Steve Jobs is an smoothie-sipping vegan, Zen master and creative genius — an enlightened visionary who built one of the world’s most important companies yet still meditates in the lotus position.
But the CEO of Apple Inc. is also a bratty billionaire with a God complex, an egomaniac whose vapid career is a futile attempt to prove himself worthy of his biological parents, who gave him up for adoption.
The battle between the two sides of Jobs in “oPtion$: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs” makes for a wickedly funny, first-person parody by Forbes magazine writer Daniel Lyons, author of the “Fake Steve Jobs” blog.
“oPtion$” chronicles Jobs as federal prosecutors investigate Apple’s stock option backdating scandal. Terrified of prison, Jobs confides in Larry Ellison, the surgically enhanced marijuana fiend who runs Oracle Corp. when he’s not racing yachts or having affairs with office interns.
Jobs divulges his deepest fears as the aging hippies don kimonos and get stoned at Ellison’s Buddhist palace in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. Exchanges between the two characters — friends in real life — are laugh-out-loud funny.
Ellison dismisses the SEC inquiry as a witch hunt by jealous feds:
“These are guys who spent all that money to go to law school and they can’t afford to buy a house in the Bay Area,” Ellison comforts Jobs. “Meanwhile they see all these freak engineers with Asperger’s syndrome driving Ferraris. For this they blame guys like you and me, because we’ve committed the great sin of creating jobs and generating wealth. … And you know what? I don’t blame them. Look at us. Thursday afternoon and we’re dressed like Japanese warlords and having a tea ceremony. I’d hate us too.”
The book also ribs Bono, Al Gore, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Bill Gates (who appears in Jobs’ crucifixion nightmare). Every character is a buffoon — from Windows-using “frigtards” to power-hungry megalomaniacs who short-sell their own stock.
Lyons intended to publish the book under a pseudonym, but a New York Times reporter exposed him in August as the author. The book includes a back-cover biography.
For more than a year, Lyons’ blog has been required reading among coders and cube dwellers from Boston to Bangalore. The blog — which had 1.3 million visitors in August — is politically incorrect and breezy, same as the book.
“oPtion$” skewers Silicon Valley, with touches of “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Dilbert” and “Revenge of the Nerds.” The only unfortunate criticism is that “oPtion$” — fundamentally a roast of the tech industry boys’ club — itself can feel insiderish.
One character — Misho Knedlik, CEO of Bronson Microelectronics — is a Slovak who escaped from Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, got his Ph.D. and became an American CEO. He’s now a jet-setting management guru — Jobs’ paternalistic but intimidating father figure, author of “Everyone Wants to Kill You.”
Knedlik’s character is funny, but he becomes downright hilarious when you realize he’s a proxy for the real co-founder of Intel Corp., Andy Grove, who fled the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in Berkeley, Calif. Grove, past president and CEO of the world’s largest chipmaker, wrote “Only the Paranoid Survive.”
Figuring out real-world people behind cartoonish cutouts is half the fun of “oPtion$”; you feel like the only audience member who gets the punch line of a great gag. But it also limits the audience and may make a nontechie who stumbles into “oPtion$” feel like something of a frigtard himself.
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