While much of the tributes to the late Steve Jobs have focused on his innovation, we're guessing folks on Wall Street are going to miss him for a related, but different, reason.
He made investors a lot of money.
Shares in Apple rose more than 6,000 percent between the time Jobs took back the helm at Apple in September 1997 and the time he stepped down in August of 2011.
Jobs, who died earlier this week, returned to the company he had co-founded as many were questioning whether Apple could even survive. Shares in the company were trading around $5, adjusted for splits.
On Aug. 24, the day Jobs resigned, shares in Apple closed at around $376.
In the years in between, Jobs reinvigorated the company’s computer line and oversaw the invention of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
Last year, Harvard Business Review named him the best-performing CEO in the world, citing the $150 billion increase in market capitalization between 1997 and 2010, when the list came out.
“It may come as no shock that Steve Jobs of Apple tops the list,” Harvard Business Review wrote.
Jobs was known for being deeply involved in the minutiae of product development, but experts said this week that they expect the company will continue to be successful without Jobs. Investors are surely hoping for that.
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