He's just one Jobs ex among many. A quick tally:

• Palm's financial backer, Elevation Partners, employs Fred Anderson, the former Apple CFO who publicly battled with Jobs over blame for Apple's stock-options backdating scandal.
  
• The company also hired away Apple's former head of Mac PR, Lynn Fox.
  
• Then there was the poaching of Mike Bell, who had been at Apple for 16 years and was senior VP for product development.

Palm's hiring spree grew so annoying to Jobs that he supposedly called up Rubinstein and screamed at him.

Jobs had reason to be agitated. Rubinstein successfully instigated a crash development program that, somehow, conjured an incredibly slick device, the Pre, from a company whose technology had been languishing for years.

In the words of tech blogger John Gruber, "it's quite possible that they have done everything right since" the launch of the iPhone. "Palm designed, built, and released the Pre, WebOS, and an app store, all in about two years."

The Palm team's experience at Apple no doubt helped along the way; it would appear some very detailed knowledge of Apple's iTunes helped allow the Pre to magically sync with the media software, an impressive feat.

The Pre, just released, promises to give Apple's iPhone the most worrisome competition it's yet seen.

And now Rubinstein has his prize, taking control of the whole company from 16-year Palm veteran Ed Colligan. If Jobs needed a catalyst to get him fired up about his return to the helm of Apple later this month, he sure got it.

Amid SEC charges that Apple management had shifted the dates of stock options to benefit executives, including Jobs, Anderson, and former general counsel Nancy Heinen, the company took an $84 million charge in 2006. Jobs and Apple settled a shareholder lawsuit for $14 million, but avoided trouble with the SEC. Anderson and Heinen paid $3.5 million and $2.2 million in fines respectively, without admitting guilt.

The episode caused a major rift between Anderson and Jobs. Anderson had left Apple in 2004, but stayed on the board until the scandal led to his resignation in 2006. In the meantime, Anderson had joined Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm in Silicon Valley. As the stock-options scandal grew, Anderson and Jobs pointed fingers at each other, at one point issuing dueling press releases shifting the blame. Anderson has long maintained that Jobs knew more about the options chicanery than he has let on.

Elevation, which also counts famed Valley investor Roger McNamee and U2 frontman Bono as partners, backed Palm, a rival to Apple in the smartphone business, and recruited a former top Apple executive, Jon Rubinstein, as Palm's executive chairman. No one in Silicon Valley honestly believes this is a coincidence.

Forbes is another Elevation investment. The May 11 story, written by Bill Barrett and teased on the cover, centers on the 118-page transcript of a three-hour interview Jobs gave SEC examiners trying a case against former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen, which the magazine obtained at some difficulty through a Freedom of Information Act. In the interview with SEC examiners, Jobs complained that the board was not looking out for him and he had to ask for a generous stock-options package, but maintained that he was largely unaware of the backdating and ignorant of the accounting consequences. (Backdating is not illegal by itself, but requires notice to shareholders and a charge to earnings, neither of which Apple undertook at the time it backdated options.)

Excellent journalistic work on Barrett's part. But here's the question: How did Forbes know precisely which document to ask for? It always helps to have well-connected sources. And it's hard to imagine who would be better placed to know the details of the case than Anderson.

Bono is a founder of Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity firm named after the U2 song. And Elevation just sank another $100 million into Palm, the troubled smartphone maker. Palm, which waited too long to switch its product lineup from electronic organizers to souped-up cell phones and whose Treo smartphone is showing its age, lost more than $500 million in the most recent quarter. Bono's firm now owns 39 percent of Palm.

He's also lassoed several former Apple executives into the Palm corral. Fred Anderson, a former Apple CFO and board member, is an investor at Elevation. Jon Rubinstein, a hardware executive who served as Jobs's right-hand man at Apple, resigned in 2006 — one day before the company's 30-year anniversary — and joined Palm a year ago. Rubinstein, the company's executive chairman, is working on a new family of devices that will compete with Apple's iPhone; the big unveiling is planned for the CES computer trade show next month.

