As far as Wall Street is concerned, Steve Jobs might be a technology genius but he is not so hot when it comes to share dealing. Currently Steve is looking like a god with his 10 million shares each around $250 each.

That makes him $2.5 billion worth but according to marketwatch, he could have been a whole lot richer. In March 2003 when the stock market was on the floor and the Iraq war was about to start the technology industry was devastated. Jobs thought that his share options in Apple were worthless and Apple employees were allowed to swap many of their options for a smaller number that became valuable at a lower price.

Jobs volunteered to cancel all his options in return for a far smaller number of shares, worth about $75 million at the time. It would have all made sense if Apple shares never picked up. The shares Jobs received are worth $2.5 billion at today's stratospheric prices. But if he had kept them they would have been worth $12.8 billion. In other words it cost him $10.3 billion for thinking extremely pessimistically about his chances of turning Apple around.

Jobs is the 136th richest man in the world and is worth about $5.5 billion. But if he'd kept those options, the extra wealth would have bumped him all the way up to number 32 on the Forbes list right next door to Steve Ballmer.