Steve Jobs' employment is a bargain for Apple

Seth Weintraub
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March 11, 2010
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The interesting thing about Steve Jobs' $5.5 Billion (making him the 136th richest person, up from 3.6Billion/172nd richest last year) in assets is that only around $1 billion of that is from Apple.  His Pixar-sold-to-Disney shares are worth $4.2 billion, down from the original $7.2 billion at the time of the deal.

Jobs did completely cash out of Apple (at not a great time) after his first stint and used some of that money to buy and grow Pixar and start NeXT.  But, Apple's market cap has gone from $4 billion in 1997 when he started to over $200 billion this week.  That's 50 times the value if you've been sitting on AAPL Stock since then.  Considering Apple was in a death spiral at the time he returned, you can pretty much chalk all of the $200 billion up to the guy.  That is a lot of shareholder value.

So it is without much question, that he's been a bargain for Apple over the past 13 years.

Also, not a fan of that picture from AP/Forbes.

Comments (8)

jumpinerd (not verified) | March 11, 2010 - 8:03am

Steve Job's didn't save Apple all on his own. He went to his homeboy Bill Gates for the much needed cash Apple needed to survive. On the other hand, without Steve's genius of product innovation, Apple would not have survived no matter how much money outside investors would keep pumping in at that particular time.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | March 11, 2010 - 8:08am

Apple didn't need the CASH Microsoft paid  so much as they needed the endorsement from MS that came along with it... Apple,  even in its darkest days still had a a billion or so in liquid assets 

Cloud-Noob (not verified) | March 11, 2010 - 9:00am

Microsoft's money was for:http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Apple_v._San_Francisco_Canyon Not for saving Apple

Lead Goat | March 11, 2010 - 4:12pm

MS bought $150 million non-voting shares and later sold them at a profit.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | March 11, 2010 - 8:04am

oWell a bargin perhaps but the employees still had to put up with that monster ego of his.... lol

Violian2 (not verified) | March 11, 2010 - 10:21am

He's definately a good Return On Investment..lol. And value-added.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | March 11, 2010 - 11:06am

Steve's stake in Disney did NOT go down, he only owned 50% of Pixar's shares, so when he sold Pixar to Disney, for $7.2B, only $3.6B was his. His shares have gone up since then. Not much, but enough.

Seinfeld | March 11, 2010 - 12:46pm

on this picture stevo looks quite nerdy...