Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

• 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 nonfic
tion 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.

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 Connery
esque 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 making 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.