This will be the funniest thing you will read all day. An apparent excerpt from Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN quotes an epic exchange between Steve Jobs and the ESPN president:

The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. “I am George Bodenheimer,” he said to Jobs. “I run ESPN.” Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard,” then turned and walked away.

Steve is a champion who is not afraid of speaking his mind.

What an awesome find from Gruber of DaringFireball, who points out that the “dumbest” phone in question is this ESPN branded Samsung flip-phone from 2006, shown here:





DaringFireball also points out that ESPN and Disney when on to lose $135 million on that phone, which kind of proves it was a dumb idea. Assuming this quote comes from when that ESPN phone was released (mid-2006), this was pre-iPhone, but the iPhone was certainly being tested internally at that point for a launch the following year in January of 2007. The rest is history, as Apple released the iPhone which changed the entire face of the mobile industry, and in just Q3 2011 alone they sold over 20 million of the phones.

By the way, what better way to sell a book than an epic Steve Jobs quote?