Back in 2003, Steve Jobs decided to cancel his “nearly worthless” stock options at Apple in exchange for $75 million.
If he had kept them? They’d be worth $10.3 billion dollars in profits today.
Of course, not that Jobs is hurting. He’s ranked the 136th wealthiest man in the world, even without that extra $10.3 billion.
The big irony of the story is, in fact, that in 2003, those options were practically worthless at the time. The only reason Steve Jobs “lost” anything here was because he successfully remade Apple into one of the most profitable companies in tech.
For some reason, for excellence-driven Steve, I think he’s happier with the way Apple has turned out than an extra $10 billion could make him.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
