Steve Jobs and Apple's $19 billion sneeze

LA Notebook: The incredible plunging share price

For most of us, the flu costs nothing more than the price of a box of Lemsip and a couple of days off work. For Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, the illness has turned out to be a bit more expensive than that.

Like $19 billion more expensive. Which, when you think about it, probably works out at a couple of hundred million dollars per sneeze.

It took me until Friday last week to realise what was going on. Every time I looked at my iPhone's home page, I saw something unusual- Apple's share price symbol was in red, followed by a negative number.

All this was made more baffling by the presentation given last week by Mr Jobs on the new, cheaper, souped-up iPhone at a conference in San Francisco. I've been to these events before, and they are like rock concerts. Music blares. Huge video screens loom. And then on comes Mr Jobs, in black turtleneck, frameless John Lennon glasses, jeans and trainers. He always looks slightly extraterrestrial - as though he is still readjusting to such novel concepts as gravity and an oxygen-based atmosphere. Predictably, the analysts loved every minute. The new iPhone prices could have a short-term impact on profitability, they said, but on account of Apple's imminent world domination, they would upgrade their long-term forecasts.

So what happened? The problem, it turned out, was the video of Mr Jobs's presentation that circulated on YouTube. Bloggers noticed that the Apple chief looked a bit thinner than usual, which - naturally - led to speculation about his imminent death. I say naturally, because Mr Jobs recovered from pancreatic cancer a few years back, but didn't announce it publicly until he was in the clear. This time, Apple went on the offensive, announcing that Mr Jobs had a “common bug”. Alas, that wasn't enough to stop $19 billion vanishing from the company's stock market value.

Which proves, I think, that the description of Mr Jobs as a “rock star” is no longer accurate. After all, dying is usually a good career move for a rock star. No, he is a deity - a messiah in Apple's corporate theocracy. And when God catches flu, people get worried.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/chris_ayres/article4152295.ece