Anderson Blames Jobs In Backdating

[ulyssespdx]

the SEC doesn't "respond" to a former employee saying "hey, my former boss said to me that it was okay."

c'mon, folks. this guy left Apple under a cloud. suddenly, Steve Jobs is involved in every minute detail of the company's stock option accounting?

uh-huh. yeah. ooh. big "conspiracy."

slow news day?

this entire thing is one uber-hyped blamefest. hyped mostly by the media, that is.

 

[AidenShaw]

funny, though

Suddenly, Steve Jobs is involved in every minute detail of the company's stock option accounting?

But, people here often assume that The Steve is involved in every other tiny little detail of the company - it stretches the imagination to think that he wasn't paying attention to hundreds of millions of dollars of stock options.

 

[GanleyBurger]

old people...

If Jobs is indicted and removed as CEO of Apple, and Apple falls by the wayside into the corporation graveyard, how long would a web site like MacRumors survive? A year? Less?

Have you guys got your resumes polished up yet?

Don't worry. If Apple crumbles, Macs will become collectors items. To keep them going strong, we'll have to start ripping them apart like PCs to work on them.

Then, we will start a website called MacMemories. We'll all be like 80 years old and we'll chat about the good ol' days, about how stupid Steve was, risking it all for a little gain.

Then we'll complain about our corns, our sore thumbs, and our failing eyesight... destroyed by staring at 30" monitors.

We'll hit people with our canes... and the handles will be carved into the shape of Apple symbols...

We'll rule the nursing homes!!!!!!!!!

 

[Rot'nApple]

the SEC doesn't "respond" to a former employee saying "hey, my former boss said to me that it was okay."

c'mon, folks. this guy left Apple under a cloud. suddenly, Steve Jobs is involved in every minute detail of the company's stock option accounting?

uh-huh. yeah. ooh. big "conspiracy."

CEO Jeff Skilling left Enron suddenly, leaving Ken Lay to be involved also. And as he touted the company stock and that it's trading price will bounce back up, he was busy selling his! And we all know how Enron turned out!

Not saying this is "Enron 2", but I think all executives of major corporations need to see the perp walks of handcuffed executives, such as Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, heading to trial, lest they forget. It does a body good!

 

[GanleyBurger]

.

 

[Doctor Q]

Between Jobs and Anderson, we seem to have a he-said-he-said situation. Personally, I never believe anybody named Mr. Anderson.

If Jobs is indicted and removed as CEO of Apple, and Apple falls by the wayside into the corporation graveyard, how long would a web site like MacRumors survive? A year? Less?

Have you guys got your resumes polished up yet?

Yes, I've been working on it since I saw your post. Thanks for the warning. I've got my first interview tomorrow.

 

[LoganT]

I can imagine Jobs meditating and giving words of wisdom to his fellow inmates.

 

[iMikeT]

The guy settles and he comes out crying and pointing the finger...

Isn't there a clause somewhere called "No cry babies"?

 

[surferfromuk]

Apple is a great company.

Rumours and talk are cheap - PROOF is a whole lot harder to come by.

Let me reassure all those tempted to enter into a dialogue with the apocalyptic doomsayers that have creeped out of the woodwork that the 'sky is most defintately NOT falling in'.

And taking a slightly different view of history - say let's zoom out and look at the last 30 and the next 30 years -

and say ;

SO WHAT if Jobs, the board, Fred Anderson etc etc chewed off a little more fat than they should - without Jobs Apple would be in the dumpster of history right now and we'd all be using Micro sh&t XP ( yeah you think Vista would be out if OSX had not transpired - who would they have copied then ?? what competition would they have - why even bother making a new OS????).

I'm sure a LOT of ordinary folks made a lot of money out of Apple Shares and Job's vision over the last decade. A few milliion quid went astray - so what - they company is turning billions over.

