Is it time to fire Steve Jobs ???

Investors expressed concern today regarding the latest reports about options grants made to Apple Computer's enigmatic chief executive officer Steve Jobs. New reports about Apple's options backdating have investors concerned about how much CEO Steve Jobs knew. But analysts doubt Jobs will have to step down. The Financial Times reported that Apple's board gave Jobs 7.5 million stock options in 2001 without the approval of the company's board, and said the company later falsified documents that purportedly showed a full meeting of the board had taken place to approve the options grant. The newspaper also reported that Jobs later surrendered the options without exercising them.

Shares of Apple (Charts) fell about 1.1 percent Thursday afternoon on the news after sliding as much as 2.3 percent earlier. NOTE: This comes a day after an online legal publication.


Steve-Apple Story
Apple, more so than many other companies, is a firm that is widely associated in investors' minds with its CEO. Jobs, who co-founded Apple, left the company in the mid-1980s and Apple hit a rough patch shortly thereafter. Jobs returned in 1996 and took over as interim CEO a year later. Since then, he has been widely credited with making the company relevant again with products such as its iMac computer and the ubiquitous iPod media player and iTunes online store.

My Intuition
Despite the fact that Jobs' name has surfaced more prominently in the most recent accounts of Apple's options problems, Wall Street analysts largely shrugged off the news and said that it's highly unlikely that Jobs would be forced to leave Apple.

"Any time a CEO is at risk of being, for lack of a better word, forcibly removed, then investors should be concerned. But do I believe that Steve Jobs' job is at risk? That's an unequivocal no," says Jonathan Hoopes who is an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners.

To that end, Apple said in a press release in October that "in a few instances, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was aware that favorable grant dates had been selected, but he did not receive or otherwise benefit from these grants and was unaware of the accounting implications" and added that independent investigators "found no misconduct by any member of Apple's current management team."

So ... Steve survives [for now ;-)]