The last CES was also the scene of the latest dig by Bono at Jobs. In January 2008, he appeared in a farewell video for Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Later that month, he shilled for Michael Dell, the founder of the eponymous PC maker who once called for Jobs to shut down Apple and "return the money to shareholders." (Apple is now worth far more than Dell. Ha!)

And to think they were once so close. At an Apple event in 2003, Bono called Jobs "the Dalai Lamai of integration." One year later, Bono and Jobs introduced a U2-branded edition of the iPod. Jobs, who is rarely seen in public, attended a U2 concert in 2005, and Bono praised Apple as being "more creative than a lot of rock bands." In 2006, Bono promoted a red iPod for his Product (Red) charity scheme.

So what happened? The falling out has never been publicly explained, but I have a theory on what happened.

Apple's board of directors fingered Fred Anderson, the former Apple CFO, in a probe over stock-options backdating at Apple. In a public statement, Anderson blamed Jobs. Things got messy, and Anderson resigned from the board after reaching a settlement with the SEC.

At that point, Anderson was already at Elevation helping make Bono, whose net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, even richer. So Jobs wasn't just messing with Bono's pal; he was messing with his pocketbook.

It hardly squares with the Irish rocker's saintly save-the-children image, does it?

The cause? The same kind of expense-account hijinks that landed him in trouble at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit parent of Wikipedia.

In 2006, Wales was courting Marc Bodnick, a cofounder of Silicon Valley private-equity firm Elevation Partners, in an effort to find a way to profit from Wikipedia, despite its nonprofit status and volunteer contributors. Bodnick and an assistant had traveled to St. Petersburg, Fla., where Wikimedia was then based. The talks went nowhere, but Wales, his wife, Bodnick, and Bodnick's assistant had a $1,300 meal at one of the city's finest restaurants. ($600 of the bill was spent on wine.)

At that point, the Wikimedia Foundation had confiscated Wales's corporate card, so he paid for the meal himself. But he then sought to have it reimbursed by Wikia. Michael Davis, Wikia's chief operating officer, became enraged and reported the expense to Jeremy Levine, a Wikia board member and partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which had invested $4 million into the company only a month before.

Levine then told Wales he was fired as CEO, and found Penchina, who had already made a fortune at eBay. Wales must hate that: Every time he sees Penchina, he must ask himself, "Why is this guy rich and I'm not?" Penchina, meanwhile, must be asking why Wikia is still paying Wales a salary.

• Forbes.com superstar Lacey Rose will move to Los Angeles and will take the lead on the magazine's Celeb List.
• Scott Woolley, L.A. bureau chief, is moving back to New York to run a team there.
• Betsy Corcoran, who runs the Forbes.com team in the magazine's Silicon Valley bureau, is stepping back from editing to do more writing — but some in Forbesian circles think she might be interested in ousting Quentin Hardy, her replacement as the magazine's Valley bureau chief, as head of the combined print and Web operations in the Valley. Corcoran says, "No, no, no. Wrong."

Our tipster adds: "Please don't buy this bullshit about how nice things are between print and dotcom."

The ongoing intra-Forbesian unpleasantness aside, one big question looms over the coming reorganization: Who's going to run the whole show. Churbuck thinks Bill Baldwin, the magazine's editor, is brainy but clueless. Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment, insiders say, is just a "puppet" of the publisher, Jim Spanfeller, and Maidment's contract is up soon. We have a suggestion: Why not just make Bono, the rock star turned venture capitalist at Elevation Partners, editor-in-chief of the whole shebang?

Literally, in the real-estate sense. In New York, Forbes is housed at 60 Fifth Avenue, while Forbes.com is at 90 Fifth Avenue. Now, the publisher is said to be taking a floor at 60 Fifth to house the dotcom reporters, while it clears out "deadwood long-timers." The new mandate: Everyone will write for both Web and print. Which sounds sensible — unless you work at Forbes.

