Biting Into Apple’s Steve Jobs

In the establishment-skewering tradition of Voltaire, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne we now have a voice for our own digital age. Naturally, he came to us first in blog form. Now he's reappeared in the fleshed-out chapters of his memoir: "oPtion$, the secret life of Fake Steve Jobs." In stores on Nov. 1, it promises to deliver the inside story of a guy who doesn't really exist.

Of course the real Steve Jobs does exist. The cofounder and CEO of Apple has achieved near-mythic status in entrepreneurial, computing and even Hollywood circles (thanks to his role in creating Pixar). The Fake Steve Jobs, it turns out, is Dan Lyons, a Forbes magazine journalist who anonymously started his hilarious parody blog in the middle of 2006. (From the blog: "Dude, I invented the friggin' iPhone. Have you heard of it?") His portrait of the über-geek as an unhinged narcissist caused a stir among the Silicon Valley types Lyons lampooned. Speculating on who its author was became a popular parlor game until the New York Times's Brad Stone (formerly of NEWSWEEK) outed Lyons in August.

Still, Fake Steve continues blogging unabated. The new book isn't perfect: some of the jokes about FSJ's various obsessions, himself included, wear thin, and the options scandal that provides the story's arc isn't consistently riveting. But great swaths of it are Mac-slappingly funny. NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker recently spoke with Lyons about the blog, the book and what he would say if he ever met the real Steve Jobs. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: You're reviewing gadgets for Forbes now. Do you get Apple stuff or have you been crossed off the list?
Dan Lyons: I never used to get Apple stuff, because I haven't been writing about gadgets for all that long. The ironic thing is that when I got outed and Forbes changed my job, I had to call Apple for the first time this summer and say, "Can I get an iPhone?" They were really cool: they sent it to me. I'm surprised.

Were you bummed to be outed before the book came out.
I was kind of bummed. The timing was bad. I was on vacation when it happened. Right before that happened, a friend who knew it was me said, "You should do it for as long as you want to do it, shut it down, go dark and never tell anyone you did it. It'll be this Internet legend." That kind of had some appeal to me. But, whatever, it's done. On the other hand it's great not to have to keep a secret. Valleywag [a Silicon Valley gossip site] was haunting me.

But they never got it right.
No. They tried three times. [Laughs]