He's not a politician and we don't have the opportunity to vote for him, so that's not much of an analogy.
There are laws about how much a publicly-traded company needs to disclose, and I'm pretty sure that the health of its CEO isn't on the list.
On the other hand, since it is kinda important to the future of the company and the industry, I can't see any point in making it a taboo topic for the rest of us to discuss.
The principle public companies adhere to is that they should disclose anything 'material', meaning anything that, if it were widely known, would affect the stock price. Perhaps there are investors out there who think Apple would be worth $162 billion run by Gil Amelio or whoever, but I'm not one of them.
The health of the CEO definitely has impacts on the company, especially so in Apple's case. The health of Apple is directly related to Jobs, much more so than any other large company I can think of. There was an article (can't remember where) about his first bout with cancer and the struggle he had to stay on the up and up with the SEC. Basically it's his private matter up until it would be likely to affect his performance. It's kind of a grey area, but keeping things disclosed is much better for the company.
It's pretty depressing, but you'd have all sorts of insider trading problems with only a few people knowing you're sick. The people who would know (nurses, doctors, etc) would probably be fairly under the radar as far as that's concerned too.
Comments
He's not a politician and we don't have the opportunity to vote for him, so that's not much of an analogy.
There are laws about how much a publicly-traded company needs to disclose, and I'm pretty sure that the health of its CEO isn't on the list.
On the other hand, since it is kinda important to the future of the company and the industry, I can't see any point in making it a taboo topic for the rest of us to discuss.
The principle public companies adhere to is that they should disclose anything 'material', meaning anything that, if it were widely known, would affect the stock price. Perhaps there are investors out there who think Apple would be worth $162 billion run by Gil Amelio or whoever, but I'm not one of them.
The health of the CEO definitely has impacts on the company, especially so in Apple's case. The health of Apple is directly related to Jobs, much more so than any other large company I can think of. There was an article (can't remember where) about his first bout with cancer and the struggle he had to stay on the up and up with the SEC. Basically it's his private matter up until it would be likely to affect his performance. It's kind of a grey area, but keeping things disclosed is much better for the company.
It's pretty depressing, but you'd have all sorts of insider trading problems with only a few people knowing you're sick. The people who would know (nurses, doctors, etc) would probably be fairly under the radar as far as that's concerned too.
If you are a shareholder you do get the opportunity to vote for him. I'm not familiar with the laws, just playing devil's advocate here.
CEOs come and go so one should ideally be investing in the company, unfortunately that is not the case.