Apple Says Jobs Is Taking a New Medical Leave | Hacker News Reader

Apple Says Jobs Is Taking a New Medical Leave

nytimes.com

92 pointsjoshwa29 comments

There's an interesting story to be told about what makes someone who's already a billionaire keep on in such a hyper-stressful job/career/calling when facing repeated life-threatening illnesses.

We, of course, won't get that story, and will have to settle for a news cycle of the fiduciary responsibility tourettes brigade vs. the hacks who think they're John Gruber screaming at everyone to leave Steve alone.

I seriously think that he is at the company because he likes his job. He probably identifies strongly at the company and feels that it is his responsibility to stay with the company.

Considering his monetary pay is $1/year, I think he really enjoys doing something, where he has the resources, and backing, to "do it right".

And when something doesn't come out right, he can breath a little fire (e.g. MobileMe problems a year back or so)

it is a joke to think that $1/year salary has anything to do with Job's remuneration which takes place largely in Apple's stock. The better Apple does, the better he does. He's got incentive, regardless of whatever ersatz salary he nominally receives.

So, yeah, i think he's doing it cause he's a control freak who gets high off of being in charge of one of the most important tech consumer companies in the world. But to claim that he's not benefitting massively off of Apple's continued financial success is definitely not true.

That's the understatement of the century. Apple is not a company, it's a exoskeleton for Steve Jobs. The two entirely symbiotic and probably cannot survive on their own anymore.

Your "fiduciary responsibility tourettes brigade" is my favorite phrase of the year. Bravo!

We're only 17 days in, let's not get ahead of ourselves ;)

You are presuming that becoming a billionaire is the end game.

No presumptions here, which is why an in-depth story would be so interesting.

Make that a $5 billionaire (not counting the Apple stock value).

Back when Disney bought out Pixar, I made a little spreadsheet that calculated how many DIS shares Steve wound up with. Assuming that he has not sold off (or gifted) any/much since then, his DIS stock is now worth slightly more than $5B. It has a net gain of $2B since the Pixar buyout. He is doing what he is doing out of internal motivation (and certainly not because he needs the money).

Tomorrow Apple will announce (suspected to be great and record breaking) finantials http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/14/apple-will-announce-q1-2011-f...

Obviously releasing this note the day before is meant to avoid $AAPL going to much into the red.

It also gives Apple PR an extra day to get their message out due to the US financial system being closed for Martin Luther King Day. With analysts and financial reporters off of work, Apple is likely to receive fewer calls for explanation.

Just to be pedantic:

What exactly is the value that should be substituted for the variable $AAPL? :P

$AAPL is used on twitter to talk about stocks, just like # is used for hashtags. Like $AAPL, $GOOG, $MSFT ... etc

Ah, Twitter. What symbol will you appropriate next?

Probably %

@astrodust - Perhaps the @ sign? :-)

I actually just looked up hash tags on Wikipedia, and was surprised to see that the asterisk is starting to be used to give out "stars" and ratings to items: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)#Star_tags

So I guess so far, microblogging has appropriated at least four symbols: @, #, $ and *. That leaves: !, %, ^, &, and ().

Could it be... interrobang‽

Why is that necessary? Why not just use the symbol? I'd think that $ appears in too many non-stock contexts to really be a useful filtering mechanism.

IIRC, it's because of StockTwits. http://stocktwits.com/

348.48 at the moment, according to google finance.

NASDAQ is closed, holiday. DAX (Germany) is in business hours though, and the stocks fell ~7% immediately http://www.finanzen.net/aktien/Apple-Aktie and then flattened out.

Expect something similar when NASDAQ opens again.

Sounds like a good bargain to buy on tomorrow's drops

Yeah, It will go up and this situation shows why Tim Cook is so vital to Apple's future.

Exactly. Many people freak out when Jobs is away, but Cook + team (ie. Forstall, Mansfield, Johnson) proved themselves last time Jobs was away for an extended period of time.

I'd always be interested to know who would run the company if Jobs stepped down (he'd probably stay until he couldn't, given his drive) - my bet would be Ive.

I think they would mimic the current situation with Cook running the company and Ive doing the product development. What their actual titles would be is anyones guess. Cook's lieutenants are going to be very important.

I hope this is just the effects of the transplant per the NYT article. It would make sense given the compensastion they are giving Cook.

It's a holiday.

Get well soon, Steve.

More at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112128

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