Who is this amiable and harmless-looking fellow to the left, you ask? Why, none other than the man who has terrorized and entertained Silicon Valley for the last year with The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. The quest to unearth the true identity of Fake Steve Jobs is over, and he turned out to be this guy, Dan Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes. That’s surely a disappointment to people who had been hoping that FSJ would turn out to be an Apple executive of some sort, or even El Jobso himself.

Lyons’s respect for truth compelled him to interrupt his vacation and take his life into his hands as he talked on his cellphone while driving through a torrential rainstorm in Maine.

Q. You obviously were unmasked earlier than you would have liked. Did you have a plan to reveal yourself down the road?
A. Well, I didn’t. The last bit of advice from Forbes was that coolest thing to do was to stay anonymous and then just shut down and never tell anyone, just leave it at “The Legend of Fake Steve.”
     
Q. The blog is shifting over to Forbes. Do you anticipate that you’ll be able to keep your readership or has something been lost along with your anonymity?
A. I don’t know. I think there’s only one way to find out. If I had to guess, I’m not going to put it on Forbes, we’ll keep it separate but connected. The feedback is, don’t tinker with it, keep it the way it is. Forbes has been great, they think it’s fun and want it connected to their Web site.
    
Q. Why do you think you managed to stay anonymous for so long? And how many people were in on the secret?
A. I don’t even know now, a lot, though. Some of my friends knew from the beginning. They said they kept it quiet but I’m pretty sure some of them told other people.
In my book propoosal, we made some mistakes in there. It was anonymous, but there were enough clues in there that it was really easy for people to figure it out.
I couldn’t believe (Silicon Valley gossip blog) Valleywag kept missing. Then people started writing, saying they were feeding Valleywag misleading information. I think most people didn’t want to know and that had enough momentum so I was able to stay anonymous.
    
Q. Talk about about how you started the whole thing. I understand you didn’t necessarily know a lot about Jobs at the start.
A. It was really almost an experiment with technology rather than with material. I’m in my 40s, an old media guy, print journalist, dead-tree kind of guy, in this crisis with the rest of us, and I was thinking “Gee where is this going?”
I started a bunch of blogs on different services, WordPress and Blogger. With the Jobs thing, I thought it would be kinda funny if a CEO kept a blog but really told you what he thought.
I ran a few items on that to fill space and sent it to a couple friends of mine, as a private joke. But people started finding it, I don’t know how, and it really spread virally. The name Fake Steve was from one of the readers. I didn’t think of that myself, I was calling it “The Diary of Steve Jobs”.
It’s very addictive, blogging is very addictive, finding an audience like that, a readership like that. The voice just kept coming to me. I’d wake up and something would happen and I’d know here’s what Fake Steve would think about that. It was not a lot of work. 
After about six weeks I shut it down, but someone else put the site back up with an RIP notice, so I relaunched it with (Web-site-traffic counting tool) Sitemeter and found there were readers from Russia, Europe.
I was starting to develop little story lines like a comic strip would have and I thought, this is kind of cool, like writing your own TV show. There were recurring characters like Larry Ellison.
About six months in, in January, I thought about shutting it down again but Wired wrote to me asking if they could sponsor me. Forbes also wrote to me asking for a sponsorship. It was then I though maybe I can make a little cash out of this.
    
Q. How do you reconcile the demands of Fake Steve with the demands of Dan Lyons? Fake Steve says some pretty mean things about executives and other journalists. Does that complicate things in real life?
A. I don’t know. Fake Steve is way more popular than I am. It’s like that Jim Carrey movie “The Mask”, when he puts the mask on he’s charming and funny and everyone likes him and when he takes it off he’s just a schmuck.
I call Bill Gates “Beastmaster” and I’ve had Microsoft people writing in for months saying they love it. I call (Wall Street Journal columnist) Walt Mossberg “Goatberg“, but Mossberg is making a million bucks a year at the Journal, he can deal with someone making fun of him.
There have been things that do cross the line. I look at those now and say “Oh”. But with the blogosphere you can’t take it back, it’s out there. I heard from Larry Lessig. I like to make fun of him as being the big anti-property guy. I was taking the piss a lot and said he took money from Google. He wrote and said he laughed at the stuff about him but he was concerned with that because it didn’t happen. So I wrote a post saying I was wrong and made it a big post. Lessig wrote me back saying he now knew I wasn’t the real Steve Jobs because he would never have done that.
I try to walk that line and I haven’t got it right every time. People like a little meanness, but too mean and even the readers go, Oh, I’m not laughing now. You want to be, well, puckish isn’t the right word, but teasing.
    
Q. Talk a bit about the upcoming book. what’s it about?
A. It’s the story behind the story, if you can imagine what it’s like to be in the Apple boardroom when they first find out about the options inquiry from the SEC.
The arc of the narrative would be built around that, but on the way there are lots of digressions and asides about hanging out with Bono and Larry Ellison. I won’t give away the ending but there’s a very dramatic move to save himself. In terms of real time, the story sort of ends in January ‘07, with the last dot, the last word being written on June 29, the day the iPhone launched.
    
Q. What’s next for Fake Steve? Any speaking engagements or more polished magazine pieces or anything?
I had some interest over the month from people wanting to do a back of magazine column for Fake Steve, and I’ve had some offers to do some speaking, things like being a keynote speaker at an employee meeting. There’s a conference in September I might do, but I don’t know how to do it, would it be like doing standup?