Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made the Time 100 Most Influential List again in the Builders & Titans category, hitting No. 82.

Quoting from the Time piece about Jobs by Barbara Kiviat:

Steve Jobs is great at playing the countercultural icon. He’s a college dropout who once backpacked around India looking for spiritual enlightenment, and he takes only $1 a year in salary. There are righteous battles to fight, and with Macs and iTunes and iPhones, Jobs fights them, taking on the entrenched megaliths that try to dictate our tastes in computers and music and mobile phones.

But don’t let the black mock turtleneck and denim trousers fool you. More than anything else, Jobs is a canny CEO who knows how to sell product. Steve Wozniak was the technical genius behind the first Apple computer; Jobs saw the marketability. He now presides over a company with $24 billion in annual sales and 22,000 employees. Jobs, 53, is revered by tech and design geeks, but the world’s business-school students may have the most to learn from him. Apple’s stock has shot up more than 70% over the past year, thanks to Jobs’ strategy of focusing on his most profitable customers and coming up with new things to sell them—the ultra-thin MacBook Air most recently—rather than just chasing more market share.

Jobs may be a celebrity CEO, but he doesn’t jump out of airplanes or traipse around Africa with bundles of cash. He is always in character and always on message, so much so that when late-night TV parodies him, he’s invariably rolling out some new iProduct . Jobs gets called mercurial, egomaniacal, a micromanager. If that sounds a little like a CEO doing his job, maybe that’s because he is—and a mighty fine one.”

See the Time 100 listing here.

…aaaanhhddd on Mac-A-Doodle we start a new year of Macfanboyism by paying tribute to the Man.

Steve Jobs has been named Face of Business 2007 by CNBC in a poll conducted Christmas week. CNBC Vice President for Business News Jonathan Wald said

This was a year of great business triumphs and headlines, and all of those nominated had significant impact on the world of business and, therefore, were worthy of consideration, but Steve Jobs is driving Apple to new heights, including a record stock price.”

Among the closest runners-up in a large, illustrious selection were CitiGroup CEO Chuck Prince (6.9%), the “Google Guys” (3%) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (1%).

Steve-O got 78% of the votes.

From Mac-A-Doodle, a prosperous new year to one and all! May the Lord bless us all with more Mac-ness this 2008!

Figures to ponder:

• US$200 - per-share stock value hit by Apple briefly today, an all-time high
• US$170,000,000,000 - current market value of Apple Inc.
• 3 - times Apple’s size is now compared to Dell
• 1/2 - times Apple’s size is now compared to Microsoft
• 10 - times Apple’s stock value is today compared to mid-2003 when it was just starting with iPods
• 34% - increase in sales of Macs in the most recent quarter
• 143% - percentage Apple stock has risen this year, making it one of the top performers for 2007 (in contrast, Google gained 53% in 2007)

(Via Mashable)

Full text of Steve Jobs‘ No. 1 entry by Fortune Magazine’s Brent Schlender:

Steve Jobs
Chairman and CEO, Apple

During the first two decades of his remarkable 30-year career, the Apple Inc. founder twice altered the direction of the computer industry. In 1977 the Apple II kicked off the PC era, and the graphical user interface launched by Macintosh in 1984 has been aped by every other computer since. Along the way Jobs conceived of “desktop publishing,” gave the world the laser printer, and pioneered personal computer networks. As a side gig he bankrolled Pixar, which fostered the development of the technology and a brand-new business model for creating computer-animated feature films.

Since returning to Apple in 1997, he has changed the dynamics of consumer electronics with the iPod, and persuaded the music industry, the television networks, and Hollywood to distribute their wares with the iTunes Music Store. With his hugely successful Apple Stores, he gave the big-box boys a lesson in high-margin, high-touch retailing. And this year, at the height of his creative and promotional powers, Jobs orchestrated Apple’s entry into the cellular telephone business with the iPhone.

That’s five industries that Jobs has upended - computers, Hollywood, music, retailing, and wireless phones. At this moment, no one has more influence over a broader swath of business than Jobs.”

Jobs is followed by Rupert Murdoch at #2. Other IT-related people in the list are Google founders Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin (#4 ) and Microsoft’s Bill Gates (#7 ).

Fortune’s full listing here.