Just stop a moment and try and remember that, and I don't understate this to lightly, that the future of mankind is tied to these handful of visionary tech companies and the handful of incredibles that run them and we'd better be careful that if we burn these people down that it may take 10, 20, 50 or 100 years before the likes of them appear to replace them.

This witch hunt is like trying to jail Alexander Bell for making a 'few more' dimes out of HIS 'telephone idea' than was previously considered.

Steve Jobs practically invented the modern world for crying out loud - so he got a little 'extra' doing it. Big Deal!!.

Just be thankful he's even doing this - he could just as easily be sat on a desert island drinking tequila's giving the modern world the 'bird.

I say - forget this nonsense. Mac's are great, SJ IS GREAT ( only a fool would try to argue against that) and history will show that like all great figures in history they are at the end of the day ordinary human people JUST TRYING TO GET A JOB DONE in the face of all kinds of mediocre crap!.

I ,for one, are amazingly grateful to Jobs and Apple and even to a degree Microsoft and Bill Gates - These people have enhanced our lives immensely!.

We could all still be timesharing an IBM on a green screen or worse picking wheat from the fields with our bare hands in some peasant communist low-tech nightmare...

 

[BenRoethig]

I see two scenarios here.

1. Anderson is trying to save his butt by shifting the blame to Steve Jobs.

2. Anderson had overwhelming evidence against, but was promised a light sentence if he provided evidence against Jobs that they couldn't get on their own.

 

[hagjohn]

I see two scenarios here.

1. Anderson is trying to save his butt by shifting the blame to Steve Jobs.

2. Anderson had overwhelming evidence against, but was promised a light sentence if he provided evidence against Jobs that they couldn't get on their own.

Do you believe that Steve Jobs didn't know about the backdating? Is it really shifting the blame if they all knew about it?

 

[crap freakboy]

Whos this Jobs guy youre all on about?

 

[California]

Anderson took the blame legally and is paying a huge fine.

Why he's lashing out at Jobs here? To make himself look good.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Whos this Jobs guy youre all on about?

Exactly... this aint the Jobs we know... the one that's working on 13" MacBook Pros with backlit keyboards and dedicated graphics memory for WWDC. That Steve Jobs is working to hard on the future of computing to bother with this SEC and Anderson finger pointing crap.

 

[ClimbingTheLog]

If Jobs is indicted and removed as CEO of Apple, and Apple falls by the wayside into the corporation graveyard, how long would a web site like MacRumors survive? A year? Less?

Have you guys got your resumes polished up yet?

http://www.macobserver.com/appledeathknell/index.shtml

Jobs 1.0 is the person who ran the company into the ground.

He left at the height of the first Macintosh revolution. Get your dates straight. Unless you feel that sticking with the Apple ][ was the right course of action for mid-80's Apple.

She should be disbarred as well, and that is exactly what will happen if the SEC wins the case against her.

Good, maybe that'll give corporate lawyers some motivation, if not spine. They need to use their license responsibly.

I would think that as the CFO he would have access to the board and the board records. As the CFO it was his responsability to ensure that he had the correct authority in writting before acting on it.

Right, he's an Officer, not an accountant.

Fun times ahead. But Fred's just screwed himself over in that statement in my book. As if he wasn't screwed enough already....

Agreed, he's now known as Fred "The Squealer" Anderson up and down the Valley. I expect this means that Jobs basically fired him, and he's trying to be vindictive, but this doesn't bode well for his future opportunities.

But, people here often assume that The Steve is involved in every other tiny little detail of the company - it stretches the imagination to think that he wasn't paying attention to hundreds of millions of dollars of stock options.

Those people are crazy. No man can be involved with corporate takeovers, product design, do Keynotes, fight cancer, work on the new campus and its iTube (subterranean shuttle), run Pixar, and take care of the topiaries. He may or may not have been involved with the backdating, but the mystique about Steve Jobs is just that.

 

[mccldwll]

"I would think that as the CFO he would have access to the board and the board records. As the CFO it was his responsability to ensure that he had the correct authority in writting before acting on it."


