Steve Jobs must be one happy camper this week. AAPL stock owners must be even happier. Apple’s stock slowly climbed higher and higher, peaking at a number that was enough to value the company as the second highest on the market at $267.5 billion. Apple’s stock was at $292.76 a share at that time, but has since slipped back down to $288.92. This again puts the company at a $263.9 billion, just below the $265.5 billion valuation of PetroChina. Exxon Mobil is still at the top of the charts.

When Steve Jobs first took his medical leave a few months ago, Apple shares dropped as the Internet went crazy with the story. However, these past couple months have been relatively quiet about it, partially due to respect for him and his families’ privacy. As Steve Jobs will be back soon, so is the news about him. Business Insider is reminding us that Apple’s stock is up 64% from when Jobs took his leave to around the $140 it was at the time that he left.

Connie Guglielmo, Rochelle Garner and Jason Gale reported for Bloomberg this morning that Apple CEO Steve Job may need to have his pancreas removed, if Robert Thomas, head of surgery at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, is correct. Thomas was the first to perform the Whipple operation—which involves removing parts of the pancreas, bile duct and small intestine, and which sometimes results in having to remove the entire pancreas. Jobs underwent a procedure similar to the Whipple operation after he was diagnosed with a rare type of pancreatic cancer in 2004. It should be noted, though, that Thomas is not Jobs’ doctor, and doesn’t know the details of his condition.

It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that when negative news of Apple CEO Steve Jobs crosses the wire, Apple stock is going to drop. That’s been the case today upon news that Jobs is taking a health leave from Apple until the end of June. Jobs will remain CEO, but has put Tim Cook in charge of day to day operations and will be “… involved in major strategic decisions …” but that hasn’t prevented Apple stock from dropping 2.71% as of 4:00 p.m. today.

Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo, apparently not at all concerned about Apple’s stock price or its shareholders, ran an article yesterday in which a “source” that has been “100% correct before” suggested the real reason Steve Jobs is not speaking at the Macworld Conference and Expo keynote, and is pulling from Macworld Expo forever and ever and ever, is because Jobs’ health has been “rapidly declining.” Later that day, Jim Goldman at CNBC donned his tights and headed down to the ring for the big Mac Web cage match.

And so it goes with Wall Street. Half an hour before Apple’s MacBook event today, Apple was trading at $109.80 (down 0.46). We’re now half an hour after the event, and AAPL is down -5.39 to 104.87. This tends to be the trend with Wall Street, though where Apple almost always drops after a keynote. more »

Shares of Apple Inc. (AAPL) fell for the third day in a row today, which may possibly reflect shareholder concerns about the shift in its iPhone strategy, although some analysts continue to think that the company will thrive. Behind the excitement of Steve Jobs’ announcement on Monday of the new iPhones 3G was news that more »