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As you may all already know, a visionary was lost today. An innovator that shaped and changed the world we live in today. Steve Jobs passed this evening at a young 56 years of age. Wall Street Grand would like to dedicate this post to his passing as the world will mourn a father, a leader, and an inspirational individual that will always be remembered as the legacy of Apple. Steve Jobs made Apple the most valuable technology company in the world at $350 billion. Apple’s stock under Jobs: from $10 to $400.

Steve Jobs is known as both mercurial and visionary, part rock-star CEO and part master salesman, a meticulous micromanager who can drive his employees to distraction — and one of the most important figures in American industry in the past half-century. After pulling his own company back from the brink of bankruptcy before the decade started, he almost single-handedly went on to save the recording industry with the iPod and iTunes. He revolutionized handheld devices and touch-screen technology with the iPhone. And he may well usher in a post-PC era of computing with his latest gadget, the iPad. “The resurrection of Apple is just the most astounding story that’s probably happened in business in at least a decade — you might be able to go further and say it’s a half-century,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies, a technology-industry think tank. “It’s on par with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell in terms of its total impact.”

Jobs’s legacy stretches back several decades and includes the development of a few more groundbreaking innovations from his first go-round at Apple in the 1970s and ’80s: the Apple II, the Mac and elaborate computer graphics, to name a few. he has driven Apple to the top of the heap in technology. The company ranks No. 1 in the sector in market cap at $285 billion. That’s greater than longtime rival Microsoft Corp., whose value today stands at around $220 billion. Investors who plunked down $1,000 on Apple stock at the end of 2000 would have seen it grow to nearly $43,000 by the end of the decade.

With Jobs’s mantras of putting the customer first and of desiring nothing more than to make great products ruling the day at Apple, consumers have been as delighted as investors. For the Apple faithful, the decade was a virtual orgy of technological wonderment, marked by marvel after marvel, alongside several inventions that rewrote the books. He also oversaw a big expansion of the company, hiring tens of thousands of workers as the company’s ranks swelled to more than 46,000 from about 8,500 at the start of the decade. Revenue skyrocketed. Today, more than 320 Apple Store locations span the globe, from the first stores in suburban Virginia and Southern California to Milan and Ginza.

During the first decade of the new millennium, Jobs and Apple managed to thrive even when the rest of the country didn’t. Apple’s shares blossomed, pausing only when Jobs’s health was in doubt. While the stock trades at roughly 43 times its level of a decade ago, the S&P 500 has lost about 7%. Sales are up twelvefold from the end of 2000, surging from $5.4 billion for fiscal 2001 to $65.2 billion for fiscal 2010, which ended in September. Cumulatively, Apple has racked up more than $229 billion in total sales during the decade.

Along the way, Jobs also ran another hugely successful company for much of the decade, Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar has had an uninterrupted string of blockbuster hits since its first release, “Toy Story,” in 1995, followed by such instant classics as “Monsters Inc.,” “Finding Nemo” and “Up.” Jobs sold Pixar to the Walt Disney Co. In 2006 and as a result became the entertainment giant’s largest shareholder and joined the Disney board.

Those successes come at a price. To many observers, Jobs wrote the book on micromanaging, and that’s not meant as a compliment. There have been numerous stories over the years of his roaming the Apple compound in Cupertino, Calif., uprooting workers and aborting careers. In technology circles, Jobs’s mood swings are the stuff of legend and, in fact, led to his initial ouster from the company in 1985, according to Endpoint’s Kay. “When he’s in his Mr. Hyde role, he’s just insane,” Kay says. “Dr. Jekyll is the guy who’s making it all happen.” Adds Enderle: “He is not somebody [who] any one of us would want watching our kids, but, in terms of running the company, he’s excellent.” Jobs jealously guards both Apple’s secrets and his own privacy, remaining largely inaccessible, and he demands the same of the vastly expanded Apple corps.

Steve Jobs Tribute Video