Correct. It was Anderson's job to get this stuff right. Who knows exactly what Anderson told SJ and what SJ understood Anderson was telling him. This was a gray area back when happening, as evidenced by all the companies now under investigation. Accountants were pushing things. In all liklihood, the board did approve (if informally, maybe a series of phone calls to all members) a grant at lowest price, and Anderson was in charge of getting it to work. SJ didn't just create these things himself. They were granted (even if correct procedure not followed). And it also was Anderson's responsibility to get them right, and the annual accounting right. For him to shift responsibility to Jobs, he had better have somethiing signed by SJ explaining the situation, and that he was aware of the problems and implications.

 

[mklos]

If Jobs is indicted and removed as CEO of Apple, and Apple falls by the wayside into the corporation graveyard, how long would a web site like MacRumors survive? A year? Less?

Have you guys got your resumes polished up yet?

Apple can survive without Steve Jobs today. They are in a very good position currently with some very good people surrounding them. Apple just needs to keep going in the direction its currently going in and keep focused. Thats what happened in the early/mid 90's, they lost focus and paid dearly for it. Steve came back and got them back on track, focusing on the things they should have been doing in the first place.

Also, Steve isn't the only person who thinks up all of these new great ideas, its the people behind the scenes. Steve is just really good at getting what he wants which is something a lot of other people aren't good at. He's also a damn good salesman!

 

[TheBobcat]

I guess the key thing here is that the SEC didn't feel the need at any point to do anything more than question Steve. So they couldn't find a THING to do to him. If they even had an iota against Steve, they would have pursued it so some bureaucrat could become famous and they could make an example of someone else just like they did of Martha Stewart.

The testimony of a convicted criminal isn't quite enough to build a case against Jobs, since obviously there has been nothing to indicate any involvement on his part. Albeit, he could have access to some records, but you would think that anything he could get now as he's been out of the company for a while is something the SEC already would have had access to.

The bottom line is that the SEC needs to utilize its discretion to go after the right people. What, how many people from Enron are still on the loose, where a ton of people lost their pensions? The administration can give loads of money in all these suspicious contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we're more interested in putting away Martha Stewart for getting 40 grand in insider trading. I'm not saying that we shouldn't ignore their crimes, but I think we should make an efficient use of our tax dollars instead of trying to make examples of people.

 

[Gasu E.]

I'm so sick of you stupid, warped drones. You worship a piece of plastic and silicon as if it's the monolith from 2001 and refuse to believe anything your sainted Steve Jobs does could ever be wrong. If this charge is true, Steve Jobs ought to be thrown in jail. You children who have never owned a share of stock or owned underwater options (I still have 1000 of them from IBM issued in 1999 ... anyone want 1000 IBM shares at 148? Didn't think so.) you obviously don't understand the pure greedy criminality of this act. Anyone guilty of options backdating ought to be dragged through the streets for his pathetic, borderless greed.

You know nothing... the issue under discussion was immaterial to Apple's stock performance. Jobs being removed, on the other hand, would destroy enormous amounts of stockholder value.

I own over $500K of stock (no, not specifically Apple) and have an MBA from a top 10 business school.

You, on the other hand, know so little you should apply for a job at the SEC. Perhaps this is why you bought tech stock options at the height of the Internet bubble. Talk about ignorant, greedy lambs being led to slaughter!

 

[IJ Reilly]

He left at the height of the first Macintosh revolution. Get your dates straight. Unless you feel that sticking with the Apple ][ was the right course of action for mid-80's Apple.

