Steve Jobs worth $6.1 billion, ranked 42nd richest American by Forbes

Forbes released yesterday their 2010 ranking of the 400 richest Americans. This year Steve Jobs is ranked the 42nd richest American (136th worldwide) with a net worth of $6.1 billion.
The graph on the right shows that despite the worldwide crisis, Steve’s worth has kept growing over the recent years. Ironically, most of that wealth comes from Steve’s involvement with Pixar (now $4.4 billion in Disney stock). As far as political donations are concerned, do not trust the  $26,700 figure given here. For years, Steve has given to the Democratic party using his wife’s name, as can be seen here.

In the tech world, nothing is really new under the sun. Steve’s good friend and future neighbor (in Woodside) Larry Ellison is now worth $27 billion, the 3rd richest American behind Warren Buffet and of course Uncle Bill (worth $54 billion). The Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth $15 billion, while Eric Schmidt is down to $5.5 billion. The talk of the town is more about Mark Zuckergerg, whose net worth is valued at $6.9 billion — hence more than Steve’s.

Venture Beat interestingly comments by saying:

The dichotomy between the two CEOs points to an interesting fact: where as Jobs was fired from his company back in 1985, Zuckerberg has done a commendable job of keeping in power, still controlling an unprecedented 25 percent of the company and the majority of board seats. The young CEO probably learned a thing or two from Jobs’ mishap, and it seems to have paid off. He also had good counsel from Sean Parker, the founder of Napster and Plaxo, who had been booted out of his companies. Parker, who was Facebook’s first president until he was ousted, was determined to raise funding in a way that would preserve Zuckerberg’s control of Facebook, and that strategy has by and large panned out.

My comments:

1. There are at least two obvious differences between Steve and Zuck. At age 26 (in 1981), Steve was worth “only” $220 million — far less than Zuckerberg — and only thanks to Apple’s IPO in December 1980, before which he was worth $20 million. I don’t need to remind you that Facebook has yet to go public. More importantly, Mark is the de facto head of Facebook, which is pretty different from Steve’s situation at Apple in the early 1980s. He was the public face of the company and chairman of the board, but the company was ruled by much older men, namely CEO Mike Scott and investors such as Mike Markkula.
2. Had Steve Jobs “remained in control” of Apple (if we assume he ever “had” such control) in the 1980s, chances are he wouldn’t be that rich today. As we pointed out earlier, his wealth comes mainly from Pixar, which he created after he was fired from Apple with the money he had gained selling most of his AAPL stock in disgust in 1985. I am also one of those people who think the tech world would be far less interesting had he not started NeXT and Pixar…

In short, I don’t believe the comparison between Steve and Zuck is that relevant after all 😉

Source : Forbes

Larry Ellison Mark Zuckerberg wealth