President Obama 'celebrates' Steve Jobs, FT calls him 'Man of the year'

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been named 2010’s ‘Person of the Year’ even while US President, Barack Obama, speaks up for the wealth of the Apple co-founder.

The Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year, saying the introduction of the iPad marked the moment when the ‘rebound’ in Apple’s fortunes “was complete”.

The iPad is the culmination of an approach that he has seemingly been perfecting for his entire career,” stated the newspaper’s opinion writers.

“A rebuttal of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s much-quoted aphorism that there are no second acts in American life does not come more decisively than this,” wrote Richard Waters and Joseph Menn.

“When Steven Paul Jobs first hit the headlines, he was younger even than Mark Zuckerberg is now. Long before it was cool to be a nerd, his formative role in popularising the personal computer, and Apple’s initial public offering on Wall Street made him the tech industry’s first rock star.”

“Now, three decades on, he has secured his place in the foremost ranks of the West Coast tech titans who have done so much to shape the world around the turn of the millennium.”

Meanwhile, US president Barack Obama cited Apple boss Steve Jobs as an example of the ‘American dream’.

“We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that’s a good thing. We want that incentive. That’s part of the free market,” he said.