The members of his executive team came by regularly. His worsening health made an already tight group of executives even closer. They talked with him about work, and sometimes they’d just hang around to watch a movie or have dinner. Their work together on what Cook calls the “treadmill” of Apple’s perpetual innovation machine had only intensified as the company gained momentum. “Steve had been close to the first group,” says Laurene, referring to the team with Fred Anderson, Avie Tevanian, and Jon Rubinstein that had saved Apple with Steve, “but he loved the last group. I think it was because of the amazing, amazing work they did together.”
On August 11, a Sunday, Steve called Tim Cook and asked him to come over to the house. “He said, ‘I want to talk to you about something,’ ” remembers Cook. “This was when he was home all the time, and I asked when, and he said, ‘Now.’ So I came right over. He told me he had decided that I should be CEO. I thought then that he thought he was going to live a lot longer when he said this, because we got into a whole level of discussion about what would it mean for me to be CEO with him as a chairman. I asked him, ‘What do you really not want to do that you’re doing?’
“It was an interesting conversation,” Cook says, with a wistful laugh. “He says, ‘You make all the decisions.’ I go, ‘Wait. Let me ask you a question.’ I tried to pick something that would incite him. So I said, ‘You mean that if I review an ad and I like it, it should just run without your okay?’ And he laughed, and said, ‘Well, I hope you’d at least ask me!’ I asked him two or three times, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ because I saw him getting better at that point in time. I went over there often during the week, and sometimes on the weekends. Every time I saw him he seemed to be getting better. He felt that way as well. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.”
Cook had been the obvious candidate for years. He had already run the company twice, during Steve’s medical leaves in 2004 and 2009. And Steve preferred an internal replacement. “If you believe that it’s important to understand Apple’s culture deeply, you wind up clicking to an internal candidate,” explains Cook. “If I were leaving this afternoon I’d recommend an inside candidate, because I don’t think there’s any way somebody could come in and understand the complexity of what we do and really get the culture in that deep way. And I think Steve knew that it also needed to be somebody that believed in the Beatles concept. Apple would not be served well to have a CEO that wanted to, or felt like they needed to, replace him precisely. I don’t think there is such a person, but you could envision people trying. He knew that I would never be so dumb as to do that, or even feel that I needed to do that.”
Steve had discussed the subject with Cook for years, so none of this came as a surprise. And they had talked often about the fate of Apple after Steve’s death. As Cook puts it, “He didn’t want us asking, ‘What would Steve do?’ He abhorred the way the Disney culture stagnated after Walt Disney’s death, and he was determined for that not to happen at Apple.”
Eight weeks after Steve told Cook he was making him CEO, things took a sudden turn for the worse. “I watched a movie with him the Friday before he passed away,” Cook remembers. “We watched Remember the Titans [a sentimental football story about an underdog]. I was so surprised he wanted to watch that movie. I was like, Are you sure? Steve was not interested in sports at all. And we watched and we talked about a number of things and I left thinking that he was pretty happy. And then all of a sudden things went to hell that weekend.”
John Lasseter got a call from Laurene, who told him he should come quickly for one last visit. “We just hung out in that study they had turned into a bedroom for him. We talked all about Pixar, all the things at Disney, and stuff like that. And then I kinda looked at him and he said, ‘Yeah I need to get a nap now.’ I got up to go, and then I stopped, and I looked at him and came back. I gave him a big hug, and a kiss, and I said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.’
“He’s special,” says Lasseter. “It’s funny, there’s a little group of people who were very close to Steve up until the very end. And we all miss him very much. I was at Laurene’s birthday party [in November 2013], her fiftieth birthday, in San Francisco. I got there a bit early, and Tim came in. He came over and we started talking, and of course we started talking about Steve. I said, ‘Do you miss him? I really miss Steve.’ And I showed him this,” says Lasseter, pointing to the favorites list on his iPhone. “I still have Steve’s number on my phone. I said, ‘I’ll never be able to take that out.’ And Tim took out his iPhone and showed me—he still had Steve’s number in his phone, too.”
“LIFE SHOULD BE about renewal and growth,” says Jim Collins. “Most great leaders don’t start out that way, they grow into it. And that’s what Steve did. I don’t see it as a success story, but a growth story. I wish I could have seen Steve Jobs 3.0. Seeing him from age fifty-five to seventy-five would have been fascinating. If you’re in good health at that age, 3.0 should be the best. But we don’t get to see that.”
“There are three things you need to be considered a truly great company,” Collins continues, switching gears to Apple. “Number one, you have to deliver superior financial results. Number two, you have to make a distinctive impact, to the point where if you didn’t exist you couldn’t be easily replaced. Number three, the company must have lasting endurance, beyond multiple generations of technology, markets, and cycles, and it must demonstrate the ability to do this beyond a single leader. Apple has numbers one and two. Steve was racing the clock [to help it get number three]. Whether it has lasting endurance is the final check, something we won’t know for some time. There are lots of good people there, and maybe they’ll get it.”
