Steve Jobs' employment is a bargain for Apple

The interesting thing about Steve Jobs’ $5.5 Billion (making him the 136th richest person, up from 3.6Billion/172nd richest last year) in assets is that only around $1 billion of that is from Apple.  His Pixar-sold-to-Disney shares are worth $4.2 billion, down from the original $7.2 billion at the time of the deal.

Jobs did completely cash out of Apple (at not a great time) after his first stint and used some of that money to buy and grow Pixar and start NeXT.  But, Apple’s market cap has gone from $4 billion in 1997 when he started to over $200 billion this week.  That’s 50 times the value if you’ve been sitting on AAPL Stock since then.  Considering Apple was in a death spiral at the time he returned, you can pretty much chalk all of the $200 billion up to the guy.  That is a lot of shareholder value.

So it is without much question, that he’s been a bargain for Apple over the past 13 years.

Also, not a fan of that picture from AP/Forbes.