Options mania

Some options odds and ends.

McAfee fires president Kevin Weiss in the wake of its own stock option backdating scandal.

And the Wall Street Journal reports that the committee Apple relied on to investigate its option backdating included Apple board member Jerome York – who was responsible for granting some of the backdated options (although he recused himself during the investigation of those time periods) – and Eric Schmidt, who’s caught up in his own options issues at Google.

Hmm.  Foxes?  Chicken coop?  Any of this ringing any bells, Apple board?

They at least got the third member right by picking Al Gore who, say what you want, probably doesn’t have any issues with stock option backdating since he spent the entire problem time period in the public sector and then teaching.

Trolling for more background, the Macalope found this report on MacNN that references a Bloomberg story about Steve Jobs relinquishing his entire 27.5 million options in March of 2003 for 5 million of directly owned shares.

That’s interesting.

Nine months after Sarbanes-Oxley passes, Steve Jobs trades his options in for actual shares.  Apple’s statement about Jobs’ seem pretty unequivocal, however.

In a few instances, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was aware that favorable grant dates had been selected, but he did not receive or otherwise benefit from these grants and was unaware of the accounting implications.

Or is it?!  Paging George Ou and David Burke!

(Not really.  Please don’t respond to that page.)

3 thoughts on “Options mania”

  1. >Steve Jobs relinquishing his entire 27.5 million
    >options in March of 2003 for 5 million of directly
    >owned shares.

    I’m not sure I get it. How is this connected to the backdating problem?

Leave a Reply to pedro Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.