Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  Chapter 17

  “Just Tell Them I’m Being an Asshole”

  In early December 2008, Steve called me at my home office in Foster City, California. He said he had something important to tell me.

  For several months, I had been working to set up a joint interview of Steve, Andy Grove, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell. The confab was supposed to kick off the reporting for a book I had in mind. I had what I thought was a snappy title—Founders Keepers—and a plan to describe how a handful of geeky entrepreneurs had evolved into captains of industry; how self-absorbed inventors morphed into self-taught empire builders; how shaggy-haired idealists managed to stay in the saddle even as the companies they created grew rapidly by orders of magnitude, and as their own wealth and influence over the world itself became far more than the stuff of dreams.

  I had intended to get started on the book in 2005. But while traveling on a road trip to Nicaragua for what was supposed to be a long vacation, I became very sick. Endocarditis lodged on the artificial heart valve that had been implanted in my aorta eight years before, and it had spread from there throughout my body. In my spinal column the infection gestated into meningitis, and from there entered the lining of my brain. Other infections landed in a lung, in my intestines, and elsewhere throughout my body. Doctors in a Managua hospital saved my life, but only by inducing a coma and blasting me with antibiotics that, while quelling the infection, caused me to lose 65 percent of my hearing, including going completely deaf in one ear. My employer, Time Inc., had me medevacced by jet back to Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, where I endured three weeks in the intensive care unit. The doctors there were puzzled by what exactly was keeping me so sick.

  During this time, Steve came to visit me in the hospital a couple of times. I was so addled with sedatives and painkillers and my own delirious hallucinations that during one visit I expressed my sincerest regrets at not being able to play saxophone in a Beatles retrospective show he was planning to put on in Las Vegas with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Somehow I had thought he had taken up guitar in order to play the part of John Lennon himself, and he had asked me to be part of the backup band. Unfortunately, I explained to Steve, with my new hearing-loss problem, I’d never be able to pull it off. Apparently, Steve and my wife, Lorna, had a good laugh. At least that’s what she told me later when I had regained my senses. She also said that before leaving, he said, “I’ve told them to give you the VIP treatment here. Call me if you need anything.”

  We stayed in touch off and on by email over the coming few years, as I slowly recovered in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I managed to write one last cover story for Fortune by turning a series of four interviews with Pixar’s John Lasseter into his own first-person narrative. Steve didn’t make time for photographs or even a short interview for the story, despite his closeness to Lasseter. It turns out that he had decided not to work with me on magazine stories anymore. Perhaps my zany behavior during the hospital visits had convinced him that I would never be able to tell Apple’s (or Pixar’s) stories with the same level of sophistication I had applied in the past, or perhaps it was something else. I never did learn his reason.

  Despite having no interest in working with me on magazine articles, Steve seemed genuinely curious about the book idea. He and I had discussed the project a few times, and in the spring of 2008 I told him I wanted to set up a roundtable discussion of around eight founders, as the centerpiece of my reporting. “That’s way too many people,” he snorted. “Everybody will want their camera time, and nobody will say much of anything honest or real.” Instead, he suggested, “Focus your book on the emergence of the PC. There are four of us, really. Me, Bill, Andy [Grove], and Michael [Dell]. Get us together and we’ll have a good discussion. It will be more focused. We know each other’s weaknesses and strengths. It will make a much better story for you to tell, and we’ll all have to be more honest.”

  He even offered to help me wrangle the other three, although I told him I didn’t think that was necessary. Just being able to tell them that Steve wanted to do it was enough to get them to readily buy in to the idea. Announcing Steve’s involvement was like waving a magic wand. I got immediate responses from the other three, despite their very tight schedules. After some back and forth, we set a date for converging at the offices of Andy Grove’s family foundation in downtown Los Altos, California, on Thursday, December 18. All four committed to spend lunch and the entire afternoon together. Andy’s longtime admin, Terri Murphy, arranged for the food after I had consulted with Lanita Burkhead, Steve’s administrative assistant, about what would work for her notoriously finicky boss—sushi, perhaps a salad, and herbal tea.

  But here Steve was, in the early afternoon of December 11, calling me at home on the phone. “Hi, Brent, this is Steve.” Before waiting for me to respond, he immediately announced, “I really hate to have to say this but I just can’t make it next Thursday.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Steve, we have been planning on this for six months. Everybody else cleared out a whole day on their schedules so they could be here for this. Lanita said everything was all set last week. We can’t do it if you aren’t there.”

  “Sure you can,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and waited for him to explain.

  “I have to tell you, Brent, my health has really gone downhill. I can’t put on any weight. You know me, I’m a vegan, and I’ve even started getting chocolate milk shakes now, eating cheese, anything. But I keep wasting away. You wouldn’t want to see me like this. The others wouldn’t, either. Laurene says I can’t wait any longer. I have to deal with this. And she’s right.”

