Ah, to live the live as CEO of a mutli-billion dollar corporation. It must be full of trips on your private jet sipping smoothies, cruising San Francisco with infamous rock stars, and bossing around your employees and keeping them on task, because you are on a mission.
For Steve Jobs, that mission is messianic: he was put here on this planet to save us all from our terrible "stink of Windows laptops" and create beautiful objects that "restore a sense of childlike wonder to people's lives." If you dare doubt his artistic infallibility, he will put you in your place, saying "dude, I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?"
Of course, this isn't the real Steve Jobs. Although there is plenty of evidence supporting the real Jobs' egomaniacal side (ever seen The Pirates of Silicon Valley?), Fake Steve Jobs personifies the worst aspects of the Silicon Valley CEO: self-absorbed, unreliable, and corrupted by money.
The real Fake Steve Jobs (or something?) is actually Daniel Lyons, a Forbes Magazine reporter who started a blog last year (fakesteve.blogspot.com) that parodied a "day in the life" of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The blog took on an impressionistic vision of what it's like to head the company that invented the friggin iPod and renewed our childlike wonder for beautiful computers. In terms of the satirical value of the Fake Steve Jobs blog, Lyons has delivered the tech equivalent of Steven Colbert's The Colbert Report, and the book version is just as good.
Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs is written like a memoir and follows Steve Jobs during Apple's stock options scandal last year, which left questions about the integrity of Jobs' role in Apple's stock. But this book isn't really about the ins and outs of SEC regulation and stock market law; instead, Options follows Steve Jobs' complete ignorance of the situation and the effects it has on the company. In one particularly funny scene, Jobs is being grilled by those investigating his company, and he explains that it's obviously not his fault because he is "mathlexic," which is "like being dislexic, only with numbers." Jobs believes that this is a perfectly logical explanation.
In fact, Lyons has created the perfect evil genius in Fake Steve Jobs. He is a man well-versed in some pop culture version of Zen Buddhism, and he truly believes he can control people's minds. He is also a man so self-absorbed that no one is allowed to talk to him (except during a scheduled time published on his iCal account) lest they risk being fired.
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