That's right, Meg Whitman. The former eBay CEO made the magazine's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" list three years running; even after leaving eBay, she finagled a place on last year's "Highest-paid women" list. This year, she's nowhere: Not on Most Powerful, not on Highest-Paid, not even on "10 Global leaders" or "The D.C. power list." And she's been given just 20 minutes at the very end of Fortune's conference. Whitman's already skipped one full-fledged debate; now she skipping another event so she can make a minor appearance tied to a magazine she's not even in. Scared of your public much?

Come on Meg, it's not as hard as it looks. Consider who's doing the job now!

We hear the New York Times' Brad Stone has been calling around frantically, trying to get hold of a galley himself and spoil Fortune's exclusive. And he may well succeed; the writer outed the author of the anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog last year with help from his sources in the publishing industry. Mezrich's book is due out July 14.

The media scramble for galleys of Accidental Billionaires just goes to show Facebook remains something of an "it" company in Silicon Valley, even as it grows out of its startup phase and gropes for revenue.

It also proves that respected media outlets have no trouble taking seriously a project created by a busted, fabricating author and adapted for film by would-be crack smuggler, about a money-losing company.

Nor do we, obviously. We'd love to get our hands on said galleys, if only to fact-check them the way we did with Mezrich's comical book proposal. If you can help, please get in touch.

Brazen Careerist blogger Penelope Trunk thought about sex and clean boxes.

Fortune contributor Caroline Waxler, formerly an editor at Henry Blodget's Business Insider, contemplated downward mobility.


Wired's Danny Dumas saved a Washington Post reporter the trouble of finding an actual source.

Freelance editor Todd Lappin crowdsourced his geek inquiries.

Technology Review editor Jason Pontin tried to fill up a lonely letters page.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

We doubt it. Facebook board member Marc Andreessen once cited a paper on business magazine covers as contrarian indicators:

Headlines from featured stories in Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes were collected for a 20-year period to determine whether positive stories are associated with superior future performance and negative stories are associated with inferior future performance for the featured company. "Superior" and "inferior" were determined in comparison with an index or another company in the same industry and of the same size.

Statistical testing implied that positive stories generally indicate the end of superior performance and negative news generally indicates the end of poor performance.

So what does that mean for Facebook? In this case, "superior performance" means losing money on an estimated $280 million in revenue last year — and facing more problems as the site grows.

We hear the company is even having trouble managing something as simple as a move to its new headquarters, a soulless office park facing a residential neighborhood on the other side of Palo Alto, Calif. from its current downtown digs. Local residents recently received a newsletter informing them that the move, scheduled to happen this quarter, was pushed back to April because of ongoing renovations:

A necessary disclosure here: I worked on this list for several years when it was put out by Fortune's now-defunct sister publication, Business 2.0. It was a pain in the tuchis! It was a lot of work! I had half-a-dozen factcheckers going full speed for weeks on that mother! Oh, and also, it was funnier when I wrote it.

So I can't blame Fortune for cutting back. Tough times, which make for great stories of business disaster, are exactly when advertising-dependent publications are least able to afford covering them. In fact, Fortune laid off some of the people who contributed to this year's list. Next year, I'm betting this one goes to eleven.

A management consulting firm hired by Yahoo to streamline the company is recommending that the Internet portal elminate 20% of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, according to a person familiar with the situation.

We'll decode the journalistspeak: "a person familiar with the situation" most likely means someone at Yahoo who wants to be able to deny that they blabbed.

Got something to add to the calendar? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com.

Cook’s deep knowledge of Apple’s operations and ready command of detail has won him the respect of the board of directors and the investment community. A bachelor with a passion for cycling, he’s as steady and low-key as Jobs is temperamental.

Of course, as any Apple employee will tell you, "steady and low-key" doesn't strike the necessary fear into their hearts like Jobs' legendary tirades.

Jonathan Ive, the wildly talented designer and crowd favorite for the role, is apparently even more soft-spoken, and too shy to carry the yoke of showman that he would inherit. However, secret plans not obtained by Valleywag have revealed Jobs' succession plans: A top secret project begun by Jobs while still at NeXT to take back Apple by force if necessary has been quietly resurrected by Ive, with Apple engineers working only on small parts so as not to reveal the true goal — an indestructable cyborg assassin capable of verbally abusing ten times the employees in a single day while still finding time to ignore his no-longer biologically related daughter.

I, for one, welcome my new Robot Steve Jobs overlords.

You also need some leadership skills. You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.

Page points out how many engineers have been hired by Big Oil to find every last drop of crude, calling it "disproportionate to the return that they could get elsewhere." A big proponent of geothermal and solar, he further describes how cleantech investment that has focused on the move from fossil fuels to electricity doesn't solve the root problem of our grid being powered mostly by coal. And in his view, venture capitalists are ten years too late in funding green initiatives:

Look at VC investment in clean energy. What caused that to happen was two things: the price of oil going up and global warming. It's mostly the price of oil going up.

I think it's everybody who cares about making progress in the world. Let's say there are 10,000 people working on these things. If we make that 100,000, we'll probably get 10 times the progress.

