Becoming Steve Jobs Read online

  Over time, our similar ages became a bridge more than a barrier. Steve and I had navigated similar adolescent rites of passage. I could say the same thing about Bill Gates, whom I also covered extensively, but he wasn’t the product of a working-class upbringing or public schools as Steve and I were. All three of us had dodged the bullet of serving in Vietnam because the military draft was abolished by the time we had turned eighteen. Yet Steve and I, more than Bill, were true products of the antiwar, peace and love, tune in/turn on generation. We were music nuts and gaga for gadgets, and we weren’t afraid to experiment with outlandish new ideas or experiences. Steve had been adopted as a child, and we did occasionally talk about what that had been like, but that aspect of his upbringing never seemed nearly as big an influence on his intellectual and cultural development as was the larger social and political milieu—and the high-tech sandbox—in which we came of age.

  In those early years, Steve had an important reason to cultivate our relationship. In the ever-shifting computer world of the late 1980s, building breathless anticipation for his Next Big Thing was crucial to attracting potential customers and investors, and Steve would need plenty of the latter, given that NeXT would take nearly five years to produce a working computer. Throughout his life, Steve had a keen sense of the tactical value of press coverage; this was just one part of what Regis McKenna, perhaps his most important early mentor, calls “Steve’s natural gift for marketing. Even when he was twenty-two years old he had the intuition,” McKenna elaborated. “He understood what was great about Sony, about Intel. He wanted that kind of image for what he was going to create.”

  Knowing that Apple was also among the companies I covered for the Journal, and later for Fortune, Steve would call up at seemingly random moments over the coming years to offer me “intelligence” that he’d heard from former colleagues who were still there, or simply to share his opinions on the interminable executive soap opera at his old company in Cupertino. Over time I learned that he was a reliable source about the mess that Apple became in the early 1990s—and I also came to realize that there was nothing random about those calls. Steve always had an ulterior motive: sometimes he was hoping to glean something about a competitor; sometimes he had a product he wanted me to check out; sometimes he wanted to chastise me for something I’d written. In the latter case, he could also play the withholding game; once, in the late 1990s, after his return to the company he had cofounded, I sent him a note to say that I thought it was about time for me to write another Apple story for Fortune. I had been out of touch for several months because I’d had open-heart surgery—he had called me at the hospital to wish me well—but now I was ready to jump on another piece. His email reply was simple: “Brent,” he wrote, “as I recall, you wrote a rather mean story about me and Apple last summer. I remember this hurting my feelings. Why did you write such a nasty story?” But a few months later he relented, and cooperated for another cover feature about the company.

  Ours was a long, complicated, and mostly rewarding relationship. When I would run into Steve at industry events, he would introduce me as his friend, which was flattering, odd, true, and yet not true all at the same time. During the brief time when he had an office in Palo Alto near Fortune’s bureau, I would run into him around town now and then, and we’d stop to chat about all kinds of things. Once, I helped him shop for his wife Laurene’s birthday present. I visited his home many times, always for one work reason or another, but with an informality that I’ve never encountered from another CEO. And yet there was never a minute where the basic terms of our relationship weren’t clear: I was the reporter, he was the source and subject. He enjoyed some of my stories—others, like the one that prompted that email, infuriated him. My independence and his hoarding of information created the borders of our relationship.

  This necessary distance expanded during the last few years of his life. Both of us got very sick in the mid-2000s; he was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, while in 2005 I contracted endocarditis and meningitis during a trip to Central America, which put me in a near coma for fourteen days and eventually took away almost all my hearing. He knew more about my illness than I knew about his, of course. Still, he did sometimes reveal details—one time we even compared surgical scars, much like Quint (Robert Shaw) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) in the movie Jaws. He visited me in the Stanford hospital twice during the weeks when I was recovering—stopping by when coming in for regular checkups with his oncologist. He told me some awful jokes about Bill Gates, and excoriated me for having continued to smoke cigarettes despite his admonitions over the years. Steve always did love to tell people how to conduct their personal lives.

  AFTER STEVE DIED, reams of armchair analysis unfurled: articles, books, movies, and television shows. Often they resurrected old myths about Steve, using stereotypes that had been created way back in the 1980s, when the press discovered the wunderkind from Cupertino. In those early years, Steve was susceptible to the flattery of the press, and he opened himself and his company to reporters. He was at his most undisciplined and most intemperate then. As much as he showed a genius for imagining breakthrough products, he also could display a disturbing meanness and indifference toward both employees and friends. So when he started limiting access, and cooperating with the press only when he needed to promote his products, the tales from those early days at Apple became the conventional wisdom about his personality and thinking. Perhaps that’s why the posthumous coverage reflected these stereotypes: Steve was a genius with a flair for design, a shaman whose storytelling power could generate something magical and maleficent called a “reality distortion field”; he was a pompous jerk who disregarded everyone else in his single-minded pursuit of perfection; he thought he was smarter than anyone else, never listened to advice, and was an unchanging half-genius, half-asshole from birth.

