Is Steve Jobs Untouchable?
In Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs is admired for many things: his storybook resuscitation of Apple Computer (AAPL), his billion-dollar-plus fortune, his rock star status as the driving force behind iconic products such as the iPod. Near the top of the list is Jobs’s famed ability to spin what admiring techies refer to as a “reality distortion field” to win consumers over to the Apple view of the world. But will it work with government regulators? As Jobs prepares to wow the masses once again with his keynote at the annual Macworld trade show on Jan. 9, skepticism abounds among options experts, as well as techies, that the Apple chief executive is totally in the clear over his role in resetting start dates for company stock options. A report issued on Dec. 29 by a two-member special committee, composed of no less than former Vice-President Al Gore and tough-minded finance veteran Jerome B. York, “found no misconduct” by Jobs or other managers. Yet it acknowledged that he knew about some of