What Forbes is not planning to announce: What sounds like a merger is really a takeover — by Forbes.com. Jim Spanfeller, the publisher of Forbes.com, will run the combined operation. "It's a massive coup, one that print people have long seen coming and long feared," says our tipster. As well they should: The editors of Forbes have long looked down on their Web brethren. Now they will be working for them.

Not that she needs the help. The foundation's bylaws only require that a majority of its board members be "elected or appointed from the community." The spirit of the term "community" suggests those who actively edit Wikipedia; Wikipedia was originally conceived as a membership organization. But that plan was abandoned, the bylaws rewritten. The Wikimedia Foundation's board can define "community" as it sees fit.

By right, the board could declare that, say, Roger McNamee, the Elevation Partners cofounder who helped broker $1 million in donations recently, was a member of the community, by virtue of his financial support.

The current board, of which three out of seven members are elected, would likely oppose such a move. But three more Gardner-approved appointees could likely swing the vote the other way. And then the board could redefine "community," or just rewrite the bylaws altogether.

Only one seat is up for election in the short term. Conveniently, it is that of board chair Florence Nibart-Devouard, who has consistently led the opposition to Gardner's moves. She is unlikely to stand for reelection in July, we hear. Wikipedians may elect a new board member in protest, but at the cost of losing the most effective resistance they have to Sue Gardner's quiet takeover. (Users have started a toothless online petition.)

The most curious seat is Wales's. It is reserved for a "community founder," and according to Wikimedia vice chair Jan-Bart de Vreede, if Wales does not occupy it, it will go empty. Here's an amusing thought: Why not have Larry Sanger, whom some say has a better claim to founding Wikipedia than Wales, bid for the spot in December, when Wales's term expires?

If the board rejects Sanger for the "community founder" spot, it will have to admit the truth: Jimmy Wales gets a board seat not because he was elected to it. Not because he has any distinct competence. Not because he is popular with the chapters. No, Wales gets a board seat because he's special. This isn't gerrymandering. It's Jimmymandering.

*Wikimedia Foundation Receives $500K Donation*

''Vinod and Neeru Khosla, innovators in educational outreach, provide financial support to the Wikimedia Foundation.''

San Francisco, CA - March 24, 2008 - The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, is delighted to announce it has received a $500,000 donation from philanthropists Vinod and Neeru Khosla.

"We are thrilled and very grateful," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Vinod and Neeru share the Wikimedia Foundation's vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Today, they have moved us closer to making that vision a reality."

"Vinod and I are proud to help Wikipedia, a valuable global educational resource," said Neeru Khosla, co-founder and chair of CK12, a non-profit organization supporting the worldwide creation of "flexbooks," collaborative, open-source textbooks. "Wikipedia proves that mass collaboration works, and that small investments can reap extraordinary returns. We are happy to be a part of it."

The gift comes at a critical time in the history of Wikimedia, which has just relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Bay Area technical talent, like-minded non-profit organizations, and educational and research institutions.

"Moving to San Francisco was an essential step in the maturing of the organization," said Gardner. "Now that we are here, and have built a great team of smart people, we're well-positioned to make significant progress."

Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia and one of the 10 most popular websites world-wide, is written, edited and maintained entirely by a global community of thousands of volunteers. It was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales. The Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003, has a staff of 15, and provides organizational support for Wikipedia and eight other collaboratively-created information projects.

In coming years, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to launch outreach projects designed to encourage contributions to Wikipedia from targeted groups such as academics, speakers of small languages, people in developing nations and older people. It also plans to increase the distribution of material from Wikipedia and its other projects in non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books, to provide information for people who are not online.

*Sloan Foundation to support Wikipedia's quality and growth initiatives*

''Institutional support of $3 million to Wikimedia Foundation over three years will support organizational growth and technical innovation''

March 25, 2008, New York/San Francisco - The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced it is awarding $3 million of support to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which operates the world's largest and most popular encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The money will support Wikimedia's organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services.