When I worked for Quittner at Business 2.0, he talked constantly about his long-held dream of going to a startup or launching a blog. That he's now choosing to stay at magazine publisher Time Inc. is useful as an economic indicator. Quittner boosted the Valley's comeback, and the business of blogging, long before other mainstream journalists. That he's turned bearish on both now could be a sign of personal cowardice. Or keen prescience.

April 16, 2008

To: TIME Staff
From: Rick Stengel

I'm delighted to announce that Josh Quittner is coming back to TIME to cover consumer technology with a regular column in the magazine and a daily blog on TIME.com. In his new role as editor-at-large, Josh will apply his singular voice to technology, writing both reviews of new products and features that explain what's most important to consumers in Techland.

Most recently, Josh was the managing editor of Business 2.0 and a writer for FORTUNE. He first had a byline in TIME in 1994 as a staff writer covering technology, back at the very beginning of the internet. He went on to launch "The Netly News," first as a website on Pathfinder and later as a column in the magazine. He subsequently served as editor of TIME.com—twice—as well as tech editor of TIME before moving to San Francisco in 2002 to work for Business 2.0. Prior to coming to Time Inc., Josh worked at Newsday in the early 90s, where he wrote a pioneering column called "Life in Cyberspace."

Josh will continue to work from San Francisco where he lives with his wife, journalist Michelle Slatalla (with whom he has co-written five books) and their three daughters, but I expect he'll be in the New York offices regularly. Josh is a great mind and a great brand to have back at TIME. We're fortunate to have him.

R.S.

The domain name now points to a blog that's been active since March 10. The writers are "Slatalla" — almost certainly Michelle Slatalla, Quittner's wife — and "Roofie" — presumably Quittner. The prose matches his voice, and the subject fits, since Quittner took an active interest in real estate while at Business 2.0. But real estate is a bread-and-butter subject for Time Inc.'s finance magazines. Josh, rather than starting your own blog, why don't you just apply for a job at Money, run by your former deputy Eric Schurenberg? That seems easier.

The author, Peter Elkind, has long been rumored to be working on a damning profile of Jobs, centering on backdated stock options. That Fortune is now leading off its story with Jobs's cancer, not the options scandal, tells us what happened to that story: Elkind couldn't get the goods. This is a cover story in more sense than one. An excerpt, courtesy of Fortune:

THE TROUBLE WITH STEVE

In October 2003, as the computer world buzzed about what cool new gadget he would introduce next, CEO Steve Jobs—then presiding over the most dramatic corporate turnaround in the history of Silicon Valley—found himself confronting a life-and-death decision.

During a routine abdominal scan, doctors had discovered a tumor growing in his pancreas. While a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is often tantamount to a swiftly executed death sentence, a biopsy revealed that Jobs had a rare—and treatable—form of the disease. If the tumor were surgically removed, Jobs' prognosis would be promising: The vast majority of those who underwent the operation survived at least ten years.

Yet to the horror of the tiny circle of intimates in whom he'd confided, Jobs was considering not having the surgery at all. A Buddhist and vegetarian, the Apple CEO was skeptical of mainstream medicine. Jobs decided to employ alternative methods to treat his pancreatic cancer, hoping to avoid the operation through a special diet—a course of action that hasn't been disclosed until now.

For nine months Jobs pursued this approach, as Apple's board of directors and executive team secretly agonized over the situation—and whether the company needed to disclose anything about its CEO's health to investors. Jobs, after all, was widely viewed as Apple's irreplaceable leader, personally responsible for everything from the creation of the iPod to the selection of the chief in the company cafeteria. News of his illness, especially with an uncertain outcome, would surely send the company's stock reeling. The board decided to say nothing, after seeking advice on its obligations from two outside lawyers, who agreed it could remain silent.

In the end, Jobs had the surgery, on Saturday, July 31, 2004, at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, near his home. The revelation of his brush with death remained—like everything involving Jobs and Apple—a tightly controlled affair. In fact, nary a word got out until Jobs' tumor had been removed. The next day, in an upbeat e-mail to employees later released to the press, he announced that he had faced a life-threatening illness and was "cured." Jobs assured everyone that he'd be back on the job in September. When trading resumed a day after the announcement, Apple shares fell just 2.4%.

Apple entertained no further questions about Jobs' health, citing the CEO's need for privacy. No one learned just how long Jobs had been sick—or that he had contemplated not having the surgery at all. "It was very traumatic for all of us," recalls one of those in whom Jobs confided, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the topic's sensitivity. "We all really care about Steve, and it was a serious risk for the company as well. It was a very emotional and very difficult time. This was one page in the adventure."

The woman in maroon is Facebook PR czar Brandee Barker. Here's what I want to know. Would Barker ever have agreed to being filmed for a video in which reporter Oliver Ryan and Fitzpatrick lay down slams like, "If I got the news that somebody had gone out and bought, say, a BMW 325, that would be great marketing." Or, worse, "[Facebook Beacon] might bring new types of advertisers into the Internet marketplace entirely." Harsh!

None of them want to say anything, though. Why? By playing the house sycophant, Kirkpatrick takes the pressure off the rest of Fortune's staff to write the bootlicking tech-CEO profiles he's known for — like his recent mash note to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Kirkpatrick's probing analysis of Zuckerberg? He's "nice."

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.