WEIRD SCIENCE: THE MOST AWESOMELY eCCENTRIC TECH CEOS

The tech industry attracts some of the brightest, most motivated talent from around the world with limitless opportunity for creative achievement and cash. With these rewards, however, come increasing demands to be better than average, a requirement which often means tech CEOs are…shall we say, quirky? Eccentric is an understatement when sizing up who’s who in the industry, and the following CEOs are just plain kooky…

Steve Jobs:

The original odd boss, Steve Jobs’ quirks as Apple’s CEO are known worldwide. Here are a few of my favorites: he insisted on being “employee 0” on his company nametag at Apple because it came before 1, he has a soft spot for calligraphy, he wears Levi blue jeans with New Balance sneakers and a black turtleneck EVERY SINGLE DAY, he’s a vegan, he makes $1 annually as Apple’s CEO, and he once called Starbucks to order 4,000 lattes to-go. That should do it.

Mark Zuckerberg:

Where to start with the founder of Facebook? In his mid-20s, Zuckerberg is notoriously socially inept and has been known in his past to challenge fellow developers to fencing matches for no apparent reason. It’s been reported that his apartment has no furniture save a bed and two side tables, and it’s a rental. He doesn’t own a TV. With “Social Network” the movie now chronicling his eccentricities, there’s little left to the imagination.

Seth Priebatsch:

At 21 years old, the founder and CEO of SCVNGR (a highly successful smartphone app) is never seen around the office with shoes or without a trademark pair of neon-orange sunglasses atop his head. His business card describes him as SCVNGR’s “chief ninja,” and he populates his office shelves with models of toy cars. Highly competitive as a child, Priebatsch once took a nap immediately upon reaching the finish line of a mile-long race he’d just won because he was “tired and bored.”

Jeff Bezos:

Bezos’s interests range from Wall Street to space travel, and he started Amazon.com in 1994 after a particularly fruitful cross-country road trip. With a notoriously raucous laugh and a penchant for straight lines and math, he dictates that everyone at his company must work on “two-pizza teams,” that is, teams that are small enough that they can be fed by, you guessed it, two pizzas.

Caterina Fake:

Who is she? Well, she co-founded Flickr, but since she’s a woman and works in tech, you’ve probably never heard of her. She’s got a hand in everything from Etsy to Hunch.com, and says on her own blog that she’s into “dogs, duct tape…and weather.” If her husband’s long, rambling resignation letter (all about tin – seriously. Tin, the metal.) to Yahoo is any indication of how weird Fake herself is, well, she’s pretty weird.