Friday, December 21, 2007

Shareholder suits: These whingeing bastards won’t go away

My goodness. These idiots already got spanked once but now they’re back again with an amended complaint saying I’m a bad guy and did something funky with options and they all want some of our money waaaaa …

Money quote: “The suit also takes issue with an Apple special committee finding that only two former company executives engaged in backdating options. The special committee exonerated Jobs, saying he was not aware of stock options accounting rules and had not personally profited from the backdated shares. The lawsuit, however, alleges that Jobs was allowed to exchange 55 million backdated options for an equal value of Apple stock, which totalled 10 million shares.”

Look. We conducted a thorough investigation. Al Gore, one of the world’s leading experts on forensic accounting, signed off on the whole thing. I had nothing to do with any of this. It was two of my direct reports, operating completely without my knowledge or consent. There’s nothing to see here, folks. Let’s just move along, shall we? Much love to Pravin for keeping us up to date on this.


Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Brent Schlender is back kissing my ass again

See here. Apparently Fortune magazine now believes I’m the most powerful person in the universe. Funny right? I mean only recently these guys were beavering away on a hatchet job about me, claiming I should be put in prison or something. And as I pointed out recently, Brent has been attacking our products like crazy lately.

But now suddenly the hacks at Fortune have turned into my biggest fans again. Money quote from Brent: “That’s five industries that Jobs has upended – computers, Hollywood, music, retailing, and wireless phones. … At this moment, no one has more influence over a broader swath of business than Jobs.”

As always, Katie did a great job on the article and Brent ran it pretty much word for word the way we sent it. Katie even ginned up a quote from me which I’ll reprint here with my own translation spliced into it:

“We don’t think in terms of power,” says Jobs. (Translation: We don’t have to, we friggin own your asses already, you little bitches, and nobody in tech can touch us. Plus we are all about the humility.) “We think about creating new innovative products that will surprise and delight our customers. (So shut the fuck up and start feeling delighted.) Happy and loyal customers are what give Apple its ‘power.’ (Also the fact that I can have any one of you killed just by making a single phone call. Remember that.) At the heart of it, though, we simply try to make great products that we want for ourselves, and hope that customers will love them as much as we do. (And we know they will because we tell them exactly what to love and exactly how much to love it, and they always do exactly what we tell them. Still amazes us, honestly.) And I think after all these years we’ve gotten pretty decent at it.”


Thursday, November 15, 2007

Oh snap

A judge just tossed out a ridiculous shareholder lawsuit against us involving the backdated options thing. See here. Money quote from da judge: “Without a discernable drop in the stock price there is no basis upon which to establish an injury to shareholders.” Yeah. It’s like that y’all. I just called the people at the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, which was the lead plaintiff in the case, and told them that even though they had tried to cash in on a bogus claim and that, ironically, if they’d succeeded and won a settlement they would have been hurting Apple and sucking money out of the pockets of shareholders, that nevertheless I hoped we could move on in peace and harmony with one another, and that I hold no hard feelings against them. Then I told them I wanted to sign off with a Buddhist blessing, and said, “Siooma.” They actually thanked me. What idiots. I love it.


Thursday, August 9, 2007

I hate to say this, but some people are gonna need to get whacked

So this whole Greg Reyes conviction is freaking me out. Sure, the stories all say that El Jobso is in the clear. Such is the power of the RDF. The truth is, I’m scared. Like if I hadn’t just spent 10 days on the Master Cleanse and then followed it up with 2 days of spearmint-flavored high colonics, I’d be crapping my pants right now. And it’s not just me. Half the friggin Valley is living in fear. See here. It’s like living in Stalin’s Russia, waiting for the knock at the door in the middle of the night. Last night a bunch of us were having dinner at Chantilly — the place was packed with Valley types — and a couple of cops walked in. They were just there about a car that was parked in a fire lane. Too late. Half a dozen dudes had already taken off running through the kitchen. Yeah. It’s like dat, y’all.

As BusinessWeek reports, the scary thing about the Reyes conviction is that they didn’t really have much of a case against him. But they did have some people who ratted him out. Same for us. And you know exactly who I’m talking about. I’m not saying we’re gonna do anything, but as Larry said to me this afternoon, sometimes a true Zen master is called upon to do difficult things, things that need to be done. Plus, do you really want to go to jail? I mean, really?

