Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs Read online

  * * *

  Cover

  Copyright

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: Trouble in Jobs Land

  Part Two: Dark Night of the Steve

  Part Three: Enlightenment

  Epilogue

  praise for oPtion$

  “You get the feeling Lyons planted a spycam in one of Mr. Jobs’s mock turtles.” —New York Times

  “Politically incorrect and breezy. . . . Options skewers Silicon Valley, with touches of Bonfire of the Vanities, Dilbert, and Revenge of the Nerds.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A romp.” —Los Angeles Times

  “A funny send-up of Apple's CEO, the go-go culture of Silicon Valley, and the cult of Mac, iPhone, and iPod.”

  —Boston Globe

  “In the establishment-skewering tradition of Voltaire, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne. . . . Mac-slappingly funny. . . . The book is hilarious.” —Newsweek.com

  “Peppered with deft comic touches. . . . Even the real Steve Jobs might want to pick it up for a quick, self-enlightening way to pass some time on the Jobs Jet.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “A gleeful send-up of the real Steve Jobs set amid the recent stock options backdating scandal. . . . Tech industry watchers who know (or know of) the players will get a kick out of seeing them skewered.” —Publishers Weekly “Takes to a new level Lyons’s depth of understanding of all things Steve Jobs, and stretches his Steve Jobs ‘voice’ to a place the blog could never go. . . . You'll chuckle and snort and you'll laugh at the over-the-top whimsy that IS Steve Jobs.”

  —CNBC.com’s “TechCheck” blog

  “From between the plot lines of Options bubbles a raw, honest look at Silicon Valley culture. . . . Fake Steve's ruthless inner monologues about those around him ring truer than most nonfiction profiles of tech's movers and shakers. By inserting himself into Steve Jobs’s mythical oversize shoes, Mr. Lyons has exposed the entertaining humanity behind the machines.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  oPtion$

  the secret life of steve jobs a parody by fake steve jobs

  DA CAPO PRESS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  To L. S., P. B. and M. B. Much love. Namaste. Peace out.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo Press was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters.

  Copyright © 2007 by FSJ Media LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  Designed by Jill Shaffer Set in 11 point Sabon by Eclipse Publishing Services

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2007 First Da Capo Press paperback edition 2008 ISBN-10 0-306-81741-1 ISBN-13 978-0-306-81741-0

  Published by Da Capo Press A Member of the Perseus Books Group www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9—10 09 08

  While some of this book is based on real events and people, much of the book, including the dialogue, thoughts, and attitudes attributed to characters, is purely fictional and invented by the author to enhance its parody value.

  contents

  Prologue 1

  Part One 5

  Trouble in Jobs Land

  Part Two 93

  Dark Night of the Steve

  Part Three 195

  Enlightenment

  Epilogue 245

  sometimes I feel like a great chef

  sometimes i feel like a great chef who has devoted his entire life to monastic study of the art of cooking & gathered the finest ingredients & built the most advanced kitchen & prepared the most exquisite meal so perfect, so delicious, so extraordinary more astounding than any meal ever created yet each day i stand in my window & watch ninety-seven percent of the world walk past my restaurant into the mcdonald’s across the street.

  — fsj

  prologue

  Your average frigtard probably figures I’ve got it pretty sweet. I’m one of the richest people in the world, and I’m hailed everywhere as the most brilliant businessman of all time. I’m lean and handsome, with close-trimmed hair and a Sean Conneryesque salt and pepper beard. And I’m famous. Like People magazine famous. Like everywhere I go people recognize me, and they get all weird around me, and you know what? I love it. I never get tired of it. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s retards like Britney Spears who say they wish they weren’t famous. Come on. If you really feel that way, then give away all your money, turn your wigger spawn over to Child Protective Services—which, let’s face it, is where they ought to be anyway— and move your cottage cheesy ass to a hut in Tibet. What’s that? Yeah. That’s what I thought. So shut up.

  What’s even cooler is that I’m not famous for being some steroid-taking action movie star or illiterate dick-grabbing rapper or moronic freak-of-nature basketball player. I’m famous for being a genius, and for running the coolest consumer electronics company in the world, which I totally started in my garage, by myself, or actually with this other guy but he’s out of the picture now, so who cares. I’m famous because the devices I create are works of art, machines so elegantly crafted and industrially designed that they belong in a museum. My iMac computers and iLife software restore a sense of childlike wonder to people’s lives, and bestow upon their owners a sense that they are more intelligent and even, well, better than other people. I also invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?

  People ask me all the time what motivates me. It’s not the money. There’s already way too much money, so much that I can’t even remember how much there is. I never really cared about money anyway. I could wipe my butt with hundred dollar bills, that’s how little I care about money. I actually did that once.

