That was one kooky memo Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs sent out Monday. And it is hard to imagine anyone but him getting away with it. But when you are both a genius and a cancer survivor, many people are willing to cut you slack. Especially if you have created $80 billion or so of shareholder value. Overlooked in the whole brouhaha over Jobs’s health, however, is its most crucial fact: Steve Jobs just doesn’t really matter anymore.

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What do CEOs say to each other in private? Mean Street intercepted an (imaginary) email sent this morning by Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to Sanjay Jha, newly appointed co-CEO of Motorola.

Dear Sanjay,

Many congratulations on your new job–and welcome to our ranks. It is a rare privilege to be CEO of a desperate company.

I’ve been at it now for almost nine months at Merrill Lynch, and I’ve learned a thing or two that you might find useful.

I hate to start on a sour note, but Monday’s announcement could have been handled better. Your arrival at Motorola was trumpeted a bit too loudly.

“A stunning win for Motorola,” cheered the Wall Street analysts. And your recruitment alone added more than $2 billion to the market value of Motorola.

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If you are a believer in efficient markets, every now and then a hot tech stock comes along that pushes your conviction to its limits.

VMware was bought for $625 million by EMC in 2004, went public in 2007 and soon hit a market cap of $48 billion. It currently trades at about a quarter of that value.

Even the hottest stock can’t defy gravity indefinitely. Or can it?

Let us take Salesforce.com. The San Francisco software company has been orbiting the stratosphere ever since its IPO in 2004. Its shares went public at $11. Last month, the shares peaked at more than $75.

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