Edible Apple

For as much of a public showman as Steve Jobs is, he is a notoriously private person, and his obsession with privacy clearly seeps into the culture at Apple where unannounced products are never talked about and product leaks are handled with utmost severity.

The latest and greatest product to emerge from Cupertino is the iPad, and naturally, all we know about it is what Apple has publicly disclosed to the public. You would think that this would be enough to please Steve Jobs, but then again, Steve Jobs isn’t exactly your run of the mill CEO.

Last week, on February 4th, Steve Jobs reportedly visited the offices of both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, presumably to discuss bringing newspapers and magazines to the iPad. Rumor has it that Jobs even went out to an “intimate dinner” at a restaurant called Pranna with 50 New York Times executives to demo the iPad and discuss in further detail its capabilities. Comically, Jobs was seen coming into the restaurant wearing what was described as “a very funny hat – a big top hat kind of thing.”

Jobs’ interaction with the staff at the Wall Street Journal, however, wasn’t nearly as whimsical. While at the WSJ newsroom, Alan Murray, the Journal’s deputy managing editor and executive editor of The WSJ Online, sent out the following tweet using the iPad.

When Steve Jobs got wind of Alan Murray’s insubordination (i.e tweeting), he reportedly became furious, leading Murray to delete the tweet shortly thereafter. The tweet is still visible, however, thanks to the magic of Google’s cache. And to answer your question, Alan, your tweet looks unbelievably cool.

Valleywag went so far as to ask Murray to comment on what went down with his tweet and Steve Jobs, to which Murray simply replied, “I would love to talk about this, but can’t… I will say that Apple’s general paranoia about news coverage is truly extraordinary – but that’s not telling you anything you didn’t already know.”

Paranoia seems to be an apt word choice. We get that Apple likes to keep a tight lid on things, but stressing out over a harmless tweet is well into the realm of the absurd.