Steve Jobs looks terrible. He has for months. After losing a reported 30 pounds last year, the Apple CEO has been the subject of constant scrutiny concerning his health, sparking media coverage that’s bordered on the morbid—including a mistaken obituary and a false report that he’d had a heart attack
The speculation reached a frenzy when Jobs announced he wouldn’t give the keynote speech at this month’s Macworld Expo. While Apple originally denied that the cancellation was due to their CEO’s poor health, they later conceded that Jobs had pulled out because he was ill. Exactly what this illness could be, however, remains the subject of mass conjecture.
In August 2004, Jobs announced he had had surgery to remove an islet cell tumor in his pancreas—a form of cancer that’s far rarer and less deadly than regular pancreatic cancer. It was later reported that he’d delayed the surgery 9 months after his diagnosis in order to pursue holistic treatments—a dangerous move that likely gave his doctors, and Apple’s board members, at least one ulcer apiece.
According to the New York Times, Jobs underwent another surgical procedure in 2008, the “details of which remain unclear.” Off the record, Jobs told Times reporter Joe Nocera that the CEO’s health problems “weren’t life-threatening, and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer.”
Still, Jobs’s current illness has reached a point where no one—not even the notoriously secretive Apple and its even more secretive CEO—can deny it.
