It's Just Another Steve Jobs Rumor, but...

Well, you would forgive an Apple shareholder for taking that claim with a grain of salt. Company executives have consistently fended off queries into Jobs' health, referring to it earlier this year as it a "private matter," a phrase continually proven false by the stock's swoon whenever a rumor of Jobs' ill health comes to the surface.

And it would pay to remember Peter Elkind's piece in Fortune earlier this year that disclosed that both Jobs and Apple's board knew about his original cancer diagnosis for nine months before disclosing it to shareholders.

In any event, it prevents anyone from automatically scoffing at Gizmodo and its "solid source."

Ultimately, investors have to understand that they're never going to really know anything about Jobs' health until they absolutely have to know by the strictest letter of the law.

As long as Jobs is at the helm, the stock will carry with it some unquantifiable degree of risk related to his health -- a company/CEO tie-in perhaps only surpassed by Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway(BRKA.A Quote).

The trick, as always, is calculating that risk against the huge opportunity for future upside that could be orchestrated by the man himself.