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Tony Fadell, the senior vice president at Apple and head of the iPod division is leaving Apple, according to WSJ. The reason for his departure is personal. WSJ is hinting that the recent hiring of Mark Papermaster, a former executive at IBM, was made to fill in the shoes of Fadell. However, IBM has sued this hiring accusing that Papermaster knows trade secrets about IBM’s business that he could share with Apple to give the company an unfair advantage.

When Fortune rundown possible Job’s successors, they praised Fadell in the following words:

With his American swagger and his hair bleached white, Fadell stood out at button-down Philips Electronics, where he led an in-house pirate operation designing Windows CE-based devices. It was there that he came up with the idea of marrying a Napster-like music store with a hard drive-based MP3 player. He shopped the concept around the Valley before Apple’s Jon Rubenstein snapped it up and put Fadell in charge of the engineering team that built the first iPod. Ambitious and charismatic (and no longer a bleached blond), he now runs the hardware division that makes two of Apple’s three key product lines: the iPod and the iPhone.

[via VentureBeat]