oPtion$

Posted by Marc Hodak on December 30, 2007 under Executive compensation | Comments are off for this article

I took Larry Ribstein to lunch a couple weeks ago as a meager thank you for his guest lecture in my “Scandal” class this Fall. Eating with Larry, one expects to partake of his keen insights on corporate law, business, and the media. The bonus of this particular lunch was Larry’s hearty recommendation of oPtion$ by Fake Steve Jobs (aka, Daniel Lyons of Forbes).

Despite being an FSJ fan since before Thanksgiving, I didn’t think I’d have time to add another book to my Christmas list. I decided to chalk it up to “research” on my own options idea I would be developing during my iLess break on the farm.

My wife, wrapping last-minute presents in the kitchen and hearing me laughing from the living room, was wondering what could be so funny about modeling a complex financial product. I disclosed the nature of my preliminary ‘research’, and tried to read a passage to her.

Friends, I simply couldn’t get it out coherently. I ended up needing a paper bag to catch my breath from laughing so hard. No spoilers, here, but the passages with Apple’s Chairman, who hilariously hates Jobs, and FSJ’s run-in with the attorneys investigating him as well as the one hopelessly trying to defend him are priceless. Various celebrities get skewered in cameo appearances, any one of which is worth the price of the book.

Having sampled the FSJ site over several weeks, I was initially concerned that oPtion$ would read like a collection of blog entries forced into a book just to cash in on the site’s popularity. Folks, it didn’t read that way at all. Each funny chapter hewed to a story line that was faithfully maintained to nearly the very end. At that point, some hints of character development emerge, only to be gratefully suppressed in a suitably goofy denouement.

When I was done with it, I thought, “God, I wish I could write like that.”