AAPL).
Wall Street blows hot and cold on Cupertino. Apple shares have been on fire for most of the year, and after see-sawing for much of the day they rose up sharply in late afternoon trading to close at $189.86, up 0.96%. The stock has rocketed more than 120% since January, outpacing the Dow by nearly 9 to 1 and leaving analysts scrambling to keep up. Nearly all have adjusted their estimates in advance of Monday's report, some rather dramatically (one of them raised his price target from $70 a share to $250 in the space of seven months).
Apple analysts scramble to catch up
With the stock hovering within 10 points of its all-time high ($202 per share, set nearly two years ago), the question for many traders is whether it has much further to go — which is one of the reasons they'll be closely watching Monday's earnings report.
The Street is looking for Apple to earn $1.42 a share on revenue of $9.2 billion, according to Thomson Financial's consensus, although the revenue estimates of the 20 analysts we polled ranged from $8.37 billion to $9.72. That's a difference of $1.35 billion — enough to fund a small land war — but this time the most optimistic estimates come from big Wall Street firms, not the unaffiliated analysts who have tended in the past to be the most bullish on Apple. (See chart below the fold.)
Is Steve Jobs more popular than Jesus?
Apple's CEO tops two polls in one week. Will no one rid us of these meddlesome lists?
Photo: Apple Inc.
Last Thursday, Oct. 8, an Agenda Setters panel named Steve Jobs the most influential individual in the global technology industry, ahead of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Barack Obama, President of the United States.
Four days later, a survey of 1,000 tweens and teens ages 12 to 17 picked Steve Jobs as the celebrity entrepreneur they admired most, ahead of Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg and the Olsen twins.
Is Apple's (AAPL) CEO really more influential than Obama and more popular than Oprah, as headline writers invariably put it?
Of course not.
