Steve Jobs he’s not, but funny he is on the Net
At least there were no fake denials.
Daniel Lyons, a 46-year-old senior editor with Forbes magazine, came clean after the New York Times unmasked the anonymous blogger behind “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” on Sunday.
In his latest post, the author fessed up to creating the popular faux blog in a post titled, “Damn I am so busted, yo.” By the time Lyons returned to his home outside Boston that evening, his site that averages 31,000 page views a day had exceeded 476,000.
“Oh my freaking God,” Lyons said after logging on.
The blockbuster confession from the little-known author closes the chapter on a real-life whodunit that has baffled Silicon Valley for months. Guessing the true identity of the self-worshiping “Fake Steve Jobs” had become a parlor game played with iPhone-like intensity, particularly in recent months.
Here was a modern-day Mark Twain satirist skewering self-obsessed Silicon Valley elites by pretending to be one of the world’s most famous and powerful businessmen.
Everyone wanted to know who had dubbed Apple customers “iTards,” rival Bill Gates “Beastmaster,” ponytailed Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz “My Little Pony,” influential Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg “Goatberg,” and Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive and an Apple director “Squirrel Boy.”
Speculation centered on plugged-in Apple journalists like Leander Kahney of Wired News and Andy Ihnatko of Macworld, former Apple employees, even Jobs himself. In recent weeks, someone even hacked into the Fake Steve Jobs’ e-mail account, tracing his IP address to Boston. Lyons unwittingly made that easy by using Jobs’ real-life information to set up the account, one well-placed Silicon Valley source blabbed.
These futile attempts to decipher the acerbic prose of the Fake Steve Jobs only increased the readership and the influence of Silicon Valley’s latest satirical sensation.
Most amused of all was the real Fake Steve Jobs, who came up with the motto, “Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?” and lines like “suing me is like suing God” from his rented, wood-paneled office upstairs from a nail salon in a Boston-area office park.
Some of Lyons’ sources - and even his bosses and some of his colleagues from his day job as a business magazine writer - commented to Lyons how much they enjoyed the parody. Even more entertaining: Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Jobs himself both admitted to reading the blog.
Indeed, the Fake Steve Jobs had a following of mouthy Microsoft employees but not a single e-mail from anyone identifying themselves as an Apple employee, showing just what kind of power the real Steve Jobs exerts.
Not shy were the Sun Microsystems employees who told Lyons about their CEO’s nickname then anonymously supplied him with “My Little Pony” videos and pictures.
Jobs “takes himself very seriously, which makes him ripe for parody,” Lyons said of Jobs. “He’s a spiritually gifted guy, a visionary leader and a bona fide genius who has a real dark side that fuels his brilliance. He has these two sides at war inside him which makes him complicated, interesting, intriguing and also really funny.”
Lyons hit on the idea of becoming Jobs’ online alter ego after some prominent chief executives began blogging. Wouldn’t it be funny if they could blog their minds?
At first, Lyons experimented with Digg’s Kevin Rose and Google’s Sergey Brin, but could fake neither well. Fourteen months ago, Lyons started «fakesteve.blogspot.com». It soon became a Silicon Valley must-read for its mordant take on the high-tech mecca, the companies, their leaders and Jobs himself. Whenever Lyons tried to stop blogging as Fake Steve Jobs, his readers would beg him to post again.
The truth, Lyons said, is that he was the one having the most fun. Blogging as Jobs was addictive. “When I was writing, I would imagine Steve Jobs reading it and laughing,” Lyons said. At the Wall Street Journal’s “D” conference earlier this year, Jobs admitted that the blog postings were “pretty funny.”
Not laughing this weekend: Lyons’ wife, an Ivy League academic. He had just whisked her and their 2-year-old twins to Maine for a long overdue, weeklong vacation when Lyons was unexpectedly unmasked by Brad Stone, a San Francisco technology writer with the New York Times, himself expecting twins but expressing little regret for disrupting the family vacation.
Lyons, who had to leave his family behind and return to Boston to deal with the fallout, said he was surprised the secret did not come out sooner. All of his friends, many Forbes staffers, even the private-equity dealmakers at Elevation Partners, all had known for months. And a book based on the diary is due out in October from Da Capo Press, a publisher willing to risk Jobs’ wrath.
In the end, professional sleuthing unmasked the Fake Steve. Last year, Lyons’ agent, in shopping around a novel about Fake Steve, a satire that imagines Jobs coping with the real-life stock-option backdating scandal, described the author as a published novelist for a business magazine. Lyons writes and edits technology articles for Forbes and is the author of two works of fiction. The similar writing style was the giveaway for Stone.
Unlike the author of “Primary Colors,” the political roman a clef penned in 1992 by Joe Klein, then a Newsweek writer, Lyons had already come out to his bosses. Now that the secret’s officially out, «fakestevejobs.blogspot.com», will be sponsored by Forbes.com but will uphold its snarky style, Lyons said.
