The timing was, frankly, impressive. Just days after the ex-CEO of Apple died at the beginning of October, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs opened at New York's Public Theater. A one-man show, unafraid to praise both the impact Jobs's desirable gadgets have had on the way we communicate and to ask serious questions about the conditions in which they were manufactured, its run was swiftly extended a further month, until December 4. Meanwhile, the rush-release biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson is No 1 in English-speaking book charts across the world.
The sanctification of Steve Jobs by those who constantly prod at their iPhones or tap away at their MacBooks continues apace. Can anyone imagine, it was asked in the days after his death, makeshift shrines set up in honour of any other chief executive? Would any other company executive inspire a playwright?
Another play in Los Angeles would certainly seem to suggest that, in the second decade of the 21st century, chief executives are becoming the new celebrities, their life stories ripe for interpretation. On Sunday, Windows completed its one-week run at the Odyssey Theatre. It's another one-man show delving into the psyche of a multimillionaire businessman and inventor – but this time with tongue firmly in cheek. The German theatre and film actor Clemens Schick (who starred in the recent Bond movie Casino Royale) casts Bill Gates as a pioneer, but also the "Napoleon of the internet community", in a show that mixes stand-up, performance and theatre.
And if that sounds like the kind of small-scale, experimental nonsense whose natural home is probably a cavern somewhere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, well ... it probably is. But there is the sense that we're becoming increasingly intrigued by the men in suits (or in Jobs's case, famous roll-neck jumpers) who run the companies that shape our world.
The success of The Social Network last year proved that we were indeed fascinated by the story of a nerd who wrote some computer code to flirt with girls at his college. He called his website Facebook, and the rest is history. But is the story of Mark Zuckerberg and his untold riches actually that interesting? It helped that the screenplay was brilliantly written by The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin. David Fincher turned the story of a successful start-up company into a film that explores what happens when a college kid unable to interact socially creates the ultimate tool for social interaction. But Facebook's 800 million active users identify so heavily with the brand, it's arguable that Sorkin could have written any old rubbish and people would still have flocked to see the story of a young man who had, apparently, "changed" their lives.
What's next, a Google movie? Well, possibly, yes. Although the trail has gone cold on the film of the Google founders and billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Ken Auletta's book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, was optioned last year. At the heart of the movie, it was promised, would be the idea of how a company could make money "without doing evil". Although a blockbuster where Google took control of the world by nefarious means, only to find its bid for hegemony thwarted by Will Smith, Independence Day-style, would surely be more entertaining.
Definitely in production, though, is The Murdochs, a take on the famous media family by the Oscar-nominated writer Jesse Armstrong. Famously on last year's Hollywood "Black List" of screenplays yet to be given the green light (although it wasn't that surprising 20th Century Fox passed over a story in which Rupert Murdoch is trying to alter the inheritance), the British television station Channel 4 has now stepped in after the phone-hacking revelations of this summer.
The Murdoch story does have an inherent, almost Shakespearean drama, a tale of crass wrongdoing which ended in the closure of the biggest Sunday newspaper in the world. The interest in Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg, though, is emblematic of something more serious. These people have made our lives easier, but hailing them as the cornerstones of our culture hints at how obsessed we've become with materialism. After all, Apple's last trading figures announced profits of $7.31bn (Dh26.8bn); it might make a nice shiny phone, but in the end it is just another big, profitable company. Is that really the stuff of great drama ... or just an easy and all too familiar story about money and power?
