As a postscript to last week's Apple options backdating developments, Joe Nocera offers some tasty details about the part Steve Jobs' played in the whole affair in Saturday's New York Times (subscription required).
Nocera was an editor at Fortune when it published the June 2001 cover story on the "highway robbery" (their phrase) of executive compensation, using Jobs as the cover boy. Nocera recalls that he was quite happy with how the story turned out:
What a delicious surprise to discover that the Jerkoff, who had ostentatiously taken only $1 in salary since returning to Apple in 1997, had a stock option package bigger than any ever bestowed on such well-known greed heads as Sanford I. Weill of Citigroup or Michael D. Eisner of Disney.
Jobs, however, was not so happy. He railed about the “unfairness” of the cover. And he wrote a scornful letter to the editor, asserting that because Apple’s stock had fallen almost $20 a share since the options grant was made, they weren’t worth $872 million — “they are worth zero.”
That is not how options are valued, but never mind. In a tone dripping with sarcasm, Mr. Jobs offered to sell Fortune the options for half their supposed $872 million value.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the article so infuriated Mr. Jobs that he began agitating to have the options package canceled. The options were so far underwater that he felt it wasn’t worth the bad press to hold onto them.
Did that mean that Mr. Jobs was willing to go back to his $1 a year salary? Hardly. At the same time, he and the board began negotiating a new package: 7.5 million stock options this time, at a price of $17.83.
Thus began the chain of events that led to the indictment last week of Apple's former CFO and general counsel. But not, as Nocera points out, the guy who at several turns in the story engaged in protracted negotiations to make sure he was getting his due. The article concludes:
As for Mr. Jobs, as hard as he’s worked to convey the image of an above-the-fray visionary, that’s not quite the reality, is it? I recently stumbled across this comment from him, circa 1985: “I’m at a stage where I don’t have to do things just to get by. But then I’ve always been that way, because I’ve never really cared about money.”
Yeah, right.
http://blogs.business2.com/apple/2007/04/joe_nocera_on_s.html
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