Ah,The Value of Hindsight - Worth 3.6 billion
03.05.07 - 03:45pm
As reported in Fortune Magazine, Steve Jobs seems to have made a glaring error, not in the company, not even in the backdating scandal, but in his own estimation of what the little white music player he introduced six years ago was actually worth.
Fortune, at the time did an article about the stock options Steve Jobs received in 2001, just before the iPod launched and changed the world of music forever. They reported at the time on how Jobs had received a mammoth grant calculated at $872 million, the largest one-year package for a CEO in history.
Jobs wasn’t thrilled with the report and drafted a letter stating since Apple was currently in a decline the stock value was actually zero and even offered to sell the options to Fortune for half the money. (Fortune didn’t quite have the 436 million on hand to take advantage of the potentially “good deal”)
Ah hindsight, that little piece of stock is now currently worth 2.5 billion! and a second stock option Jobs received just a few months later would be worth 1.1 billion. However, as sad as the Fortune reporters are that they couldn’t come up with the 436 million, they can find some solace that Steve Jobs is not enjoying the extra 3 billion either.
You see, Jobs who is considered supremely self confident, and one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs, didn’t have that much faith in the little white music player either. Instead of holding onto his back dated stock options he gave them both up in 2003 for a chunk of restricted stock, just before the iPod took over the market, and resurrected Apples stock from the doldrums. While Jobs’s restricted stock is now currently worth a cool 848 million, it is still worth less than even his initial stock options of 872 million.
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