Apple shares soar to a new high; Steve Jobs gets more moolah
The stock run-up came "amid a buying frenzy after Jobs pulled off another seemingly improbable feat of posting blockbuster results that even beat Wall Street's best estimates," notes The New York Post. Shares briefly breached the $200-a-share barrier, reaching a high of $201.75, before eventually backing off to close at $198.76, up nearly 5 percent. Trading volume was nearly twice the daily average. For the year, Apple shares are up 133 percent.
The jump was enough to catapult Apple to be among the five largest US companies by market cap, and eclipse firms long seen as bigger, notes the Post.
Meanwhile, CEO Steve Jobs' net worth rose to US$5.4 billion this week. In September, Steve Jobs' $5.1 billion earned him the No. 43 spot on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans. Since then, Apple's shares have rocketed to within orbiting distance their all time high.
So Jobs is a lot richer today he was then -- more than $282 million richer, at least on paper -- but only about half that increase is thanks to Apple, while the rest is all Disney, according to a
Fortune report.
The article says that, according to the two companies' proxy statements, the bulk of Jobs' net worth is in the form of preferentially owned stock:
° 5.426 million shares of Apple (most of it from a 2003 grant of 10 million shares, later reduced to pay taxes)
° 138 million shares of Disney (from when Disney acquired Pixar).
Fortune says that, in the six weeks since Forbes took its financial snapshot, Apple has gained 26.35 points (as of Tuesday's close) while Disney inched up 99 cents. But because Jobs' net worth is so much more closely tied to Disney than to Apple, those 99 cents carry a lot of weight in his portfolio. Bottom line: Jobs' holdings increased in value $146 million from Apple and $136 million from Disney.