  None of this jibed with my experience of Steve, who always seemed more complex, more human, more sentimental, and even more intelligent than the man I read about elsewhere. A few months after his death, I started combing through the old notes, tapes, and files from my stories about him. There were all kinds of things I’d forgotten: off-the-cuff notes I’d written about him, stories he’d told me during interviews that I couldn’t use at the time for one sensitive reason or another, old chains of emails we’d exchanged, even a few tapes I’d never transcribed. There was an audiocassette he’d made for me that was a dubbed copy of one given to him by John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, with all the various versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever” recorded during its lengthy composition process. These were all stored away in my garage, and unearthing them triggered many buried memories of Steve over the years. After rustling through these personal relics from the past for a few weeks, I decided that it wasn’t enough to grumble about the one-dimensional myths about Steve that were ossifying in the public mind; I wanted to offer a fuller picture and deeper understanding of the man I had covered so intensely, in a way that hadn’t been possible when he was alive. Covering Steve had been fascinating and dramatic. His was a truly Shakespearean tale, full of arrogance, intrigue, and pride, of perceived villains and ham-handed fools, of outrageous luck, good intentions, and unimagined consequences. There were so many ups and so many downs in so short a time that it had been impossible to draw the broad trajectory of his success while he was living. Now I wanted to take the long view of the man I’d covered for so many years, the man who had called himself my friend.

  THE MOST BASIC question about Steve’s career is this: How could the man who had been such an inconsistent, inconsiderate, rash, and wrongheaded businessman that he was exiled from the company he founded become the venerated CEO who revived Apple and created a whole new set of culture-defining products that transformed the company into the most valuable and admired enterprise on earth and that changed the everyday lives of billions of people from all different socioeconomic strata and cultures? The answer wasn’t something Steve had ever been all that interested in di
scussing. While he was an introspective guy, he was not inclined to retrospection: “What’s the point in looking back,” he told me in one email. “I’d rather look forward to all the good things to come.”

  A real answer would have to show how he changed, who influenced those changes, and how he applied what he’d learned to the business of making great computing devices. As I pored over my old documents, I kept coming back to the time that many have described as his “wilderness” years, the dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return. That era, from 1985 to 1997, is easy to overlook. The lows aren’t as dramatic as the blowups of his first tenure at Apple, and the highs, of course, aren’t as thrilling as those he engineered in the first decade of the twenty-first century. These were muddled, complicated times, and not the stuff of easy headlines. But those years are in fact the critical ones of his career. That’s when he learned most everything that made his later success possible, and that’s when he started to temper and channel his behavior. To overlook those years is to fall into the trap of only celebrating success. We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve’s last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values—the whole Pandora’s box of immaturity—were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in later years.

  By the end of that decade in the woods, despite his many missteps, Steve had, remarkably enough, salvaged both NeXT and Pixar. The legacy of the first secured his professional future, while the triumph of the second ensured his financial well-being. His experience at both companies taught him lessons that, in retrospect, determined the future of Apple and helped define the world we live in. Steve could be intransigent, and nothing was ever learned easily or superficially, but learn he did. Driven and curious even when things were tough, he was a learning machine during these years, and he took to heart all that he gleaned.

  No one works in a vacuum. Getting married and beginning a family changed Steve profoundly, in ways that had an enormous positive impact on his work. I had plenty of glimpses into Steve’s personal life over the years, and several encounters with Laurene and their children. But I was not a close friend of the family. When I started to report this book, in late 2012, it seemed that I might not learn much more about his personal life. Saddened by his death and feeling burned by some of what had been published about Steve posthumously, many of his closest colleagues and friends originally refused to talk to me. But that changed over time, and those conversations with his most intimate friends and colleagues—including the only four Apple employees to attend his private burial—revealed a side of Steve that I had sensed, but had not fully understood, and that I have certainly never read about elsewhere. Steve was capable of extraordinary compartmentalization. It’s a talent that allowed him to master and keep track of the various pieces of an entity as complex as Apple upon his return. It allowed him to maintain his focus despite the cacophony of worries that came with knowing he had cancer. It also allowed him to maintain a deep and meaningful life outside the office, while revealing little of that to people who weren’t part of his close inner circle.

  Of course, he could be a difficult man, even late in his life. For some people, he was hellish to work for. His belief in the value of his mission allowed him to rationalize behavior that many of us might well deplore. But he could also be a loyal friend, and an encouraging mentor. He was capable of great kindness and genuine compassion, and he was an attentive and loving father. He believed deeply in the value of what he chose to do with his life, and he hoped those close to him believed in the value of their work just as deeply. For a man who so thoroughly “deviated from the mean,” as his friend and colleague Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, puts it, he had deeply human feelings, strengths, and failings.

