Apple Disclosures About Jobs To Face SEC Review

suraj.sun writes "US regulators are examining Apple Inc.'s disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's health problems to ensure investors weren't misled, a person familiar with the matter said. The Securities and Exchange Commission's review doesn't mean investigators have seen evidence of wrongdoing, the person said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn't public. Bloomberg News reported last week that Jobs is considering a liver transplant as a result of complications after treatment for cancer, according to people who are monitoring his illness."

Comments

fixed link

[TheGratefulNet]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDL78iMCdOzk

(its a question mark, not a quote mark...)

copy the url, look at it, does it look 'right' to you? ;) usually its a question mark as the first delim char before the parms.

Re:Apple isn't Apple without Steve.

[afidel]

Looking at the 3 month chart they are moving almost exactly with the market and are down about 2% less then the NASDAQ composite over that time period. Over the 1 year period they are down about 12% more than the NASDAQ composite but the movements are mostly market tracking.

Practice what you preach, SEC.

[RogueWarrior65]

I'll tell you what, Mr. SEC Investigator, you do a really good job sniffing out wrong-doing in the Mortgage Crisis (and that means severely pointing fingers at Congress) as well as demanding transparency in the oil trade business and I'll let you bitch about Apple.

This wouldn't be an issue at most companies....

[King_TJ]

I have to side with Jobs himself, on this one. People just need to leave him alone, and stay out of this media crusade to "get to the bottom of what's ailing him".

The ONLY reason people are worked into a frenzy (and even got the SEC involved) in Apple's case is because of the intense focus on Steve Jobs as THE man behind Apple.

(My mom is friends with a guy who went through chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, very similar to what Jobs had. Even though he was initially doing well, they discovered some of the cancer cells had metastasized to his liver, and about 4 years later, he's looking at a possible liver transplant. So *if* Bloomberg's report is accurate -- I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is the REAL story with Jobs' health right now.)

Nonetheless, it's not doing investors or the company any good to keep harping on it, and perpetuating the idea that Apple can't function without Steve in charge!

He's not going to live forever, even if it turns out this whole thing was made up as an excuse for Jobs to give himself a 6 month vacation! There has to be a "plan B", and any decent CEO has certainly given that some thought.

IMHO, Steve Jobs already served his main purpose for Apple. He rescued the company from a downward spiral, completely revamped the product line from top to bottom and turned it into one of the biggest tech success stories out there. He set Apple on a course of being a media distributor as well as a "computer company", and extended that to the cellphone marketplace too. If nobody out there can work with THAT, after it's handed to them on a silver platter? Well, I'm not sure America has any future in tech at all!

leave steve alone!

[goombah99]

Just leave him alone! He's suffered enough, can't you all see that. Just leave the poor guy alone.

In any case, this SEC thing seems sort of silly. The SEC while it has the power to abusively coerce responses, techincally Jobs is just he CEO, not a golden child. How can his health issues be any more important than those of head of tupperware or American Toyota, who's name you don't know.

Is it because you know his name that makes his health techincally relevant? Then what about some who's names you do know, like Jack Welch, or Larry Ellison. Should they have been given annual public proctology exams since that's a high cancer risk for men their ages?

Sure the cult of Steve is an importnat phenomena to apple, but it's not a techincal criteria that I can see. It's not like Apple is somehow misrepresenting it's products or it's book value or it's liabilities to it's shareholders.

So what does the SEC have to argue here.

Re:leave steve alone!

[MikeDirnt69]

Yeah! What's the problem with a company trying to keep their Jobs?
Oh, wait...

Re:leave steve alone!

[DanTheStone]

If Apple's disclosures were an attempt to influence stock prices, then it would matter. The SEC just seems to be watching for fraud like stock manipulation. That is their job, after all.

Re:leave steve alone!

[_LORAX_]

Like it or not the stock price is linked to Steves Health. This is for several reasons, none of which the SEC cares too much about.

If Steve or the board, knowingly, withheld information they knew would have a negative ( or positive ) impact on the stock price would be breaking SEC regs.

It's not specifically about his health, but the fact that his health has a material effect on the stock price and therefore investors have a right to know enough information to make informed investment decisions. It's one of the basic requirements for a free market.

Re:leave steve alone!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that they are interesting in the possibility that apple lied about jobs' health, not in his health per se. As TFA notes, apple is not obliged to disclose anything about jobs' health; but they decided to do so anyway. If they were lying about it, that would be an issue.

Re:leave steve alone!

[mweather]

While Jobs's efforts have saved the company from a downward spiral, that doesn't mean that it's all on him.

The parent never claimed it did. He said Apple's stock price is tied to Jobs' health. And it is. Go to Google Finance, look at the news links on Apple's stock charts. You'll see a price drop after any negative story about Jobs' health. Whether Apple would be fine without him or not is completely irrelevant.

