The Apple CEO, Steve Jobs issued a statement Monday assuring all those concerned that he's alive and fairly well. His recent weight loss, he wrote, is due to a hormonal imbalance. “I'm not dead” was his message.

Jobs, 53, said in his public letter that his being so thin had been a mystery to everyone, including his doctors until a few weeks ago, when "sophisticated blood tests" confirmed that he has "a hormone imbalance that has been `robbing' me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy."
However most talk centered around the possibility that he again had cancer. In August 2004, Jobs announced he had had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his pancreas, an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. The cancer is easily cured if diagnosed early. Jobs did not have a deadlier and more common form of pancreatic cancer, called adenocarcinoma.

Rumors about Jobs' declining health resurfaced last month when it was announced that he would not be giving the keynote address at the 2009 Macworld conference. In mid-December, Apple announced Jobs would forgo his keynote speech at Macworld and that the company would not participate in future Macworld events, renewing rumors and speculation that the high-profile CEO was gravely ill. Apple's stock fell from $95.43 a share to $89.16 a share following that announcement. And over the two-week period, the computer maker's shares dipped as low as $84.55 a share.

Moreover after Jobs' June appearance, Apple officials pegged his weight loss to a "common bug" he had contracted. Some analysts found that explanation hard to believe and made repeated calls on Apple to come clean about the health of its CEO.

But Apple had officially remained mum about Jobs' health since June. Nevertheless the CEO talked off the record with Joe Nocera, a reporter at The New York Times. Nocera reported only that Jobs' health problems "weren't life-threatening, and he doesn't have a recurrence of cancer."
Apple's board of directors released an accompanying statement today, saying, among other things, that: “if there ever comes a day when Steve wants to retire or for other reasons cannot continue to fulfill his duties as Apple's CEO, you will know it.”

In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, created one of the first commercially successful personal computers. But after losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. NeXT's subsequent 1997 buyout by Apple Computer Inc. brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he has served as its CEO since then. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He remained CEO and majority shareholder until its acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006. Jobs is currently the Walt Disney Company's largest individual shareholder and a member of its Board of Directors. Jobs also has three children with his wife, Laurene Powell, and one from a previous relationship.