Bloomberg mistakenly publishes advance Steve Jobs obituary

Faking your own death is not a good idea. Profiting from your own demise is highly illegal and generally a bit of a faff, the incumbent admin just isn’t worth it. In Steve Jobs’s case, it’s an even more perilous thing to do, seeing as the stock price per share of his company could slip dramatically if he was to die unexpectedly.

So it’s probably fair to say that Steve Jobs is more than a teensy bit peeved with Bloomberg, as the news site falsely reported his death by printing his obituary yesterday afternoon. Whether this was the mother of all slip ups or simply a mischievous employee looking for a quick notoriety fix is unclear at the moment.

Jobs’s pancreatic cancer has been well documented and his gaunt appearance at the launch event for the iPhone 3G has had analysts worried that Apple’s CEO is again experiencing serious health problems. Jobs has gone on the record to state otherwise, playing down his peeky visage as the remnants of a common virus.

Still, all of these factors are still very fresh in the public consciousness making Wednesday’s false obituary all the more poorly timed. It’s common practice for news networks to draft obituaries in advance, and the one accidentally published on Bloomberg very clearly had “HOLD FOR RELEASE — DO NOT USE — HOLD FOR RELEASE — DO NOT USE.” written all over it.

Still, once something like this is out, true or not, suppressing it is a tricky business. In any case the obituary was retracted almost as soon as it was published and so far as everybody knows, Steve Jobs is still very much alive and well. A happy ending then, though probably not for Bloomberg which is probably currently dealing with some very angry Apple lawyers.

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