Of course this goes without saying that O’Brien said all of this in jest and it should be pretty obvious, and in a post congratulating Satya Nadella on his new position, O’Brien wrote, “Sure, the Microsoft board never technically asked me to be their CEO. I did, however, get a tweet from Bill Gates once. So, you do the math. That is why I was proactive, as business visionaries often are, and sent a very nice “thanks, but no thanks” note with an Edible Arrangement to their Redmond, Washington campus.”
O’Brien went on to list the changes he would have made at Microsoft, before concluding with, “The reason I turned down the CEO job was simple – I knew, in my heart of hearts, that Microsoft would never, ever, let me rename the entire company CONAN. And at the end of the day, I just want to work for a company that’s in the business of me, me, me.”