Will the revelation of his identity prove to be a spoiler? Lyons isn’t sure. He’s hopeful that all the high-tech CEOs, venture capitalists, open-source fanatics and others he lampooned won’t hold it against him. One blogger already pointed out that Lyons wrote a Forbes’ November 2005 cover story “Attack of the Blogs,” that, in part, took aim at “an online lynch mob” of bloggers who anonymously bash companies.
But Silicon Valley pundit Paul Saffo says the blog captures the cheeky, authority-challenging Silicon Valley spirit in all of its glory.
“What I love about this is that it’s a new kind of satire in a new medium, but it’s the same old Silicon Valley we have come to know and love over the years,” he said. “This means the soul of Silicon Valley is very much alive.”
Fake Steve Jobs already has had a profound effect on the blogosphere, spawning an online universe of fake celebrity blogs and on Monday a “Fake Brad Stone” blog proclaiming “I am the best journalist. Ever,” in an homage to the Fake Steve Jobs tone.
In an e-mail interview, the anonymous blogger posing as Stone said outing the Fake Steve Jobs puts him on a “whole new level,” on par with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and the NSA wire-tapping scandal combined.
“The problem is, some people aren’t seeing my achievement for the wonderful triumph of investigative reporting that it is. Some people have convinced themselves that revealing Fake Steve ruined the fun for everyone, that what I’ve done is like telling all the children that Santa Claus is just a fat man in a suit. That’s why I started the blog: To remind people what a huge revelation this is, and how my story quite possibly changes the world as we know it.”
The Fake Steve Jobs may not change the world. But he will undoubtedly sell some books.
The true test of the real-life Jobs’ world-changing influence will be if Lyons breaks down and shells out $600 to replace his Blackberry with an iPhone.
“I guess if I am doing the blog, I should have one,” he said.
Excerpts from “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs”
Nov. 30, 2006
You cannot believe the crap we are going through to make this Beatles licensing deal work out. … We’re having a few issues with Paul, or Sir Paul, as we have to call him. Friggin Ringo is good to go; he’d sell his toenail clippings on eBay if it would make him a buck. The real hassle of course is Yoko. … I’ve been back and forth to New York … about a thousand times already. And things are not going well. Case in point: We’re drinking green tea on the floor of her living room and she’s insisting that when we put the music up on iTunes that the band must be called “John Lennon and the Beatles” and she must be listed as a member of the group. Her big tactic is just to repeat things over and over in this monotone voice, to wear you down…
Dec. 12, 2006
You have to understand how we do things at Apple. We think different. So, por ejemplo, as they say in the Netherlands, we don’t start with the phone, or the software. We start with the ads. We’ll spend months doing storyboards, writing slogans, making fake billboards that we put up in one of our windowless warehouses. I realize this is the reverse of how most companies do it. Just about everybody else starts with the product. … Not here. At Apple, advertising is a pre-thought. And if we can’t come up with a good ad, you know what? We probably won’t do the product. It’s why we’re different.
May 11
Some 17-year-old high school kid in Okemos, Mich., has done a study that suggests iPods can interfere with your pacemaker and, I guess, cause you to have a heart attack. … Fact is we’ve known about this for quite some time. And we’re happy about it. We even cranked up the voltage on our new models. Thing is, we really don’t want old people using iPods. Ruins the image. Every time I see some elderly person wearing an iPod and power-walking at the mall I just want to scream. If we could find a way to make iPods interfere with fat people we’d do that too.
July 31
IPhone is getting way too popular. The wrong kind of people are buying them. … We figured we could keep things under control using our usual overpricing strategy. Who in their right mind was going to shell out 600 bucks for a friggin phone, right? Especially if it lacks all sorts of features that people really want. Just to be doubly sure we put it on the AT&T network and gave it an unbearably slow wireless connection so that Web browsing is practically impossible.
Wednesday
Frigtards at AT&T stores won’t sell iPhones. … They’re pissed because they don’t get as big a commission as they do on other phones. And because they have to compete with Apple stores selling iPhones too. … This is one huge reason why we stayed out of the phone business for as long as we did. I can’t stand the kind of morons who work in the typical cell phone store. It’s like they give people an IQ test and an EQ test and those who fail move on to the next round; then they sift out anyone who’s polite or helpful or doesn’t have a criminal record or a serious drug problem; whoever’s left gets the job.
Sunday
(I)f anyone can think of a cool way to use the name “Brad Stone” (all or part) as a verb, let me know.
Maybe this:
brad, v.i.:
1. To bust a fellow filthy hack without mercy and spoil the fun for everyone, in a quest for personal aggrandizement.
2. To urinate in a pool.
E-mail Jessica Guynn at jguynn@sfchronicle.com.
