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If you were an AAPL shareholder, nobody would be holding a gun to your head and preventing you from selling your AAPL stock.
by asdflkj 18y ago
If you were an AAPL shareholder, nobody would be holding a gun to your head and preventing you from selling your AAPL stock.
- mhartl 18y agoThat's true, but you could say the same about anything else they might want to suppress. Should Apple hide crippling delays in its next line of iPods because, after all, no one's holding a gun to the heads of the shareholders? Of course, you could argue that companies are (or should be) under no obligation to disclose anything they don't want to. The market would then work its magic by punishing (via fewer stock purchases) those companies that were insufficiently transparent. I'm sympathetic to that position, but that's not the argument people make. Instead, they place Jobs's health into the special category of "privacy", as if that's the only rationale they need. My point is that making the health of the iconic CEO off-limits is simply an arbitrary social norm; it's not written in stone.
- jodrellblank 18y agoThey should be obliged to disclose anything about the business. And obliged to keep private anything about any employee's health (or finances, or other private/personal concerns). Privacy is the only rationale I need. Steve Jobs is a person, entitled to be happy, suffer, live in private. Yes it makes things less predictable for you, but you have shares in the company, not the CEO, so ... tough.
- mhartl 18y agoI agree that they shouldn't be obligated to reveal anything about Jobs's health; I'm just identifying the "private" status of a CEO's health as an arbitrary social convention rather than an objective fact.