  To recap: I’m a handsome, famous, spiritually gifted genius; and I wipe my ass with money. No wonder people are jealous of me. I understand. I’d be jealous of me, too. Yet what most people don’t realize is that in many ways the life of El Jobso is not always so fantastic. I travel too much. I work too much. I sleep too little. I rarely take a day off. I’ll be honest; it’s a hard life. It’s like Bono always says when we’re hanging out, People think being a rock star is just nothing but sex and drugs and having fun, but it’s a grind, man, it really is.

  But the really tough thing about being super brilliant and successful is that people get jealous, and they try to knock you down a peg. In my case the top-seeded jealous frigtard I’ve ever encountered was a United States Attorney named Francis X. Doyle, a big sweaty blockhead who one day decided that he wanted to run for governor of California and who figured that the best way to launch his career would be to prosecute a high-profile celebrity CEO. Why not, right? Eliot Spitzer worked this same scam, bringing charges against dudes on Wall Street, and now he’s governor of New York.

  So Doyle and his tiny sidekick, a young lawyer named William Poon (I swear I am not maki
ng this up), decided to take down El Jobso. They sat up there in their ugly office in San Francisco, pecking away at their Windows laptops, plotting and scheming, making phone calls to the SEC and leaking information to the press. Fatman and Robin, we used to call them. Or Inspector Clouseau and Kato.

  I wasn’t their only target. These idiots went after dozens of companies in Silicon Valley. They concocted a fairy tale about greedy executives lining their pockets and cheating investors, and of course the nitwits in the press bought the whole story and ran with it, because let me tell you something, if there’s any group of people in the world who are suckers for a story about evil rich people, it’s the filthy hacks in the media. These spiteful, hateful, small-dicked losers spend their entire lives in a constant state of jealousy and resentment. Here’s their job description: Interview people who are richer, more successful, and more interesting than you are, then take cheap shots at them in print. They’re parasites. They’re leeches. To overcome the shame of what they do, these conniving bastards convince themselves that they’re saving the world by exposing all those rich, successful, interesting people as phonies. Which is ridiculous. But whatever.

  No doubt you’ve heard what happened to me. You’ve read the stories about the big scandal at Apple. The fact is, you’ve heard only one side. You’ve heard a distorted tale based on leaks and lies, fabrications and falsehoods created by prosecutors, government flunkies, and media hacks. Now it is my turn. And believe me, my lies and fabrications and falsehoods are way more convincing than theirs.

  PART ONE

  Trouble in Jobs Land

  It is Tuesday afternoon. I am barefoot, sitting on a cushion in the lotus position, gazing at a circuit board. This board, no bigger than a playing card, has taken years to create. It is the heart of the iPhone, the most important object my engineers have ever assembled. And it is wrong. I do not know why, exactly. But it is wrong. By this I do not mean that the board does not function correctly. It functions perfectly. But it lacks beauty. My engineers argue that a circuit board need not be beautiful, since no one will ever see it.

  “Yes,” I say, “but I will know it is there. And I will know that it is not beautiful.”

  So I have come to the Tassajara meditation room. The room is windowless, white, perfectly silent. I focus on my breathing. I gaze at the circuit board. I allow my mind to empty itself of distraction. Slowly, like a blind man moving along a hallway, I make my way toward the still center, toward nothingness.

  I’m almost there when someone knocks at the door. At first I can’t believe it. I ignore them. They knock again, and this time they open the door. I turn. It’s Paul Doezen and Sonya Bourne, looking grim.

  “I’m sorry,” Sonya says.

  Sonya runs our legal department. She’s bony and beak-nosed, high-strung and always freaked out about something.

  She’s also well aware of our company policy regarding which people can speak to me and under what circumstances. We have ten tiers of access, arranged by rank—the highest people can speak to me by appointment, the mid-tiers can speak to me when I’ve spoken to them first, and the lowest can never speak to me, and in fact can be fired for trying to speak to me or even for speaking to other people in my presence. Those executives who are allowed to speak to me can do so only during certain time periods, which are arranged into a kind of matrix (certain people have access to more time periods than others) which is available to all of them on iCal under my public folder. It’s right there; just sign in, click on my folder, and boom, you can see whether you’re allowed to speak to me at the present time, and if not, you can see when your next available window will be. Right now I’m in total black-out mode. No one at Apple is ever allowed to interrupt me when I’m meditating, or doing yoga or tai chi, or getting my weekly high colonic. And when I say never, I mean never. Like, if there’s an earthquake, or a fire, leave the building and I’ll figure it out for myself, once my butt is fully flushed or whatever. But don’t even think about taking out that hose before I’m done. Because I’m a total health nut. I’m totally serious about this.

  Yet here they are. Breaking the rules.

  “It’s an emergency,” Paul says. He’s our chief financial officer, a big fat guy who just joined the company last year. I usually don’t hire fat people, just on principle. But he came highly recommended.

  “Is the building on fire?”

  “No.”

  “Are we having an earthquake?”

  “No.” He shakes his head.

  “Are there some Goth kids in the lobby with automatic weapons?”

  “Huh?”

