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  • 2019-01-07 (xsd:date)
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  • Are These the Last Words of Billionaire Steve Gouves? (en)
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  • In December 2015, we looked into a bit of text being shared on social media which was said to represent the final words of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. We hoped our article helped to put the kibosh on that false rumor, but in January 2019 a nearly identical speech was circulated anew, only this time attributed to a different billionaire with an eerily similar name: Steve Gouves. The Steve Gouves death bed speech was shared by many social media users in January 2019, with one of the most popular postings being that of Joshua Feurstein, an evangelical internet personality who has previously spread misinformation and is perhaps most famously known for railing about Starbucks' Christmas cups. Fuerstein's posting included a photograph of a bearded man, presumably Mr. Steve Gouves, and the following text: The man in this photograph is not Steve Gouves but rather James R. Kirouac, a Level 2 Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique Practitioner with the company Leading Edge Thought, who, as best we can tell at the time of this writing, is still very much alive: The first half of this text (everything preceding Treat yourself well and cherish others) is a nearly verbatim copy of the fake deathbed speech falsely attributed to Steve Jobs back in 2015. That speech appears to have originated on a random blog and was never connected to Jobs in any real way. (You can read more about the actual last words of Steve Jobs here.) The second half of this text has been circulating independently from the first since at least September 2015, when it was posted to a Chinese language blog at xuite.net. That posting was not attributed to Jobs, Guoves, or any other billionaire, and it was not shared as if it were a deathbed speech. The fake Steve Jobs deathbed speech started making its way around the web in November 2015 and readers, apparently, have revised and expanded it over the years. At some point the text posted to xuite.net was tacked onto the end of the original fake speech, Jobs' name was changed to Guoves, and an image of an unrelated bald man was employed to depict the fictional billionaire. In short: Steve Guoves did not make this speech on his death bed because Steve Guoves does not exist. Much of this text was previously attributed to Steve Jobs, but the Apple co-founder did not utter those words on his death bed either. (en)
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