Steve Jobs On The Value Of Stock Options
On March 18, 2008, Steve Jobs was deposed by the SEC during its investigation of Apple's stock option backdating scandal. The deposition was never made public until Forbes published it on Friday, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a three-year arc that began when Financial Times reported in 2006 that files tied to Jobs' options grants were falsified, and continued when Bloomberg confirmed in September 2007 that Jobs had been subpoenaed for a deposition. The SEC questioned him behind closed doors on March 18, 2008, during its backdating investigation, and the transcript stayed sealed.
What changed this week is access: Forbes obtained the full text through a Freedom of Information Act request and published it, making one of the most scrutinized executives in tech answerable in his own words on a scandal that had until then been filtered through filings and press reports.
First-order effects
- Investors, reporters and Apple watchers can now read Jobs' own account of the backdating episode directly, ending reliance on secondhand summaries of what he said under SEC questioning.
- Apple faces renewed scrutiny of a governance episode it had largely moved past, with Jobs' deposition answers subject to line-by-line interpretation.
Second-order effects
- Other outlets now have a working template — a FOIA request against the SEC — for prying loose sealed investigative records about public companies, raising the odds that deposition transcripts become standard reporting targets rather than exceptions.
- Regulators weighing how much investigative material to keep confidential face pressure from news organizations arguing that records involving public-company CEOs should be public.
Third-order effects
- If FOIA-based extraction of regulator-held corporate records becomes routine, the default boundary between an agency's investigative file and the public record shifts toward disclosure, changing how companies and executives anticipate what will eventually surface.
- Corporate-governance scandals increasingly get a second life years after settlement, as archived official documents are released on journalists' timelines rather than companies'.
The trend: Freedom of Information Act requests are turning sealed regulatory investigations of public companies into publishable records, moving executive accountability outside companies' control of their own disclosures.