Apple’s Steve Jobs explains the reasoning behind his stock option strategy when he was deposed by the SEC on March 18, 2008, during its investigation of the stock option plan - which SEC considered as a backdating scandal.
The deposition was never made public until Forbes published it on Friday, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Jobs explains why he asked the board for mega grants of options for both himself and his top executives, but claims ignorance of the mechanics of how that was done after the board approved the grants themselves. (It was the falsifying of board minutes for a meeting that never occurred, not the backdating per se, that got Apple’s former general counsel Nancy Heinen into hot water with the SEC-this deposition was for a case against her).
But the document provides the first detailed account of the incident from Steve Jobs himself in his own words. What comes through in the deposition is how Jobs sees himself and his’ fierce loyalty to those who work for him. For instance, after selling NeXt to Apple in 1997, his initial reason for acting as a consultant was to get “some of the NeXt people into some jobs where they could help Apple.”
He himself was reluctant at first to take on the CEO role at Apple because he did not want the people at his other company, Pixar, to “think I was abandoning them.”
Then, when it came time to reward his “ultra key” executives with one million options each, two of them were from NeXT. While he was taking care of his top lieutenants by trying to surprise and delight them with what a career at Apple could be. He was “hurt” that Apple’s board did not do the same for him. So he had to have a little talk with them about swapping his 20 million then-underwater options for 7.5 million new ones, which they did.
Via: TechCrunch.
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