There are an awful lot of Silicon Valley CEOs sporting beards these days. As Michael Copeland writes in the current issue of Fortune, “it takes more than leading-edge technology and a Stanford MBA to make it big in high tech. Apparently it takes whiskers.”
So the magazine organized a contest: The Silicon Valley Beard-off. It pulled together a spread of eight unshaven execs and invited a panel of three distinguished judges to choose the best beard of the bunch. You can see the results here.
You can also vote for your favorite among the four semi-finalists: Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs, Flickr’s (YHOO) Stewart Butterfield, Pixar’s (DIS) Ed Catmull, and Oracle’s (ORCL) Larry Ellison. Click here.
The leader in early returns — with 53% of votes cast as of Wednesday morning — is Steve Jobs.
Vox populi is clearly at variance with Fortune’s judges. They didn’t vote Apple’s grizzled CEO past the first round, in which he edged out Steve Wozniak.