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”)
“This is no longer a case in which the defense says, ‘We didn’t understand the accounting implications.’ It’s now a cover-up case, and the backdating was more widespread than we initially thought,” said attorney Mark Molumphy.
