Apple stock made people rich and that mattered to Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs famously made a lot of money off the successes of Apple (AAPL) and Pixar (DIS). His net worth was an estimated $6.7 billion at the time of his death in 2011, according to Bloomberg.

But did he care about shareholders? The authors of the new book, “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader” say yes (well, some of the shareholders anyway).

Co-authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli tell Yahoo Finance that Jobs was an ever-evolving businessman and that he did care about the inner circle of people around him. “Each step of the way, he would turn into a slightly different person,” Schlender says. Schlender got to know Jobs well over the course of 25 years covering technology for The Wall Street Journal and Fortune.

But Jobs cared very much about the people closest to him and how Apple made many of them very wealthy, the book concludes.

Good Times for Inner Circle

“I think he did care about Apple's stock price,” says co-author Tetzeli. Tetzeli points to an interview he and Schlender conducted with Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. Cue told the pair that for a very long time, the Apple brass didn’t really measure things by numbers. “But at a certain point,” says Tetzeli, “the devices achieved this ubiquity that they all took this enormous satisfaction in. And Steve liked the fact that people at Apple were making money because of the stock price." Schlender and Tetzeli say after interviewing those close to Jobs, that’s the thing that he cared about most in terms of the stock price.

"Becoming Steve Jobs" also notes that Jobs knew how much of an incentive the stock was for his colleagues and he didn’t always play fair. “Early in his career, he also shut people out from getting founders’ shares, shares of the stock when he started out,” says Tetzeli. "He understood how stock was both a carrot and a stick,” he says.

While he made his close circle of his executives very rich with stock options grants, "it eventually got him in some trouble," says Tetzeli.  In 2008, former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen settled with the SEC on charges that she improperly backdated stock options for executives at the company. Heinen paid $2.2 million in penalties and fines to settle the case but she did not have to admit any guilt in the deal.

The suit charged Heinen cherry-picked grant dates for stock options awarded to top Apple executives, including Jobs. That boosted values. She was also charged with covering up what she had done. Apple conducted an internal investigation at the time Heinen was charged, but Jobs and other executives were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Evolution of Jobs' Wealth

Jobs co-founded Apple with his friend Steve Wozniak in April of 1976. Within four years, the company's Apple II became a wildly popular home computer. Sales reached $117 million in 1980, and the company went public. Jobs later brought in an experienced CEO, John Sculley from PepsiCo (PEP). The relationship evenutally soured and Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985. Jobs sold all but one share of his Apple stock.  Later that year, he founded another computer company NeXT, which developed a powerful computer based on the Unix operating system.

A year later, Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm for $5 million and became Pixar’s CEO. “Becoming Steve Jobs” suggests that it was Pixar that taught Jobs the value of a more hands-off approach to business and shaped him as an executive.

Schlender says, “It was a stroke of amazing luck on his part to buy this team [at Pixar]. And it was so fascinating to watch how he worked with them because he had no idea of what they really did. But he knew they were good. And it became a very, very important part of his own development as a manager.”

In 1997, Apple bought out NeXT, and brought Jobs back in to lead the company. Jobs also remained in the chief executive position at Pixar until Disney (DIS) bought the studio for $7.4 billion in 2006.

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