Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs by Daniel Lyons

Author:Daniel Lyons [Lyons, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: vl-nfcompvg, aVe4EvA
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2008-07-09T20:00:00+00:00

At any given moment the San Jose Jet Center probably has more rich people walking around under its roof than any other building on earth. This is where everyone in the Valley keeps their private jets, and like all of the old-school Valley locations it remains intentionally drab, with crappy furniture and worn-out carpeting and faded paint. Old-money guys in the Valley—by which I mean anyone who’s been rich since before the Internet bubble of the late nineties—totally get off on shabbiness. They might ski in Utah, but not at Deer Valley. That’s for new money people, like Google employees and Web 2.0 strivers. The old guys ski at Alta.

So a crappy jet terminal with shitty instant coffee in styrofoam cups is just perfect. That may be because it helps us forget that we’re flying around in planes that cost ten thousand dollars per hour to operate. The other reason that nobody cares about how bad this terminal looks, of course, is that nobody ever sits around here. People like me don’t wait for flights. Our planes wait for us. We show up and go.

Except today. Today it is raining. I mean raining. The drops are as big as grapes, and they’re falling so hard they’re carving divots in the grass. It’s noon, and the sky is pitch black. Sheet lightning keeps blasting out of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Trees are bending sideways in the wind. They look as if they might rip up out of the ground and fly away.

So we’re stuck, maybe fifty of us, waiting for the storm to blow over, when in walk three FBI agents and a bunch of uniformed San Jose cops. Right behind them is a crew from KSJT, the local TV station.

The cops go up to Sanjay Dash, the CEO of Altona Semiconductor, and three of his executives, and start reading them their rights. Handcuffs, the whole thing. The FBI guys make a big show, I suppose to be sure that all the rest of us see what’s happening. They perp walk the guys out to a van and haul them away. When they’re gone the TV idiots come back inside and try to get interviews. The reporter is a woman in her twenties with blonde hair, a black suit and sneakers. She rushes around shoving her microphone at people. Nobody will talk to her. She tapes a spot anyway, and makes it seem as if Sanjay and his guys were arrested while trying to flee the country, which is apparently what the FBI guys told her. Nice touch.

It’s the third big arrest in less than a week. Nick Malone of MTware and Dave Tsao of Mantis Networks were perp-walked out of their offices. Mark Broder of Xictel, a chip company, was picked up at Bentley’s in Woodside, leaving his wife sobbing into her duck confit and pommes salardaise.

“It’s not going to stop,” Misho Knedlik says. “Now that there’s blood in the water, there’ll be more, not less. Trust me, this was how it happened in Bratislava, back in the Communist days.

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