  I asked him about the earlier surgery, and why he had insisted so strongly that he had been cured. Was it his pancreas still? Or was it something else? He told me it was some sort of endocrine disorder that seemed to have made it difficult for his body to digest food. “I eat something, and it goes right through me,” he said.

  “Whatever it is, I have to drop everything else and figure it out now. It has to be my only priority. I owe it to my family. I haven’t even told the board or Tim and the others this yet, but I am going to have to take another medical leave. MacWorld is coming up, so I have to announce it before then, because I don’t think I can do that, either.”

  Then his tone changed. “I’ve always told you what was happening with my health, because you can relate. So I’m sure you know you can’t tell anyone else about this. It’s just between you and me. That’s why I called. Because I wanted to tell you myself. I wanted you to know that I really wanted to do this with you, too. But I just can’t.”

  Sitting there on the edge of the daybed in my home office, I tried to imagine what Steve must look like. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since the Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco the previous June. He had looked thin then, but he had also had a spring in his step. iPhones were flying out of the stores and the App Store was selling apps by the millions. iMacs, now pristine white rectangular slabs that floated in front of you, were selling better than ever. And the new MacBook Air—the laptop equivalent of a sleek supermodel—was the latest “it” device.

  “So, what am I supposed to say to Bill and Andy and Michael?” I asked. “They’re going to want to know why you are pulling out at the very last minute. Should I tell them you aren’t feeling up to it? I won’t say anything more than that.”

  At first Steve didn’t answer. Then, after a few beats, with a mordant giggle, he said, “Just tell them I’m being an asshole. That’s what they’ll probably be thinking, anyway, so why not just say it?”

  I was dumbfounded. “Do you really want me to say that?” I replied, thinking that none of them would buy it for a minute. They knew that Steve wouldn’t have put me up to the whole roundtable thing, only to back out. He could be a jerk, but he wasn’t an asshole. “All I ask is that you just don’t tell them the real reason. Not yet.”

  I didn’t tell Michae
l or Andy or Bill anything other than that Steve had to cancel because of a personal conflict that had come up. A month or so later, after Apple had announced Steve’s medical leave for “complex” health-related issues, I saw Bill at his office in Kirkland, Washington. He told me he wanted to get in touch with Steve and wasn’t sure of the best means. It had been a long time since they had spoken. I gave him Steve’s home phone number and his cellphone number, and also the email address and phone number of his assistant Lanita, but not before relating the story of the “asshole” excuse Steve had suggested. Bill loves a smart riposte as much as anyone, so we had a good laugh.

  ACCORDING TO TIM COOK, he and Katie Cotton, Apple’s communications chief, first learned about Steve’s need for a liver transplant in January 2009, a few weeks after Steve and I spoke. But he had watched Steve wither away during 2008. By early 2009 Steve wasn’t coming into the office at all, and Cook would visit him at home just about every day. He started to worry that things might finally be headed in a fatal direction. “It was terrible going over there day after day and talking with him, because you could see him slipping day after day,” says Cook. Steve was starting to look alarmingly frail. He developed ascites—an accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal cavity that caused his belly to protrude in ghastly fashion—and he just lay in bed all day, gaunt and tired and irritable.

  He was on the list of people in California who were awaiting a liver transplant. This isn’t a list that can be gamed. At one of their many bedside meetings, Steve told Cook that he thought he might have a better chance at a liver transplant than others because he had a rare blood type. It wasn’t a statement that made any sense to Cook, because while there were fewer applicants on the list with Steve’s blood type, there were also fewer people of that blood type whose livers could be transplanted to him. In fact, Steve’s chances of getting a donor were not good at all.

  One afternoon, Cook left the house feeling so upset that he had his own blood tested. He found out that he too had a rare blood type, and made the assumption that it might be the same as Steve’s. He started doing research, and learned that it is possible to transfer a portion of a living person’s liver to someone in need of a transplant. About six thousand living-donor transplants are performed every year in the United States, and the rate of success for both donor and recipient is high. The liver is a regenerative organ. The portion transplanted into the recipient will grow to a functional size, and the portion of the liver that the donor gives up will also grow back.

  Cook decided to undergo a battery of tests that determine if someone is healthy enough to be a living donor. “I thought he was going to die,” Cook explains. He went to a hospital far from the Bay Area, since he didn’t want to be recognized. The day after he returned from the trip, he went to visit Steve. And there, sitting alone with him in the bedroom of the Palo Alto house, Tim began to offer his liver to Steve. “I really wanted him to do it,” he remembers. “He cut me off at the legs, almost before the words were out of my mouth. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll never let you do that. I’ll never do that!’ ”

  “Somebody that’s selfish,” Cook continues, “doesn’t reply like that. I mean, here’s a guy, he’s dying, he’s very close to death because of his liver issue, and here’s someone healthy offering a way out. I said, ‘Steve, I’m perfectly healthy, I’ve been checked out. Here’s the medical report. I can do this and I’m not putting myself at risk, I’ll be fine.’ And he doesn’t even think about it. It was not, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ It was not, ‘I’ll think about it.’ It was not, ‘Oh, the condition I’m in …’ It was, ‘No, I’m not doing that!’ He kind of popped up in bed and said that. And this was during a time when things were just terrible. Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the thirteen years I knew him, and this was one of them.”

