June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. and its board should have disclosed to investors that Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs had a liver transplant while on medical leave, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said.

“Certainly Steve Jobs is important to Apple,” Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. said in an interview today on CNBC. “Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact.”

Jobs, who went on medical leave in January, is recovering well from a liver transplant and has an “excellent prognosis,” Dr. James Eason, chief of transplantation at the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tennessee, said yesterday in a statement. While Eason’s statement didn’t specify when he had the surgery, Jobs had the transplant about two months ago, a person familiar with the matter said.

“If I have any serious illness, or something coming up of an important nature, an operation or anything like that, I think the thing to do is just tell -- the Berkshire shareholders about it. I work for them,” said Buffett, 78. “They’re going to find out about it anyway, so I don’t see a big privacy issue or anything of the sort.”

Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, declined to comment on Buffett’s remarks.

On Jan. 5, Jobs said he was suffering from a hormone imbalance and would seek a “relatively simple” treatment while remaining CEO. Nine days later, he said his health issues were “more complex” and announced his leave through the end of June. He said he would remain involved in major strategic decisions.

Those disclosures troubled some investors and corporate governance experts, who said Apple should be more forthcoming about the status of Jobs, who has led a turnaround of Apple since he returned to the company in 1997. Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak.

Apple rose $2.21 to $136.22 today in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have gained 60 percent this year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at cguglielmo1@bloomberg.net; Joseph Galante in San Francisco at jgalante3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 24, 2009 21:42 EDT