And now that there’s blood in the water, the prosecutors and SEC morons are gonna be even more bold. And no amount of money will satisfy them in terms of a settlement. They want heads on sticks.

Jerry York says he can handle the details and everything will look like an accident and there’s no connections back to me. I really hoped we wouldn’t end up here. But here we are. Negative people upset me. So do snitches. You know who you are. So a word to the wise: Zip it, jagoffs.


Thursday, June 7, 2007

I’m trying to get in on this VMware offering

But my broker says he doesn’t think I’ll get any. I’m like, Dude, Sergey is getting some. Larry is getting some. What the frig? Well for a while my guy just said it was really tight, oversubscribed, he’d see what he could do; then he just went dark and stopped returning my calls. Now I hear from someone else that apparently I’m considered poison because of the backdating stuff at Apple and VMware doesn’t want me getting anything and neither do their bankers. Fine. Just wait and see how much Apple does or doesn’t do to promote the big Macintosh desktop virtualization software you guys at VMware are announcing at the WWDC next week. Oops. Was that supposed to be a surprise? Sorry.


Tuesday, May 29, 2007

It’s true, I suck at math

See this story where a stock market expert explains how I made one of the dumbest trades of all time when I traded stock options for restricted shares. Money quote: “The exchange of the ESOs for the restricted cost Mr. Jobs over $4 billion. This is the most expensive and worst options trade ever made.” This is what I’ve been trying to tell the SEC and the US Attorney. I’m the victim here, people.


Sunday, May 20, 2007

This frooby dexter has a bug up his ass about me


See this story from the San Francisco Chronicle where this shareholder activist from Institutional Shareholder Services just rants and raves about me. The guy is just jonesing for a piece of El Jobso.

Money quotes:

“Steve Jobs touted at the Apple shareholder meeting that Apple was credited for their extraordinary cooperation by the folks at the SEC. But I don’t think they have offered similar cooperation to their own investors and have not allowed complete transparency over their investigation. They are too busy, frankly, spinning this issue and making light of it.”

“Because of his relatively young age, we don’t tend to lump Steve Jobs in that category of the “imperial” CEO. But clearly this was an emperor on his throne at this meeting.”

“One corporate secretary at a contentious meeting turned to me as her own CEO was speaking and said three simple words that I have never forgotten: “Life is spin.” I think that must be Steve Jobs’ mantra.”

It goes on and on. Just sickening.

Dude, look. I’m sorry you’re only five foot one. I’m sorry you look like a dweeb. I’m sorry you got wedgied and swirly-whirlied all through school, and that because of that you can’t have erections. But pygmy, it’s not my fault. Get some help. See a shrink. Put lifts in your shoes. But get off my friggin back. Seriously.


Friday, February 16, 2007

Maybe you think it’s funny

To laugh at my misfortunes. Apparently this guy does. Well, I don’t. Sorry. Then again, I’m the poor bastard who’s gonna be wearing an orange jump suit and trying to avoid the communal shower.


The noose tightens

You’ve probably seen the stories like this one about the feds trying to speed up their inquisition on the options stuff. And yeah, when they talk about “Apple officials” they are most definitely talking about El Jobso. Friends, I am this close to just pulling an OJ and fleeing the country. The JobsJet is fueled and ready. This whole thing is just total horsecrap.


Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Squirrel Boy rumor


Apparently there is this rumor going around the Valley that the reason we brought Eric Schmidt onto our board is so that he can step up and be CEO if I have to step down during this SEC investigation into the options stuff. I just want to say, this is totally not true. And even if I do have to step down it will only be temporary. But I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have to. We’re really working hard to get this whole thing settled and put away. You can’t believe the crap that Nancy Pelosi is putting me through, however. That lady gets your balls in a vise and friggin squeezes, let me tell ya. Free use of the JobsJet, iPods and iMacs for her nine hundred grandchildren, donations (cash only, in suitcases) to the Pelosi Library. I mean who even knew this crazy dame even had a friggin library?

Anyway, have no fear. Squirrel Boy is not going to be running Apple. At least not yet. And not permanently. I think. Um, okay. Peace out.