No, not at all. Jobs was canned when the company was deeply mired in crisis, with the success of the Macintosh very much in doubt. The Mac had gotten off to a good start in 1984, but sales fell off sharply in 1985. Jobs 1.0 was notorious for his lack of focus and discipline (as was Apple a whole), and nobody knew what to do next. In fact Jobs hired John Scully in 1985 because he recognized that Apple was in need of "adult supervision." Scully did an excellent job of righting the corporate ship -- but one of his obstacles in this task was Steve Jobs, so Scully fired him. One of the big questions everyone had when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 was whether he'd become more seasoned, to the point where he could run the company effectively. Fortunately for us, he had.

 

[surferfromuk]

Wow - there are so many 'I could have done it better's' around here...

well here's a wake up call...

Everyone on this board could be a multi-billionaire 30 years from now IF....

they only go help create something incredible and unique and then get it to market, then develop something even more incredible despite everyone saying it can't be done, then maybe get booted out of your own company for having created that incredible thing without I should add a crystal ball, then maybe manage to consolidate your position and 10 years later rise again even more triumphant, only to facilitate a few more incredible things and bring a whole new generation of wonderful things to market...

IF and WHEN you can do all that and not manage to have some lesser talented bean counters/anonymous grey men in a suits try through either incompetence, greed, scheming or just bad luck screw it all up for you THEN you can come onto a public forum and cry about what you think Steve Jobs may or may not be doing...

Until then you should recognize what an incredible man he is and that he is SO FAR removed from a TV celebrity chef and TV homemaker that I can't even believe parallels are being drawn to Stewart....

Steve Jobs is right up there with Henry Ford, Alexander Bell, Alfred Nobel...

Let's be under no mistake about this!!..

 

[Maccus Aurelius]

Pfffff, if I was in charge of Apple, I'd.....

Anyway, I hope he didn't actually do anything, cuz I'm sure his loss, regardless of whether or not the company's secondary heads can keep pumping good ideas, would still have a negative effect on the company, which would be most apparent if a #2 of sorts hosted the keynotes while Jobs sat in a translucent plastic box Magneto style. But if Jobs ate live kittens and snatched the walkers from under old ladies, we can learn to live without him.

 

[JGowan]

You gotta ask "WHY?"

Why would Steve knowingly do something this dishonest?

Steve's been a very, very rich man for a very, very long time. His passion is not the money or we see very little about him these days as he would off sailing the world and being the proverbial Bruce Wayne playboy. No, he loves computers and electronics and making the very best of them.

He's the 132nd richest man in the world, a billionaire worth almost $6 BILLION ($5.7B). He's a "millionaire" 5,700 times over. There's no way he would want to fudge for a few more million on the pile. There's simply no need.

---

FORBES.com's Billionaire List

 

[hagjohn]

Civil charges filed against 2 ex-Apple officers
POSTED: 3:30 a.m. EDT, April 25, 2007

SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- The Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges Tuesday against two former Apple Inc. officers over their alleged roles in backdating stock options. The agency immediately announced a settlement with one of them.

Former Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson, 62, has agreed to pay about $3.5 million in fines and penalties to settle the case, the SEC said.

The case against former general counsel Nancy Heinen, 50, will proceed. Her attorneys have vowed to fight the charges.

The commission accused Heinen of participating in fraudulent backdating and altering company records to conceal the fraud. The charges were in connection with two large options grants that caused the company to underreport its expenses by nearly $40 million, the SEC said.

Read full article

 

[SillyKary]

Why would Steve knowingly do something this dishonest?

Steve's been a very, very rich man for a very, very long time. ... There's no way he would want to fudge for a few more million on the pile.

Wealth makes greedy. A lot of really rich men are also really greedy, always want more. Few are as generous as Gates, giving away a lot of their wealth (and even he became a big philanthropist only after he ruthlessly made a lot more money than he could ever possibly spend on his family alone).

$3.5m to a billionaire is like $350 to someone who is worth $100,000. Imagine, if all your assets combined - house, stocks, savings - you own a very reasonable $100k, and you had a chance to pick up another $350, would you do it?

I don't know about SJ's attitude towards money, I'm just saying it's very possible that even a billionaire does very much "fudge for a few more million".