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Fake Steve Jobs outed
Forbes editor admits he's behind satirical blog

By Reuters

Published: Monday 06 August 2007

A blogger calling himself 'Fake Steve Jobs', whose parody of the Apple chief executive amused and enthralled Silicon Valley, revealed himself on Sunday as an editor of Forbes magazine.

Dan Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes, admitted to writing as Fake Steve after a New York Times reporter found resemblances between the blog and Lyons' published work and asked him whether he was behind the long-running satire.

Lyons told the Times he had started the blog last year to poke fun at the lack of candidness he saw in the growing number of CEO blogs that were attracting media attention.

Forbes.com confirmed the Times' account and posted an audio interview with Lyons, who lives near Boston and who had managed to evade media sleuths for more than a year.

Lyons said: "I was hoping to stay anonymous for a while longer but on the other hand I knew I couldn't stay anonymous forever. It had to happen at some point. I hope that it doesn't ruin the fun of the blog that people know who's behind it."

The blog, fakesteve.blogspot.com, has gained a loyal readership for its frequent posts wrapping puerile put-downs and celebrity name-dropping around sharp analysis of business and technology trends.

Fake Steve, also known as 'FSJ' or 'El Jobso', blasts Linux fans as "freetards" and skewers leading journalists as "filthy hacks" before signing off with the Indian salutation 'namaste'.

Lyons used his adopted persona to poke fun at Real Steve Jobs' reputation for being a highly demanding, even arrogant, manager, offering gems such as this one: "The MBAs say you should set high standards, let people know what's expected of them and hold them to that. I do a little twist on that and say, hold people to an impossibly high standard, but here's the twist - don't tell them what that standard is. And fire them if they fall short."

The blog has even spawned an upcoming book by Fake Steve, a satirical novel called Options, due out in November.

The blog will move to Forbes' website from Monday while Lyons takes a break for a few days. But he did have a parting, presumably joking, shot for the reporter who brought an end to his anonymity.

He wrote: "You did the sleuthing. You put the pieces of the puzzle together. You went through my trash, hacked into my computer, and put listening devices in my home. Now you've ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder."