Fortunemagazine has named Apple chief Steve Jobs as
its 'CEO of the decade' for driving innovations such as the Mac OS
X operating system, iPod, iTunes and iPhone.
The past decade belongs to Jobs, who has become a dominant
personality in the computing, film, music and mobile phone
industries, the magazine said.
Despite a
liver transplant earlier this year, the magazine said Jobs is
back at the helm of a 34,000-strong corporate army, proving he is
as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant
and profitable as ever.
"Superlatives have attached themselves to Jobs since he was a
young man. Now that he's 54, merely listing his achievements is
sufficient explanation of why he's Fortune's CEO of the decade,"
the magazine said.
In financial terms alone Jobs has been astoundingly successful,
the magazine said. Jobs has taken Apple from a $5bn value in 2000
to being worth about $170bn today.
Jobs laid the foundations for Apple's leap from stable to
stratospheric when things looked darkest, setting in motion the key
elements of rejuvenation, the magazine said.
"
He's irreplaceable," Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle,
told the magazine.
"Whenever he leaves, I hope he retires in good health and he's
sailing off in his yacht in the Mediterranean. But they [would]
miss him terribly, because it's a consumer products company. The
product cycle is so fast," he said.