  I hold up my hand. I sigh, dramatically. I close my eyes. It’s too late. I’ve lost my focus. I press my hands together in front of me, and rest my chin on my fingertips—a gesture meant to indicate that I am thinking, even though actually I’m not. At last I get up from the floor and we go down the hall to my office.

  “Speak,” I say.

  Sonya does the talking. I can see her mouth moving, but I’m still so furious about being interrupted that I can’t understand a word she says. All I hear is blah, blah, mwah, mwah. But gradually through the din I begin to apprehend that somehow, somewhere, something bad has happened. She’s rambling on about stock options and stock prices and government regulators and how all these companies are getting letters raising questions about their accounting. Or something like that.

  “That’s it?” I say.

  “It’s important,” she says.

  “You know,” I say, “I’m sure this is all very exciting in your weird little world of numbers and laws and big giant textbooks, but I was meditating, do you get it? If you’ve got some work that needs to be done involving numbers and laws and nasty little people who deal with such things, then go deal with those nasty little people and leave me out of it. That’s why I have you here, right? That’s your job. My job is to make beautiful objects. I cannot do that if I’m disrupted by negative people.”

  Paul opens his enormous maw and starts to say something and I’m like, “Paul, have you heard of the iPod? You have? Good. Now tell me. Do you want more such beautiful things in your life? Do you want your children to grow up in a world of beautiful objects that do marvelous things? Then leave me alone.”

  Sonya jumps in and starts explaining how, apparently, sometime way back in the past before iPods were even invented, Apple gave me ten million options, but I never sold them or I never made any money on them or I traded them in for some stock or something. At least I think this is what she tells me. I really don’t think about things like options or how much money I have. I’m all about the creativity.

  “Sonya,” I say, “whatever it is, just do whatever, pay a fine or whatever, but I don’t want to spend a minute on this. I didn’t want to hear about it.”

  Yet when I open my eyes she’s still there. I’m stunned. She says she doesn’t think I understand. People are talking about criminal charges. She says the way we gave out options was we dated them so they were granted on days when the stock price was low, so that whoever got the options made an instant profit. Apparently at one time this was considered okay, or maybe not, but in the old days nobody cared, but then some idiots in Washington changed the laws because of Enron and now they’re going around busting people.

  “Steve,” she says, “this is serious. The SEC is sending lawyers here and they’re going to go through our books. The U.S. Attorney has contacted us too. Some of these backdated options went to you. Do you understand?”

  “No, I do not understand, and look, I’m not stupid. Just because I didn’t finish college doesn’t mean you have to speak to me like I’m a child. I could understand this if I wanted to. I just don’t want to. So just take it out of my bank account or whatever. Jesus. Do I have to do everything for you guys?”

  “Well, paying a fine would be one scenario.”

  She looks at me.

  I’m like, “Dude, what? Spit it out.”

  “Well,” she goes, “some people a
re facing criminal trials. Some people might be going to . . . well, in some cases, certain charge may carry potential penalties that could include fines or even, possibly, in some scenarios, the possibility of incarceration.”

  That’s a strange word, incarceration, and after she says it a weird silence comes over the room. Suddenly the air feels really, really cold, and it’s so quiet that I can hear the air conditioning whirring in the walls, and I’m thinking to myself, Holy friggin mother of Jesus, I am so going to kill the a-holes who did the HVAC work in this place. Because I specifically told them I want this place silent. Not quiet. Silent. Like a friggin tomb, I told them. Yet there’s this whirring in the walls as if we’re up in a jet at thirty thousand feet. How am I supposed to concentrate? This is how I’m supposed to work? I can’t even hear myself think.

  Paul stands there, sweat beading on his monstrous forehead, his chest still heaving from the exertion of walking down the hall ten minutes ago, or maybe from the extremely hard work of having to stand up instead of sitting down. He won’t even look at me; instead he’s taking a great interest in the carpet, which, to be fair, is an exquisitely soft carpet that was hand-woven, hand-tufted and hand-dyed by master Tibetan craftspeople who are living in exile in Nepal. It’s based on one of my designs.

  Then it dawns on me, and I’m like, “Wait a minute! You ass-holes! Oh, God, I friggin hate you guys! I’m being punked, right? Where are the cameras? Where’s Ashton? Dude, get out here! I friggin hate you, you a-hole! Oh man, you guys are soooo gonna get nailed for this one, I’m not even kidding, I’m gonna call Larry Ellison and we are totally going to cook something up, you better watch your friggin backs!”

  But they just stand there giving me this pitiful look. They look the way people do when they’re about to have their dog put to sleep, or when they’ve been to visit someone in this hospital who’s terminally ill and they don’t really want to be in the hospital looking at all the freaky machines and smelling that skanky stale hospital smell and it takes all their strength just to stand there and smile and make small talk, and then at last they’ve fulfilled their obligation and it’s over and they can rush outside and breathe fresh air again and feel the sunshine on their faces, thinking, Man oh man, there but for the grace of God go I, right?