Apple became the first firm on Monday to have a market valuation of $3 trillion, more than nine times what it was worth when founder Steve Jobs died in 2011.
Jobs, unlike other iconic tech moguls such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, owned very little of Apple at the time of his death.
Instead, the majority of Jobs’ riches, which he left to his wife when he died of illness in 2011, came from an 8 percent ownership in Disney. Jobs bought the stock after he sold Pixar, the animation business he co-founded, to Disney in 2006.
Based on Disney’s current value, Jobs’ stock is now worth over $22 billion.
In an alternate universe, Jobs may have kept a larger share of Apple and become the world’s richest man.
When Apple went public in 1980, Jobs owned around 11% of the firm.
Five years later, he was fired and angrily sold all but one of his shares, claiming he had lost faith in the company’s leadership.
He kept the one share in order to gain access to investor reports.
With Apple reaching a market valuation of $3 trillion on Monday, an 11 percent share in the company is now worth almost $330 billion. According to Forbes, that would place Jobs ahead of the world’s current richest man, Elon Musk, who has a net worth of $298.7 billion, as well as Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of $195.8 billion.
Apple is currently valued at $3 trillion, roughly nine times what it was when Jobs died.
Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, after spending more than a decade away from the company. While he was compensated with millions of shares, the technologist never recovered anything near to his initial interest in the company.
During his second time as CEO, Jobs was also embroiled in a stock options scandal. The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Apple of backdating — fraudulently writing the erroneous date on agreements to grant stock options to employees — in order to offer Jobs and other executives higher pay packages and avoid taxes.
Jobs and Apple eventually paid a $14 million settlement to resolve shareholder litigation over the issue, while other executives paid smaller fines.
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