Issue of the week: Will Jobs’ illness damage Apple?

last updated 8 January 2015

“We have seen this movie before,” said Ben Heineman in TheAtlantic.com. For the third time since 2004, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, 55, is taking a medical leave of absence. In 2004, he took time off to treat pancreatic cancer. In January 2009, he took six months off to undergo a liver transplant. And now he’s told Apple employees that he’s taking an indefinite break, most likely, medical experts say, because his cancer has returned or because he’s suffering from complications from the transplant. As usual, Jobs offered no details and asked for privacy. Yet Jobs and Apple owe investors a fuller explanation. Every public company is legally bound to disclose information that might affect an investor’s decision to buy its securities. Surely the illness of Apple’s visionary, chief strategist, and public face fits that criterion. Disclosing his condition and prognosis is “a matter of basic principle regarding sound and fair investor relations.”

Apple’s silence isn’t just adding to uncertainty over Jobs’ future, it’s hurting the company’s stock, said Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times. Jobs announced his leave when U.S. markets were closed, but when trading resumed, Apple shares promptly plunged 6.5 percent, to about $325, before rebounding partway. Yet given the company’s “strong executive team,” investor concerns might be overblown. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, 50, who will oversee Apple’s day-to-day operations, is, like Jobs, “obsessed with details and involved in minute elements of the business.” With Cook in charge and design honcho Jonathan Ive supplying a steady stream of elegant, must-have devices, Apple is in good shape for the next several years, said Chris O’Brien in the San Jose Mercury News. But over the long term, Apple lovers and investors will miss Jobs’ “design brilliance” and strategic genius: Thanks to Jobs, “Apple isn’t just thinking about how it will get you to buy an iPad. It’s thinking about how it’s going to get you to buy your second and third iPad.” Where would Apple find a comparably “skilled navigator” to succeed him?

There’s no dispute about how valuable Jobs is, said Daniel Lyons in Newsweek.com. “Who else could have done what Jobs has done?” After being ousted in a boardroom coup in 1985, he returned to the company in 1997, when it was “close to dead,” and turned it “into the hottest company in the world.” But now he has asked for privacy and, despite the public’s fascination with him, he deserves it. “If you’re an investor and really can’t live with the uncertainty” created by Jobs’ leave, there is an obvious recourse: “Sell your shares and thank Steve Jobs for the ridiculous profits you’ve made.”