Unhealthy Fixation on Jobs's Illness

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Next February, when Steven P. Jobs -- knock on wood -- does his big reveal at Macworld, the geegaw people will most want to see probably won't be on display.

He will not reveal his pancreas so that the horde can examine it for signs of recurring cancer. There won't be a JumboTron image of his recently transplanted liver so that they might turn it over with a stick as they look for signs of rejection. And despite the fever for all things Mac, there won't be an iPhone app that tracks Mr. Jobs's health in real time, including blood sugar, blood pressure and white blood cell count.

Silly? Sure, but not that long a walk from the media clamor that confronted his return to work last week.

For those of you keeping score -- I'm sure there is an over/under out there somewhere -- Mr. Jobs, the chief executive and the only thing more fetishized than the iPhone at Apple, announced in January that he was taking a six-month leave, saying his "health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought." In news that first broke in The Wall Street Journal, it was learned that Mr. Jobs had a liver transplant in April, an indication to many that his pancreatic cancer, diagnosed in 2004, had spread.

But last week, Mr. Jobs returned to work on a part-time basis, precisely when he said he would. Experts with only a general knowledge of his treatment suggest his prognosis is good.

That did not stop the keening on the blogs, in the news media and in the investment community that he and Apple needed to do a medical full monty to explain his conditions because they believe they are material to the company's future and should be reported as such.

To which I, and not many others, say: Is anyone really confused about Mr. Jobs's health status? I remain unconvinced, in part because I believe that prurience, not legitimate financial concerns, drives most people's interest in the illness of others.

Health is the most private of all matters for very good reason, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has never disciplined a company for a failure to disclose health problems. In part, we all buy, sell and trade on someone's health without knowing their fates. Sergey Brin or Larry Page, Google's founders, may be fit as fiddles, but they could get run over tomorrow by a Prius in Palo Alto (a Prius would still hurt, right?).

As anyone who has had cancer would tell you (I had my turn some years ago), the prognosis is always unknowable. You are fine until you are not. Given the effectiveness of treatments and constant innovations, the more than 10 million Americans living with cancer manage it as a chronic illness. Mr. Jobs is one of them.

In the time he was on leave, the company had a net second-quarter profit of $1.21 billion, its best second quarter ever; the stock went from below $90 a share to over $140; the longtime chief operations officer Timothy D. Cook had a temporary and well-reviewed turn at the company's helm; and the iPhone 3GS went on sale and looks to be another hit for the company.

Yes, the stock ticked up a bit when Mr. Jobs came back (it also moved on news of his liver transplant), but his condition seems to have already been priced in.

Nor do insiders have a distinct advantage. Most of the people who work at Apple have no idea "how Steve is doing." If they asked company leaders, they would probably be told to go back to building the next game-changing device and mind their own business.

Not caring about Mr. Jobs's health puts me in a lonely minority. Joe Nocera, my fellow business columnist, and a guy who has covered chief executives his entire professional life, has consistently written that we deserve to know. And then last week on CNBC, Warren E. Buffett said that his own recent medical procedure "is a material fact."

Allan D. Mutter, who is both a journalist and a venture capitalist, wrote me an e-mail message saying disclosure is especially important when "a prominent and powerful chief executive is all but impossible to divorce from the essence of the brand."

Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University and a writer on technology, said that although "we don't want medical paparazzi Dumpster-diving behind the Mayo Clinic," a failure to reveal a diminished executive might "constitute a kind of fraud." David D. Perlmutter, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, said flatly, "Stockholders have a right to know about anything that affects your ability to conduct your duties."

Like any good columnist, I made phone calls until I found someone -- anyone -- to agree with me and came up with Paul Saffo, the esteemed technologist from Silicon Valley.

"Everybody knows that Steve has a grave illness and that he has devoted the same compulsive energy to making sure that the company runs well in his absence that he puts toward everything else there," Mr. Saffo said. "If somebody sued because they were saying that they didn't know about his health, they would not have a leg to stand on. This is sleazy entertainment, a sideshow."

Sideshows are what the modern media does best. Mr. Jobs is a celebrity, one who has a very high-touch relationship with consumers. He sits at their fingertips, in their ears, connects them with friends. Bill Gates might have changed the world more profoundly than Mr. Jobs, but people who didn't know him personally didn't call him Bill. People are always talking about "Steve" this and "Steve" that.

Because he seems to know us so well, or at least our needs, we like to think we know him back, even though nothing could be further from the truth. He is as inscrutable as Buddha and reportedly no barrel of monkeys to be around.

His status as a celebrity in the current moment is relevant to the clamor for full disclosure. The same sense of entitlement that leads many to think that it is right and proper to suck the marrow from Michael Jackson's bones pertains to the living, as well. There is an expectation that if you are both famous and sick, you will open up a vein and let the blood flow toward everyone. Farrah Fawcett invited everyone into her sickroom as she died of anal cancer and received the faux adoration of millions in return.

But Steve Jobs doesn't want your love. He wants you to buy his stuff.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com
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