Ouch. Thank you for sharing this story. I am stunned but weirdly unsurprised. I encountered several people like this version of Bob in silicon valley. Some of them reached huge liquidity events and that bought them enough credibility that they’re still finessing people decades later. Completely agree with one of the comments under Jeremy’s post:

I guess I got fooled by Cringely back in the old days. His journalistic work with Triumph of the Nerds was great, but only because of the subject matter and the people being interviewed. Whenever the topic veered to Cringely himself (which happened more than it should have) the work suffered.