Steve Jobs' Heart Attack: He's Faking It

Scanning the internet this morning, I came across an article telling me that the Apple's stock plummeted 10% Friday because Steve Jobs suffered a heart attack. Maybe it’s the new Windows ads, I thought, but I’m pretty sure if he suffered a heart attack I would have heard about it the day it happened, not 3 days later. I consider myself tech industry savvy, so this definitely caught me off guard. As I continued reading, it quickly became apparent that this “report” was from a site that is strictly user-generated content.

Was this just an elaborate scheme to lower the stock price so someone can purchase shares at a lower price? Or maybe Bill Gates was ticked off that Jobs was ranked the most powerful man in business by Fortune recently (Gates only came in number 7).

Whatever the reasoning behind this report, I do find it amazing that the financial market reacted so hastily over it. Apparently, I was not alone, as the SEC has said it will conduct an investigation on the citizen blogger.

But the market's reaction paled in comparison to that of the general public. In a Forbes article today, writer Brian Caulfield cautioned journalists, bloggers and Apple stock holders with the following:

"Memo to citizen journalists. Steve Jobs cannot die. His fingers shoot laser beams. He gobbles (organic) lithium-ion batteries. Where the rest of us have a heart, Jobs has a miniaturized rack of Apple XServe computers, each powered by a pair of quad-core Intel Xeon microprocessors and Apple's OS X operating system."