"We are extremely grateful for this support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Wikipedia and its sister projects have an enormous global impact, but the organization behind them has been operating on a shoestring: unable to pursue partnerships, execute projects, or even to effectively fundraise. This institutional support from Sloan will enable us to make progress on some key goals: increasing quality, broadening participation, and distributing free knowledge to people without Internet connectivity."

"We are delighted to support the Wikimedia Foundation and to help develop its organizational capacity and improve the quality of its flagship, Wikipedia," said Doron Weber, Sloan Program Director for Universal Access to Recorded Knowledge. "As the largest encyclopedia in human history and one of the top ten web sites in the world, Wikipedia represents a quantum leap in collecting human knowledge from diverse sources, organizing it without commercial or other bias, and making it freely available to people everywhere."

The funding will be received over three years, at 1 million dollars per year.

It comes at a critical time in the history of the Wikimedia Foundation, which has just relocated to San Francisco and upped its staff from 10 to 15. One of the projects which will be supported with the Sloan grant is a software feature called Flagged Revisions, which will allow experienced editors to publicly and visibly grade the quality status of articles — in effect, functioning as a kind of "nutrition labeling" for Wikipedia content. In coming years, Wikimedia also plans to significantly expand outreach events such as Wikipedia Academy, designed to increase Wikipedia's quality by teaching academics, older people, and other targeted groups how to contribute. Another goal is the distribution of educational content from Wikipedia and its sister projects in non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books, to reach people who are not online.

The Wikimedia projects are written, edited and maintained by a global community of thousands of volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003, has a staff of 15, and provides organizational support for the projects. It plans to grow its staff to 25 by 2010.

Here's Moonalice and its lead guitarist Chubby Wombat — McNamee's onstage alter ego — playing "The Nectar." The band is made up of the best musicians money can buy (literally: McNamee pays them), but its sound, to my ears, died about five years before I was even born.

It was an odd venue for a tech party — a greasy diner by day, the Grill sits on a corner near the ballpark, neighborhing Border's, McDonald's, and dozens of men in Giants windbreakers asking passerbys if they need a ticket. They say open source is about software that's free as in "free speech," not "free beer," but the open bar featured plenty of the latter.

Elevation's Marc Bodnick greeted me by saying I wasn't drunk enough, and he was rarely without a can of Coors Light the entire night. The user-contributed entertainment was karaoke, backed by a talented, and very patient, live band. The clip above, captured by Irene McGee's cell phone, is a video of Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Creative Commons creator Lawrence Lessig announcing their collaboration and singing the Sonny and Cher classic "I Got You Babe." Seriously.

And apparently, no one's putting in long hours over at Yahoo; there was a large contingent from the troubled portal there. Shouldn't they have been back in the office, saving the company? Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, our latest Silicon Valley tool, and Yahoo VP Bradley Horowitz took the mike, breaking out "Don't You Want Me," a fitting anthem. (The answer: No.)

Later on, I succumbed to the call of the spotlight, bleating out the Johnny Paycheck classic "Take This Job and Shove It," which given the events of last week seemed so appropriate. (Video by Irene McGee)

• The Winnies, the video blogger awards show organized by Geek Entertainment Television's Irina Slutsky, rolls out the red carpet tonight. Oh, it's in L.A., in case you're wondering. But that's what Southwest is for. [You Are the Winner]
• Check your replicants. Blade Runner: The Final Cut is showing tonight at the Mark Cuban-owned Embarcadero Center Cinema at 8 p.m. [Upcoming]
• We hear that Elevation Partners is hosting a private party for Wikipedia, iCommons, and Creative Commons communities tonight at the 3rd Street Grill at 8 p.m.

• Got a to-do that's a must-do? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com. Check out more events on our Google Calendar:
  

As I read through the posts, I noticed a number of themes consistent with another writer I know. References to Natali Del Conte, Nick Denton, and, crucially, Armani sunglasses.