  “This picture of him isn’t understood,” says Cook. “I thought the [Walter] Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short.” In saying this, Cook echoed the feeling of many of Steve’s close friends—in interview after interview, they complained that very little of what has been published offers any sense of why they would have worked so long and so hard for Steve. Those former employees share another common thread, too: the idea that they did the very best work of their lives for Steve.

  “Steve cared,” Cook continues. “He cared deeply about things. Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him. He wanted everyone to do their best work. He believed that small teams were better than large teams, because you could get a lot more done. And he believed that picking the right person was a hundred times better than picking somebody who was a little short of being right. All of those things are really true. A lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance. He wasn’t a saint. I’m not saying that. None of us are. But it’s emphatically untrue that he wasn’t a great human being, and that is totally not understood.

  “The Steve that I met in early ’98 was brash and confident and passionate and all of those things. But there was a soft side of him as well, and that soft side became a larger portion of him over the next thirteen years. You’d see that show up in different ways. There were different employees and spouses here that had health issues, and he would go out of his way to turn heaven and earth to make sure they had proper medical attention. He did that in a major way, not in a minor, ‘Call me and get back to me if you need my help’ kind of way.

  “He had the courage to admit he was wrong, and to change, a quality which many people at that level, who have accomplished that much, lack. You don’t see many people at that level who will change directions even though they should. He wasn’t beholden to anything except a set of core values. Anything else he could walk away from. He could do it faster than anyone I’d ever seen before. It was an absolute gift. He always changed. Steve had this ability to go through a learning curve quickly, more quickly than anybody I’ve known, about such a wide variety of things.

  “The Steve I knew was the guy pestering me to have a social life, not because he was being a pest, but because he knew how important family was in his life, and he wanted it for me, too,” continues Cook, who came out publicly as a gay man in 2014. (Steve and others at the company had known this for years, of course.) “One day he calls my mom—he doesn’t even know my mom, she lives in Alabama. He said he was looking for me, but he knows how to find me! And he talked to her about me. There are lots of these things where you saw the very soft or caring or feeling or whatever you want to call it side of him. He had that gene. Someone who’s viewing life only as a transactional relationship with people … doesn’t do that.”

  EVENTUALLY STEVE DID get a liver transplant. He had also registered on another list in Memphis, Tennessee, which was perfectly legal; the only requirements to get on an out-of-state list were that he could make his way to the hospital within eight hours of being told that a liver was available—since Steve had a private jet, he could do so—and that he be judged healthy enough to recover from the surgery by a team of doctors from the admitting hospital. He and Laurene flew to Memphis for the surgery on March 21, 2009. Because of complications, he required a second surgery a couple of days later. He and Laurene remained in Memphis for two excruciating months, during which things were so touch-and-go that relatives and close friends such as Jony Ive, Mona Simpson, Steve’s lawyer George Riley, and others came to visit and perhaps say goodbye to him. Ive even brought a special present from the Apple design team—a meticulous miniature aluminum replica of the Macbook Pro that would ship in June. The designers had made these nano-models for Steve after every product release. Given the circumstances, this one was special.


  Steve survived, of course. He later told Bob Iger that he had considered leaving Apple after the operation, to spend more time with his children at home. But, as Eddy Cue says, “Steve really just had two things he cared about in his life, Apple—and to some extent, Pixar—and his family.” He needed both. He returned to work, and just as he had after his 2004 operation, he did so with vigor. He had a new milestone he wanted to achieve before he died: the introduction of the iPad.

  DEVELOPING THE IPAD was easier, technologically, than creating the iPod or the iPhone. In the first instance, the team had had to learn an utterly new way to operate. In the case of the iPhone, Apple pushed the personal computer revolution to its pinnacle, by melding three devices into one handheld supercomputer. Now, armed with the experience of those two battles, Steve and his team were able to create something whose attributes were ethereal and unexpected. Back in 2004, Steve had shifted Project Purple away from the tablet and toward the phone. By doing so, he ensured that Apple’s tablet device would be a line extension of the iPhone; when his team turned to building the iPad, they maximized an iPhone, rather than opt to minimize an iMac. That meant using ARM-based microprocessors, which are common in smartphones, rather than the more power-hungry Intel chips that drive many computers. That meant adopting the iPhone’s multi-touch screen and virtual keyboard. Perhaps most important of all—and most ironic, given Steve’s initial resistance—the iPad would benefit enormously from the iTunes App Store. The iPad gave software developers a much more powerful target to shoot for than the iPhone, mainly because the larger screen made it possible and practical to do some really cool things that you could not do on a pocket-sized device. Often sold at the same low price points as iPhone apps, these cool new iPad apps seemed like an even better deal as they exploded on those bigger screens. The iPad multiplied the importance of the App Store, and the influence of the new market and business model for software that it had created.