I’m thinking they’re speaking of a different executive (Changpeng Zhao) pardoned by Trump. [2]
Last I heard he’s is now living in luxury in the United Arab Emirates. There was a profile on him in a paper.
I’m not sure Sam has enough cash to get a pardon.
“Mr. (Changpeng) Zhao has a long history of legal and regulatory problems. Binance pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. government. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Mr. Zhao was pardoned by Mr. Trump last year. Binance also forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company.” [1]
Oh sure, I'm definitely familiar with those. The weird ones are in forests, a reminder that an area used to be clear and then was left to grow back.
The walls of stones were the result of collecting stones that were near the surface from what I understand (maybe plow depth). I was talking more like bigger stones that were buried several feet under the ground that could just stay where they are (when you fill in the hole), but for a compulsion to treat them as things.
I had my car at a dealer. It was there so I asked for an estimate on a muffler fix. $7000. To be fair they also recommended trying the repair place down the street for that one.
Early employee at Apple who was offered to be paid in stock. He “held out for the cash”.
I really like the triumph of the nerds series. Getting bill Gates, Balmer, Jobs and those IBMers to explain how it all came together and how MS who didn’t have an OS ended up getting one to sell to IBM.
Offered to be paid with stock, took the cash. As someone who’s first startup is no long in business, and having cash in hand is appealing..
But yeah..
“well for a short time I was an employee of Apple Computer, employee number 12 and one day I helped move materials out of this garage. At the time Steve Jobs said that the company was short of loot so he offered to pay me in company shares, but I held out for the money - my mother still reminds me of that incident.”
Cringely says here that he worked part-time at Apple for a few months as a graduate student: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/qa4.html . Mark Stephens was at Stanford at the time (he earned his master's in communication in 1979) so this lines up. I think it's entirely possible that Cringely/Stephens was in fact the 12th person hired by Apple, but didn’t get a formal employee number because he wasn't a full-time employee.
But Cringely stated on Triumph of the Nerds that he was literally "Employee #12". Other than this statement of his, there are no other sources to confirm that this was true. There's a very comprehensive list of early Apple employees with evidence to back them up here: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_early_Apple_Computer_e...
Mark Stephens does not appear anywhere in this list, nor have any other early employees confirmed that he worked there.
Yes, this might have just been a small slip-up on Cringely's part, but the trouble is that he continued to make claims about being employed by Apple that were clearly fabricated. For example, Cringely claimed to have invented the Lisa's trash can icon in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06M64l7pPIk&t=373s but if you read about the same story from other Apple employees, they don't mention him at all: https://folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html
These "tall tales" start to add up, and it becomes very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Cringely was a great writer, a great documentarian, and really wonderful at finding the human stories behind the giants of the personal computer industry. Unfortunately, he also often made up stories about himself that were later found to be untrue. He didn't need to do this, because his work stood on its own. It was just a flaw in his personality.
In any case, this is sad news. Rest in peace, Mark Stephens.
That's fair, there's some other stuff that he seems to have verifiably lied about. There's the Lisa stuff you mention, and he lied about being a professor at Stanford when in reality he was either a TA or one level above a TA (sort of like Lex Fridman and MIT). I'm not sure that he'd lie altogether about being an early Apple employee when he was presenting a show that interviewed both Jobs and Wozniak (who would likely see the show and know that he was lying), but who knows.
You might already know this because you seem to know a lot about him, but when I was researching the Lisa claim you brought up I found a CHM oral history with Dan'l Lewin (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...), where page 20 mentions that Cringely was married to Ellen Nold while she was working on the Lisa project. Maybe that's how he got some of his anecdotes about Apple in the early 80s. EDIT: Cringely's next Apple anecdote in the talk you linked was about AppleLink, and this photo has Nold listed as manager of support programs for AppleLink: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ellen-nold-the...
I agree that his tendency to exaggerate his own past is unfortunate but doesn't outweigh all the great journalism he's done.
>I wonder if we need better programming abstractions/ languages that can make programming easier for people.
That was nodejs, and it turns out people unwilling and or unable to improve things through systematic skill refinement just degrades into chaos.
Successful ecosystems are just pedantically lame enough to keep silly folks from going YOLO, but empowering enough to allow people to still have fun.
>which model has the best training code that was Pac-Man.
You mean which model is more cautious about copyright bleed-through of the $9Tn in FOSS and user code they misappropriated though isomorphic plagiarism. =3
It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).
>unfathomable number of games that were released
One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.
Last I heard he’s is now living in luxury in the United Arab Emirates. There was a profile on him in a paper.
I’m not sure Sam has enough cash to get a pardon.
“Mr. (Changpeng) Zhao has a long history of legal and regulatory problems. Binance pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. government. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Mr. Zhao was pardoned by Mr. Trump last year. Binance also forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company.” [1]
[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/30/technology/binance-hack-a...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/technology/trump-pardons-...
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