Re:leave steve alone!

[EastCoastSurfer]

So Apple just manufactures iPods? Actually it's quite the opposite, they don't do any of their own hardware manufacturing and instead come up with the ideas for hardware and farm out their creations to 3rd parties often in China.

Software is simply the expression of an idea.

Apple is very much an idea company.

Ethical Question: SHOULD HE EVEN GET A LIVER?

[wisebabo]

So, let's say Jobs needs (I guess his doctors would decide if he needed it) a liver. Where does he get it? I mean, in the U.S., the scarce organs available for transplant are decided (I think) by some medical board that determines the medical usefulness(?) of the organ to the patient. That is, will it help the patient live a substantially longer, healthier life.

I don't think that they take into consideration the person's wealth or any other measure of that person's *value* to society. So, even if billions of dollars of market capitalization are at stake and millions of customers depend on his brilliance, he may be turned down for say, a 16 year old girl who has her whole life in front of her. I could be wrong though, there may be some provision for "importance" to society. Anybody know the answer? (Of course the medical board's answer may be different from what you think it should be!)

Now, living as I do in a third world country, I can see how Jobs could easily fly here and "procure" one if he needed it. (I'm not saying that he'd take one from a living person of course, just that he would get bumped up to the front of the line). Wouldn't look too good for Apple's image to so openly go around the American system but he would save his life (and presumably Apple). I'm afraid to say that as an Apple fanboy I'd rather him do that than die.

Re:Ethical Question: SHOULD HE EVEN GET A LIVER?

[dogmatixpsych]

As someone who has recently been involved in transplant cases (doing psych evals of the potential recipients) here's a bit of what I learned (this might just be true at my particular hospital).

1. Preference is given to people who demonstrate that they will be able to maintain the new organ after transplant. People with good social networks (or a lot of money to hire full time nursing care) are far less likely to be rejected.
2. Age generally is not factored in (a lot of transplants fail within 10 years anyway) unless the patient is very young or very old. The thing about a transplant is that it generally won't let someone live a normal life, just a better and longer one.
3. The parent is correct about the "usefulness" of the organ. If the team of doctors don't think it will significantly improve quality of life, they won't do it.
4. Money is a factor. If someone like Steve Jobs can pay for a transplant out of pocket without dealing with insurance, he could move up the list just because there is no need to wait for insurance bureaucracy.
5. Most of the waiting comes from waiting for a good "match." If someone has a family member or friend who wants to donate, then they go ahead with the donation process (after extensive medical and psychological testing, at least that's the way it's done at major hospitals). With livers, people can donate a piece of their liver although it's much more common to have a standard transplant from a deceased donor.

Basically, much of what the parent said was correct. However, money can influence the process (I'm not talking about bribing, which is both unethical and illegal). Other than some serious psychological issues and/or a history of non-compliance with medical care, there is very little that disqualifies people from transplantation. A lot of it comes down to the "lottery" of finding an organ match. Steve probably would get some preferential treatment though.

Bullshit x 1000000

[gig]

This story is complete bullshit. The implication's that SEC rules have been broken is bullshit. The Bloomberg story that is referred to has already been widely debunked as complete and utter bullshit. Using a person's health as an investment talking point is bullshit ... you have no idea what the state of his health is, you have no idea how that will affect the state of his health in the future, and further, you have no idea what the effect on Apple would be no matter what the outcome.

What makes this even worse is that any self-respecting nerd knows full well that Mr. Jobs above all other people in the tech industry has imbued his company with its own self-sustaining and unique culture. He could announce that he is taking up sailing like most billionaires and no longer has time to work at Apple and there will still be people at Apple trying to figure out how to remove more buttons from all of their products. There would still be customers because there will still be creative people who need fonts that work and color management you can rely on and a full pro audio subsystem, and Web developers who want to run Apache/PHP/Photoshop, and there would still be poseurs who buy only for the logo and teh shiny. In other words, you have to be truly ignorant of computing to think that Steve Jobs has been sitting in a room at Apple drawing up MacBook Airs on a napkin and that the whole thing would grind to a halt without him.

Plus, Apple has a huge lead in 21st century computing that everyone would love to have. Google, Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry all use Apple's WebKit as their Web rendering engine ... MPEG-4 is a standardization of Apple's QuickTime format ... the iPod has 75% market share. Right now many people outside Apple are just beginning to use stuff that Apple has been expert at for years. It is obvious they are the only organization with the technology and expertise to do a proper tablet, which is just an iPod touch HD. All that is required is to complete the resolution-independent user interface, which Mac OS X has had in developer preview mode since 2004.

The smart investor is buying Apple stock right now. They are so undervalued because investors don't understand how to read the subscription accounting that is done for the iPhone.