“Perhaps my most memorable moment from the decade I spent as a beat reporter covering corporate America for various media outlets came about seven months ago when I received a surprise phone call from Steve Jobs,” Nat Worden reports for TheStreet. “I was in a deli on West 47th street when my cell phone rang, and I have to admit that I initially thought it was a joke when the gravelly voice on the line claimed to be that of the famous Apple co-founder. Then it occurred to me that I had a story in that day’s Wall Street Journal about a previously unreported meeting in Silicon Valley between Jobs and the top executives of the cable TV industry — which was my beat at the time — and I should probably be taking the call more seriously.”

Worden reports, “According to Jobs, he just liked my story and wanted to chat about how the rise of digital technology was affecting the TV industry… Jobs died of cancer just five months after we spoke, and as a satisfied Apple customer myself, I’ve been thinking a lot about his call throughout all the ensuing media coverage of his death, life and legacy… It’s no coincidence to me that the one CEO who was able to come down from Mount Olympus and give me a call directly and unexpectedly to shoot the breeze about a story I had written happened to be the most successful and widely admired of them all.”

Worden writes, “Jobs may be an irreplaceable leader of the company, but he has guided Apple to an enviable position and he left the company with an under-appreciated stable of talent in place, including longtime design chief Jonathan Ive and the company’s new CEO Tim Cook… It’s possible that there’s another recession in store, and next year’s earnings expectations may prove too optimistic, but the odds of this stock turning into a star performer for the long-term shareholder at these prices look mighty good.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "Fred Mertz" and "Dan K." for the heads up.]