>> was Steve Jobs known for fabrications? ... known to say outrageous falsehoods?
Just off the top of my head... He lied to Woz about being paid to develop break out and stole money from him to go to India; He presented essentially a block of wood as the finished, functioning iPhone in 2008-ish; oh, and he denied paternity of his daughter Lisa as in "I am not the father" even after a paternity test. The last one seems pretty outrageous.
I'm not convinced he viewed himself as outright lying; He probably had seen Knuth's books and in his brain that meant he had read and understood them in their entirety.
So maybe don't be so quick to dismiss this as junk. It's a pretty innocuous example but completely inline with his behavior.
These make sense, but somehow they are more of the manipulative variety, whereas the incident with Knuth was outright bragging, which seems less like him.
Further, Donald Knuth, as is pointed out in another link on this thread, is quite humble and polite and unlikely to have called anyone full of shit.
This is uninteresting and very likely wrong. Let's not post junk like this.