“Steve Jobs is an ideas guy. He wears jeans, grows beards and orates to cheering throngs at events like this [sic: “next” actually, to be precise] week’s MacWorld conference,” Justin Scheck reports for The Recorder via Law.com.
Scheck reports, “Jobs’ biographers say evidence indicates that he’s a pescetarian. He went to India. He takes only $1 a year in salary. And he leaves it up to other people to award him hugely valuable piles of stock in Apple Computer, where he’s the CEO.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, ’tis shocking, appalling, and downright amazing that Jobs would use a lawyer to complete legal paperwork.
Scheck continues, “People like Wendy Howell, the former in-house Apple lawyer responsible for option paperwork, probably won’t be attending Jobs’ eagerly awaited MacWorld speech Tuesday. Late last year, she became the lone person to lose her job as a result of the company’s well-publicized options problems.”
“Howell’s name hasn’t been publicly mentioned in the Apple options mess, and her firing wasn’t disclosed by the company in its series of public disclosures of options problems,” Scheck reports. “But she was the person who filled out the paperwork on a 2001 option award to Jobs that has grown infamous since just after Christmas, when Apple acknowledged that the value of the grant was artificially pumped up via a set of fabricated meeting minutes.”
“As the person who wrote out those “minutes,” Howell has become a central figure in the Apple probe — both as a potential defendant in a fraud case and as someone who could tell the government who at the company knew about backdating and its financial and legal implications,” Scheck reports.
Full article here.
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I really hate to disappoint the Apple bashers out there, but Steve Jobs is not going to lose his job over this options thing. So can we finally just move on please?!?
And while she may have been the only one physically fired over this thing, she most certainly isn’t the only one who has lost their job. Fred Anderson and the former head counsel.
Well thanks RC. Now I can finally relax.
Hey, RC… want to bet? Check the San Jose, San Francisco, and Wall Street media, and get your head out of the sand. Steve will, within the very near future, make a well planned, carefully orchestrated exit from the company, with a concocted explanation, declaring his departure has nothing to do with the growing scandal.
Arrogance has brought down the high and mighty all through history and it’s about to happen again.
I will wager the price of the biggest, soon to be extinct, Mac machine that I’m right.
I doubt it. There are 200 companies being investigated for the same thing right now. This will result in some sort of reprimand and more legislation. But since there was no financial gain, he stays.
I doubt it. There are 200 companies being investigated for the same thing right now. This will result in some sort of reprimand and more legislation. But since there was no financial gain, he stays.
Hey is there a forum on this site etc. … Bla bla
Wrong again: Let’s bet!
I tend to agree with RC. Unless the shareholders demand it, and I really don’t think they would, Steve Jobs will be in charge of Apple for some time to come. Unless of course he gets indicted, which I somehow doubt. The backdating was going on at Apple long before SJ returned, which indicates that the rotten egg(s) were already there.
Did I get hurt? Nope. I really don’t care as long as my stock performs well. Seing as it is up almost $80/share from where I purchased and that gain is due to Steve I have no issue with him keeping the big chair.
Wrong Again:
Only The Steve can fire The Steve now. The Steve doesn’t have a “job”.
OK suppose Steve is forced to resign. Apple will then hire him as a consultant and things will carry on more or less as before.
I’m going to start a new magazine called Steve Jobs Computing. What do you think?
Lawyers lie for a living.
Wrong, Again,
Let me explain some elementary stock market realities.
In July 2006 AAPL is at $60. Harry the Hedge Fund Manager (HHFM from now on) sells 1000 contracts for January 2007 AAPL stock at $70 per share, figuring he can probably buy those shares for about $65 each come January. That’s 100,000 shares he’s just sold that he doesn’t have. We call that selling short. HHFM owes somebody $7M worth of AAPL. That somebody is Irwin the Investment Broker, henceforth IIB. When AAPL hits $90 per share, IIB starts to get nervous and calls HHFM and says, “That $7M you owe has now turned into $9M because the stock price is way up. You need to come up with $2M cash to cover the difference.” This is known as a margin call. Now HHFM doesn’t have $2M in his briefcase, so he gets on the phone with Jim the Jackoff Journalist (JJJ) and says, “You know, Jimmy Boy, that Steve Jobs over at Apple, well I heard a rumor he’s got a terminal venereal disease, besides which Apple is being sued by a 42 year old man who lives in his mother’s basement named Peter the Unemployed Komputer Engineer (PUKE) because people are always confusing him with Steve Jobs and he took out a patent on his own face back in 1972. See, Jimmy, AAPL is a real dog and you should warn people about that.” Being totally feckless JJJ writes the article that HHFM needed to keep IIB from making him come up with $2M he doesn’t have. Got it?
well said, Zeke.
Zeke, you need to add more tinfoil to that hat.
