On the Apple website, the biography runs to little more than 150 words. That's all investors are told about Steve Jobs - the messianic co-founder of the company that has changed the way we live.
As compact as an iPod nano, the account ends by telling us that "Steve grew up in the apricot orchards which later became known as Silicon Valley, and still lives there with his family."
It is a fittingly minimalist appraisal from a company renowned for its sleek product design. But who, you wonder, is Apple trying to kid?
On Monday came official confirmation of the rumours already bouncing around cyberspace. Apple's creator, rescuer and heartbeat was ill once again.
Jobs, 55, would be taking sick leave for a third time, having survived pancreatic cancer in 2004 and a liver transplant in 2009.
This time, though, his email to staff sounded ominous. Analysts seized on the fact that, whereas on the previous occasion Jobs had set a date for his return, the best he could now muster was: "I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can."
Henry Blodget, the former analyst turned blogger, could not escape a "bad feeling". Jobs's words, he reasoned, "read like the tragic, heartfelt sentiments of someone who thinks he might never be coming back".
Suddenly, the company that demanded we "think different" was inviting us to think the unthinkable.
With the New York market closed because of Martin Luther King Day, investors' attention turned to Frankfurt.
Apple shares promptly dived by 8 per cent. When Wall Street opened yesterday, they fell 5 per cent.
Could Apple flourish without Jobs? History might suggest not. Never before have such a major company's fortunes been so entwined with one man.
Born in San Francisco to Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian student, and Joanne Carole Schieble, the Apple boss was adopted and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs.
No archetypal geek, Jobs nevertheless found himself drawn to extra-curricular lectures after high school at Hewlett-Packard.
He took a summer job with the computer company and met Steve Wozniak, five years his senior, with whom he founded Apple in 1976.
His route to setting up the firm is not exactly typical. After a term at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Jobs dropped out - but sneaked back to attend calligraphy classes.
Without them, he was later to claim, he would never have found the right typefaces for Macintosh computers. He then disappeared to India, found Buddhism (he's still a vegetarian) and experimented with LSD.
In one of his regular run-ins with the Microsoft founder, Jobs once remarked: "Bill Gates would be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
Eight years after Apple was set up, the Mac home computer was born. But, just a year later, in 1985, Jobs was ousted in a boardroom coup.
His removal set the scene for what has proved - for both consumers and Wall Street - the most dramatic second coming.
In his 11 years away from Apple, Jobs bought the company that became Pixar, later working with Disney on films such as Toy Story and Monsters Inc. He also formed a new technology company, NeXT.
Apple, which by then had turned sour, bought it in 1996. Back came Jobs, in the role of interim chief executive - a title he later referred to as "iCeo" - before taking the top job a year later.
His return produced a barbed welcome from Gates. "What I can't figure out is why he is even trying," said the Microsoft boss. "He knows he can't win."
But he has - even if Gates is personally worth close to 10 times the $6 billion fortune of Jobs. Last May, Apple overtook Microsoft by market value.
Today it is one of the world's biggest companies, worth $310 billion to Microsoft's $245 billion.
"He came back in 1997 and saved the company," says Lorna Tilbian, an analyst at stockbroker Numis Securities.
"And from then on, he has launched the most innovative consumer products of our lifetime - the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad."
Few would deny that, whatever the team around him, Apple's success remains rooted in Jobs's gift for innovation, attention to detail, charisma and showmanship - not to mention a businessman's bloody-mindedness.
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them," he once said. "By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
The trick was to give customers products they didn't realise they wanted, packaged in a way that went way beyond functionality. So the iPhone is "revolutionary and magical" and Apple computers "make the world a better place". For Jobs, both are everything that Microsoft is not.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste," Jobs once said. "And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."
Achieving that, according to Jobs, comes from "saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track" - a rigour that underpins Apple's cult status among consumers but can also make Jobs a nightmare to work for.
Staff speak of his "infectious" enthusiasm, his proselytising with a preacher's zeal - but he is also famously irascible.
Chelsea Isaacs, a Long Island student, discovered that last year when she complained that she could not get information from Apple for a research paper and emailed the boss. "Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry," was Jobs's curt reply.
When Jobs got wind of an unauthorised biography, iCon, describing what it was like to work for Apple, his response was to ban all books published by John Wiley & Sons from Apple stores.
Perhaps it was the pre-publicity, describing "the aura of fear Steve carried with him like a dark cloud", and the line: "You didn't want to be called in front of him to do a product presentation because he might decide to lop off the product, and you with it."
That, perhaps, is what comes of working for a perfectionist. Or as Larry Ellison, the Oracle computing boss, puts it: "The difference between me and Steve Jobs is that I'm willing to live with the best the world can provide. With Steve, that's not always good enough."
But that does not mean Apple is a one-man show. His departure on sick leave will once again give his number two, Tim Cook, the chance to prove himself a worthy successor.
Cook, who has a hawk's eye for operational detail, presided over a 60 per cent share price rise last time Jobs was off. For that, few investors begrudged him his $59 million pay packet for 2010 - despite his joking that he was the world's highest paid temp.
Rita Clifton, the boss of branding consultancy Interbrand, believes Apple can prosper after Jobs, just as Gucci has after the departure of designer Tom Ford.
"Tom was a control freak, just as Steve Jobs is a control freak," she says."But Gucci has been fine. The departure of the person sitting at the top of the company and most closely associated with it creates risk.
"But leadership is not only about the person, it's also about values, such as restlessness, innovation, relevance."
Tilbian says: "One test of leadership is imbuing that culture to the people around you. Of course, Apple would miss him as its chief innovator and for his showmanship at product launches.
"But we'll only really know whether the company is bigger than him if they can come up with another killer product without him."
Whoever does that might expect more than a 150-word biog on the company website.
