It's no secret in the past year Steve Jobs has become the incredible shrinking man, going from skinny to even skinnier and leading to speculation that the pancreatic cancer that nearly took his life in 2004 had returned.

In an exclusive but not especially pleasant phone call to New York Times business reporter Joe Nocera, Jobs revealed the truth about his medical condition; here's the small part of the interview that was on the record:

“This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

Jobs went on to tell Nocera off the record the reason for his dramatic weight loss, and while Nocera confirms it's not cancer, it is something more serious than the flu, as some Apple executives had suggested.

Apart from the human aspect of the story, if something happened to Steve Jobs in would send Apple stock plummeting, because despite the success of such products like the iPod and iPhone, Apple has already shown during Jobs' 1985-1997 exile that they can't survive without him.

Via