Compare this instead to an investor who has a substantial long position in Apple stock. he will enter Internet chat rooms in an attempt to talk up the value of the stock, and counter accusations of fraud by Apple’s executives, in the hope that this will cause the stock price not to fall further, and thereby increase the value of his personal investment. That would allow him to exit gracefully either making a little more profit, or avoiding a loss.
Sound Familiar Zeke?
If you’re truly in it for the long term, short term fluctuations caused by controversy over Apple’s stock backdating will have no effect on you. Over the long term the market will value your shares fairly, whatever that is.
For now the price will adjust to reflect the perceived risk that Steve might have to leave. As a necessarily simplified argument, pick different numbers if you prefer as what I’m showing they are for illustration purposes only, if Apple stock is worth $80 if Steve stays and $30 if Steve leaves, and there’s a 10% chance that Steve might leave, then the value of Apple stock is 80*90%+30*10% or $75.
That’s the reality. Assuming as most people do that Apple would be less valuable without Steve, As the chance of Steve leaving goes up, the stock price should decrease, as the chance of him leaving goes down, the stock price should increase, independent of whether he actually will have to leave.
Obviously in my example, at some point the outcome will be known with certainty. if there’s a 100% chance that he will have to leave, the stock will have moved to $30. if there’s a 100% chance he stays, it would be at $80. But until then if there’s a 99% chance he will leave, the stock would be at $30.50. If there’s a 99% chance that he will stay, the stock would be at $79.5, with a 50% chance either way, at $55 and so on. Again the model is necessarily simplified to illustrate the concept and the numbers chosen are arbitrary, just to show how it works.
That’s a force you can’t resist with all wishful the Internet postings in the world.
Zeke:
Sounds like what happened when that “JJJ” wrote that so-called “analysis” about iTunes Stores sales dropping 65% when anyone with half a brain cell knew it was actually way up year over year.
Buy and hold folks. Don’t the idiot who bought at $90 and sold at $80.
Zeke. Listen carefully, everybody could you quiet down please…. thank you.
OK Zeke. You made some interesting points and that was a thoughtful piece you wrote. Now, here’s my take…… BLOW ME.
Thank you and good night.
Don’t any of you realize that Wrong, Again is one of an army of astroturfers paid by Microsoft to keep this story alive?
@Zeke – best market-explaination post evar.
@ElementaryStockMarketRealities – So you’re saying that internet blog posters (like say, myself) have as much power to manipulate stock prices and investor sentiment as the average JJJ? Really? Well then somebody had better tell Enderle and Dvorak to start sending me half their paychecks.
In any case, my buy-in was a split-adjusted $9.87, so wiping any sort of grin off my face is damn near impossible these days. That doesn’t change the fact that this stock *IS* being manipulated artificially, and quite pathetically obviously, by certain press outlets.
The San Jose Mercury News, for example, ran stories like this one and this one, days after the stories had made their way through the press. Why? They are both basically just outlines and timelines, with no real investigative or editorial value beyond laying out the facts that we all knew weeks or months ago. The second story’s headline was in ALL CAPS, fercrissakes, and it showed up nice and prominent-like on Google Finance.
It’s kind of like a guy who looses an argument on Friday afternoon and stops you in the hall on Tuesday to say “and another thing…”
Anyway, I don’t really care, because, like you say, if you’re in this stock long then time and real economics will take over. I don’t begrudge JJJ’s or HHFM’s their livelihood, but let’s call a spade a spade – If we’re going to lynch Steve for *possibly* having a hand in making himself richer, let’s also lynch the market-movers who make EVERY OTHER INVESTOR in the company poorer.
-c
MW: ‘material’ (girl)
“astroturfers”
Ha! Did a little spit take with my coffee on that one!
For those of you who think I’m a conspiracy theorist, you need to go watch Jim Cramer’s video interview where he outlines doing exactly what I described and says it’s common practice for hedge fund managers.
My basis price is $7.49 and I own a bundle of AAPL. I plan to basically hold it for a long, long time, though I will trade if that makes sense from time to time, and I will pull money out for important expenses like university tuition for my family.
I hate having to pull money out at a lower price simply because some sleazeball has fed a bottom-of-the-barrel “journalist” a bogus story. People like Enderle are constantly searching for a story that will produce browser hits and get attention in the print media. Their survival depends on it. Their egos thrive on it.
As for defending the stock against unfounded rumors and distorted “news” stories, I suppose those of you who object wouldn’t bother to correct a published rumor that your wife had VD and would be leaving you soon. There’s a name for people who have no regard for the truth. They’re called Microsoft fan-boys. In the investor community they are known not as bulls or bears, just losers.
Lawyers are supposed to know what is legal and what is not. Obviously, this person either didn’t know or didn’t care about the “irregularities” and overtly prohibited actions that Apple was engaged in.