The brats at the Armani store didn't even know about my Armani Bono Red sunglasses. They're the same shades I wore on the Elevation tour, priced at a reasonable $145, and 40 percent of the take goes to help your brothers and sisters still suffering. Plus if you're a blogger and getting kind of wrinkly around the eyes, they're a lot cheaper than plastic surgery. My good friend Nick Denton in New York bought a pair for one of his gang who's a bit over the hill. The man looks fantastic now. Fox TV called him on to talk about Google for 15 minutes. God's truth. It was the shades.

And yet he even looks like Bono! Here's a screen cap from a recent Boing Boing TV episode — Boutin is towards the end if you want to see his take on lolcats.

Could he be responsible for these directionless diatribes about Red products and how important Bono is? Well, they've both got the self-important part down. I pinged Mr. Boutin to see what was up.

BulldogPup83: Hey Paul, did you read Fake Steve Jobs this weekend?
ArmaniGlasses: Read it? I fucking wrote it.
BulldogPup83: I knew it!
BulldogPup83: Natali Del Conte and your silly sunglasses totally gave you away.
ArmaniGlasses: FOX cancelled on me though.
ArmaniGlasses: I think they found out I'm a libertarian which effectively means a Republican, and their whole idea was to have some whiny liberal blogger from San Francsico on to go WAAAHHHHH GOOGLE IS TOO POWERFUL.
ArmaniGlasses: What was your question again?
BulldogPup83: Oh nothing. Just saying hi.
ArmaniGlasses: Natali gave me away? I'm going to kill her.
ArmaniGlasses: Oh wait, she'll do that goddam scream if I do, aieee.
BulldogPup83: I know you think she's awesome and all, but do you really think that Bono would know who she is?
BulldogPup83: He barely knows who the other members of U2 are, never mind Natali Del Conte.
BulldogPup83: total giveaway
ArmaniGlasses: and you giiiiiiive yourself awwaaayyyy, and you giiiiiive yourself awaaaayyyyy, and you give ...
BulldogPup83: Thanks for the help, I appreciate your time Mr. Boutin
ArmaniGlasses: Wow, I haven't been called "Mr Boutin" since the last time the NY Times mentioned me.
BulldogPup83: I suspect you can have me killed. Must be respectful.
ArmaniGlasses: Xeni on line 1 here, gotta hop
ArmaniGlasses: toodles

As CNET points out, it's all about the business ties. U2 lead singer Bono is the most stylish managing director at Elevation Parters, the Sand Hill private equity firm. Elevation cofounder Marc Bodnick is on the board of directors of iLike. Hence, the arrangement. Bonus for close students of the Valley's real social networks: Marc Bodnick's wife is Michelle Sandberg, the sister of Google executive Sheryl Sandberg, who's married to former Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg, who's an iLike advisor. Got that?

Here's the back story. Marc Bodnick, a cofounder of Elevation Partners, the private-equity firm behind Forbes, where Lyons has a day job, suggested plugged-in matchmaker Brooke Hammerling to make high-level introductions in the Valley. This move, insiders say, confounded Lyons's publisher, Da Capo Press, which had its own PR operation, and momentarily threw plans for the party out of joint. Hammerling vehemently denies there was any friction. Da Capo ended up handling press for Lyons's book tour, and Hammerling and the book publisher threw a joint party at Frisson, the restaurant part-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel.

Thiel, alas, didn't show, but San Francisco's tech press corps turned out in droves, and in the case of videoblogger Natali Del Conte, kickass boots. Also crowding the joint: a bevy of Lyons's Forbes colleagues, past and present, and backers from Elevation Partners. Digg board member Brett Bullington no-commented his way through the evening. An unusually buttoned-up Hammerling, when she wasn't schmoozing, was ringing up copies of Options for Lyons to sign.

I'm sure with their brains and resources, they've already figured out a way around Wikipedia's 501 (c) 3 status. Looks to me like Jimmy's about to be able to afford all the kimonos he wants now!

We think Wales might be talking to McNamee more about his for-profit venture Wikia than Wikipedia. But we're willing to listen if you know better.