“Dear Steve, Thank You”: Apple Inc. (AAPL)

I know you weren’t easy to work for; lots of people have written about that. But the value you created for all your stakeholders — customers, employees, shareholders — tells me you were right. I learned, from that day forward — it’s an anecdote I’ve told many times at Fool HQ and in speeches over the years — to apply that same thinking to my investment research and selection. Because finding the people who are awesome is a far more reliable route to beating the stock market than any other that I know.

On another note, I love Dickensian names, and you certainly had one. You created a ton of jobs. In the world swirling around me in my native city of Washington, D.C. — a world that swirls without me because I’m (shall we say?) “politically uninterested” — a lot of people think that politicians and bills create jobs. I think that’s mistaken, having seen it firsthand. I mean, I guess anyone can tax people, raise money, and then use it to pay salaries … and have thus “created” jobs. But while others may credit that, I won’t. I believe that what actually creates jobs — rather than redistributes, creates — is innovation, and specifically innovation driven by a persistent ability to attract and please customers. Outcomes that truly make the world a better place. Outcomes that create new things. My friend Roy Spence once said the greatest pleasure in life is “creating something there that wasn’t there before.” Few people — although I can think of just a few people — have done this as well as you. So yes, very Dickensian: Jobs showed how to create jobs.

I want to thank you for Pixar. Not just for me and my family — though that would be enough on its own, as our family grew up with your movies — but for many Motley Fool members. Thousands of us bought Pixar stock in 2003, and those shares today — now part of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), which bought your Pixar out — are up 5 times in value when the market over the same period merely doubled. I am truly amazed to think that, beyond creating and then reinvigorating Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) into becoming one of the great big companies of all time, you could “on the side” be leading Pixar, too. Pixar! How wonderfully innovative and charming and wholesome. I never got a chance to interview you and ask how satisfying it was to become Disney’s largest shareholder. I suspect the answer was “very” — and that it wasn’t about the money, either.