- You wouldn't risk your new position by not quitting your old one.
- Apple would not want you to keep your old job since they want your focus on your new position.
- Getting double salaries is not worth the paperwork headache of tricking the system.
The only reason I can think of is, he would get some sort of extra pay from his old job if he would fulfil a time written on his old contract.
Given his experience in both tech media and automotive media, perhaps he was hired at Apple as part of the team whose responsibility it will be to construct the messaging and narrative around the unveiling of Apple's car program. As part of the secrecy around the project, he might well have been hired by one of Apple's automotive shell companies [1], thus his name not appearing in the Apple intranet.
As for his employment overlap, that sounds more like a mishandled quiet departure than anything else – Apple HR would certainly have instructed him to keep his transition low-profile, and maybe he simply screwed it up.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/alleged-apple-front-company-a...
It turned out playing out much like what Patel describes with Ziegler. Manager at old job became suspicious when he became largely unresponsive and figured out what was going on, then fired him. I think he thought he could do both at once better than he was able to.
Was he trying to time slice multiple processes like an OS?
I knew someone who jumped from TiVo to Google and part of the contention in the timing of the switch for him was options vesting.
So Google (well his hiring mgr/HR) told him to keep working at TiVo and get his bonus from them and they'd have something lined up for him to jump immediately afterwards. They couldn't let him work on Google proprietary stuff, though.
(conspiracy intensifies)
I don't believe this of course, but hey, tinfoil.
Anyway, this theory is getting too convoluted, hence almost certainly false :)