Directors already deal in tons of this type of information on a much more mundane level, e.g., quarterly earnings projections before the public announcement. Missing an estimate these days can take a 15% haircut off your stock price and that happens a hundred times more often than a CxO gets a serious illness. In that case, directors are obligated not to disclose that information, but to not trade on it to their private advantage. I don’t see how Jobs’ medical condition is crucially different.

I love this country!

In order for this to reach a standard where it would have to be disclosed, Job’s cancer would have to have a material impact on Apple’s financial position (note: NOT the same thing as its stock price). Which means there would have to 1.)be a financial cost 2.)that you could reasonably estimate 3.)that was material to the overall financial position of Apple. Seems unlikely for a manufacturer, no matter how important that person is. Well, I say that – I can actually envision such a thing being material to, say, the Miley Cyrus empire or Mary Kate & Ashley’s clothing line, where someone’s face is actually required to sell the merchandise being produced.

Jobs felt his health was important enough to let the directors and others at the company know. That, I think, forfeits whatever privacy right he may have had. After he told them, they had insider information that there was a higher than random chance of his having to step down for health reasons. As the post notes, they could continue trading in possession of that knowledge, not shared by the rest of the market. That’s not proper.

Real privacy, fine. If Jobs wants to keep his illness from the Board and others at the business, that’s fine, he shouldn’t have to disclose it to anybody. But if he thinks it is necessary to tell the Board, it should also be necessary to tell the owners of the company, the stockholders.

That might be a good thing to establish by legislation or contract but I think that as a matter of standing law, I think the right of privacy trumps everything else.

If not, how far down the totem pole does the loss of medical privacy go? In many high technology companies, the most critical employees are a small number of technical types. Should their medical histories be public knowledge as well? With medical cost being a major outlay, perhaps investors could claim the right to examine the medical histories of all employees in order to determine medical insurance cost.

We need to be careful about jumping to implied law. We should assume that everyone has a right to privacy and then explicitly legislate breaches in that privacy as needed.

Nice. Wait until your privacy is up for grabs.

Look, if you don’t like living in a country where the individual and his-or-her rights are really, really important, by all means move to Sweden or some other Socialist fantasy land. Really. Get out now.

It’s just that simple, isn’t it?

I’d disagree. The health of any other employee has financial consequences for a company too, and yet personal privacy trumps those concerns. Just because the employee is at the top of the power structure ought not change that. You shouldn’t have different laws for different classes of people.

Investors should assume that any CEO can drop dead, or be incapacitated, at any time. Unless the CEO has made any claims to immortality, the real question should be about what plans are in place if something happens to the CEO.