  What I have always loved about business journalism, and what I have learned from the very best colleagues I’ve worked with, is that there is always a human side to the seemingly calculated world of industry. I knew this was true about Steve when he was alive—no one else I have ever covered was so passionate about the creations of his business. But only in writing this book have I come to understand just how much the personal life and the business life of Steve Jobs overlapped, and just how much the one informed the other. You can’t really understand how Steve became our generation’s Edison and Ford and Disney and Elvis, all rolled into one, until you understand this. It’s what makes his reinvention such a great tale.

  AT THE END of our first interview, Steve walked me down the neat and glimmering hallways of NeXT’s headquarters to the exit. We didn’t exchange small talk. As far as he was concerned, our conversation was over. As I exited he didn’t even say goodbye. He just stood there, looking out the glass doors toward the entrance of the parking lot on Deer Creek Road where a crew of workmen was installing a 3-D version of the NeXT logo. As I drove away, he was lingering there still, staring at his hundred-grand logo. He knew in his bones, as he would say, that he was about to do something great. In reality, of course, he had no idea what was ahead of him.

  Chapter 1

  Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah

  On a cold December afternoon in 1979, Steve Jobs pulled into the parking lot of the Garden of Allah, a retreat and conference center on the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He was tired, frustrated, angry, and late. The traffic on 280 and 101 had been at a standstill much of the way up from Cupertino, way down south in Silicon Valley, where the company he’d founded, Apple Computer, had its headquarters, and where he had just suffered through a meeting of Apple’s board of directors, which was chaired by the venerable Arthur Rock. He and Rock didn’t see eye-to-eye on much of anything. Rock treated him like a child. Rock loved order, he loved processes, he believed that tech companies grew in certain ways according to certain rules, and he subscribed to these beliefs because he’d seen them work before, most notably at Intel, the great Santa Clara chipmaker that he had backed early on. Rock was perhaps the most notable tech investor of his time, but he in fact had been reluctant to back Apple at first, largely because he’d found Steve and his partner Steve Wozniak unpalatable. He didn’t see Apple the way Jobs saw it—as an extraordinary company that would humanize computing and do so with a defiantly unhierarchical organization. Rock simply viewed it as another investment. Steve found board meetings with Rock enervating, not invigorating; he had looked forward to a long, fast drive to Marin with the top down to get rid of the stale stench of seemingly endless discussion.

  But the Bay Area was shrouded in mist and rain, so the top stayed up. Slick roads made the traffic stultifying, so much so that it took all the pleasure out of the drive in his brand-new Mercedes-Benz 450SL. Steve loved the car; he loved it the way he loved his Linn Sondek audiophile turntable and his Ansel Adams platinum prints. The car, in fact, was a model for what he thought computers should be: powerful, sleek, intuitive, and efficient, nothing wasted at all. But this afternoon the weather and the traffic had defeated the car. Consequently he was about half an hour late to the initial meeting of the Seva Foundation, a creation of his friend Larry Brilliant, who looked like a little Buddha himself, albeit in track shoes. Seva’s goal was pleasingly ambitious: eliminate a certain kind of blindness that affected millions of people in India.

  Steve parked and got out of the car. At six feet tall and a trim 165 pounds, with brown hair that touched his shoulders and deep, penetrating eyes, he would have been striking anywhere. But in the three-piece suit he’d worn to the board meeting he looked particularly resplendent. Jobs didn’t quite know how he felt about the suit. At Apple, people wore whatever they wanted. He often showed up barefoot.

  The Garden of Allah was a quaint sort of mansion, built on a hillock up Mount Tamalpais, the verdant peak overlooking San Francisc
o Bay. Nestled into a covey of redwoods and cypress trees, it meshed classic California Arts and Crafts style with the feel of a Swiss chalet. Built in 1916 for a wealthy Californian by the name of Ralston Love White, it had been operated by the United Church of Christ since 1957 as a retreat and meeting site. Steve walked across the lawn of the heart-shaped driveway, climbed some stairs to a broad veranda, and entered the building.

  Inside, one look at the crew gathered around the conference table would have told any casual bystander this was not your typical church gathering. On one side of the table was Ram Dass, the Jewish-born Hindu yogi who in 1971 had published one of Steve’s favorite books, Be Here Now, a bestselling guide to meditation, yoga, and spiritual seeking. Nearby sat Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead singer and guitarist—the Dead would be performing a benefit for Seva at the Oakland Coliseum on December 26. Stephen Jones, an epidemiologist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, was in attendance, as was Nicole Grasset. Brilliant and Jones had worked for Grasset in India and Bangladesh as part of the World Health Organization’s audacious—and successful—program to eradicate smallpox. The counterculture’s favorite trickster philosopher, Wavy Gravy, was there, too, sitting with his wife near Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, the founder of India’s Aravind Eye Hospital, which eventually would help millions of people with an operation that repairs blindness caused by cataracts, a malady that then plagued the region. Brilliant was hoping to pull off something almost as audacious as wiping out smallpox. His goal for Seva was that it would support the work of people like Dr. V (as Brilliant called Venkataswamy) by setting up eye camps throughout Southern Asia to restore sight to the blind in poor rural areas.