When Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, said three years ago "remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered", he may not have realised that he was set to receive a very big reminder of his mortality, courtesy of the Bloomberg news service.

Today the US news agency erroneously published an obituary of Mr Jobs, detailing at length the entrepreneur's impressive corporate track record and also his tendency to use disabled parking bays in order to get to his office quicker.

The obituary seems to have been updated earlier this year when Mr Jobs appeared in public having lost a great deal of weight, sparking speculation that the billionaire's pancreatic cancer had returned.

At the time, Mr Jobs tried to quieten the speculation by insisting that while he was suffering from something more serious than a common bug, it was not life threatening. After surgery in 2005, Mr Jobs had managed to recover from cancer.

Bloomberg issued a correction today indicating that "the article was never meant for publication and has been retracted".

As the 53 year old ponders how the world will remember him, he might also consider that he joins a distinguished list of individuals who have been able to read their own obituaries.

The authors Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain were both written off before they had died. David Swarbrick, the British folk violinist, was killed off mistakenly by one British newspaper in April 1999 when it reported that a visit to hospital in Coventry had resulted in his death. Happily, Mr Swarbrick was able to quip: "It's not the first time I have died in Coventry."

Apart from one obvious error, the obituary faithfully details at length Mr Jobs' launch of the visionary Apple Mac computer, the importance of the iPod in consumer history, and the creation of Pixar, the animation movie studio, all achievements which define the entrepreneur as one of the most important visionaries of his time.

Parts of the obituary, however, may make uncomfortable reading. One former colleague – Andy Hertzfeld – who designed the Mac operating system software – describes in the article how those around Mr Jobs understood "the reality distortion field" which surrounded him that included "an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand".

Ian Brunskill, Obituaries Editor of The Times, said: "It is the worst thing you can do, but it could happen to any of us. We have a system at The Times where we always have to have a date of death -- some other papers don't. It gives us a bit of a safety net. But it will never be foolproof."

Spokesmen for Apple and for Bloomberg failed to return calls.

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