By the time of his death, Apple was truly extraordinary in just about every way that mattered to Steve. By 2011, it could safely be said that no other American corporation had a comparable record of innovation and success. Its internal goal, of continually developing great products in an efficient, unbureaucratic method built around the productivity of and collaboration between small teams, had been successful in ways that defy the fact that the company had grown to 60,000 employees at the time of his death. Its revenue stream was so much more profitable and diversified than it had been when he returned in 1997. Its management team was a veteran group that had been remarkably stable over the years. Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Fred Anderson, and Tony Fadell were notable departures, but others remained with institutional memory and remarkable chops. Most important of all, the company had shown an astounding capacity to conceive, develop, manufacture, and market products that really and truly were insanely great. It was doing everything Steve had ever hoped a company could do.
STEVE DIED ON Tuesday, October 5, 2011. There were three services after his death. He was buried on October 8, with some three dozen people attending, including four Apple employees—Tim Cook, Katie Cotton, Eddy Cue, and Jony Ive—along with board members Bill Campbell and Al Gore, Bob Iger, John Doerr, Ed Catmull, Mike Slade, Lee Clow, the four children and Laurene and some members of her extended family, his sisters Patty and Mona Simpson. They gathered at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, and walked on tatami mats to, and then around, Steve’s coffin. Several of the mourners spoke, and some read poetry. After the ceremony the group repaired to John Doerr’s house to reminisce.
On October 17, several hundred people attended a memorial service at the Memorial Church on Stanford University’s campus. The iPhone 4S had been introduced two days earlier, in the company’s first public event after Steve’s death, with presale orders that exceeded those of any previous model. The memorial service was an invitation-only event, and the guests ranged from his closest friends and family to the Clintons, Bono, Rahm Emanuel, Stephen Fry, Larry Page, Rupert Murdoch, and John Warnock, the Adobe cofounder. Bono and the Edge from U2 performed Steve’s favorite Dylan song, “Every Grain of Sand”; Joan Baez sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; and Mona Simpson read a moving tribute about Ste
ve on his deathbed. Larry Ellison and Jony Ive also made remarks. Steve’s daughter Erin lit the candles at the beginning of the service, while the other children all spoke: Reed read his own thoughts, Lisa read a poem, and Eve read the text of “Think Different.” It was, despite the number of people there, a deeply intimate and emotional event, which opened with Yo-Yo Ma playing the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Laurene’s own remarks about Steve were especially poignant:
Steve and I met here, at Stanford, the second week I lived in California. He came here to give a talk, and afterwards we found each other in the parking lot. We talked until four in the morning. He proposed with a fistful of freshly picked wildflowers on a rainy New Year’s Day. I said yes. Of course I said yes. We built our lives together.
He shaped how I came to view the world. We were both strong-minded, but he had a fully formed aesthetic and I did not. It is hard enough to see what is already there, to remove the many impediments to a clear view of reality, but Steve’s gift was even greater: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked, and he set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom. For this reason, he possessed an uncannily large sense of possibility—an epic sense of possibility.
Steve’s love of beauty—and his impatience with ugliness—pervaded our lives. Early on in our marriage we had long dinners with Mona and Richie. I remember a particularly wide-ranging discussion that lasted late into the night. As we were driving home, Steve launched into a devastating critique of the restaurant’s sconces. Mona agreed with his assessment. Richie and I looked at each other, whispering, “Is a sconce a light fixture?” No object was too small or insignificant to be exempt from Steve’s examination of the meaning, and the quality, of its form. He looked at things, and then he created things, from the standpoint of perfection.
That could be an unforgiving standpoint, but over time I came to see its reasons, to understand Steve’s unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself.
He felt deeply that California was the only place he could live. It’s the slanting evening light on the hills, the palette, the fundamental beauty. In his very soul, Steve was a Californian. He required the liberty it afforded, the clean slate. He worked under the influence, and the inspiration, of the sublimity of the place. He needed to be refreshed by the primal rhythms of the natural world—the land, the hills, the oaks, the orchards. California’s spirit of newness invigorated him, and ratified his own spirit. Its scale is contagious: such natural grandeur is the perfect setting for thinking big. And he did think big. He was the most unfettered thinker I have ever known. It was a deep pleasure, and a lot of fun, to think alongside him.
Like my children, I lost my father when I was young. It was not what I wanted for myself; it is not what I wanted for them. But the sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.
I left shortly after the ceremony closed. I was overcome with emotion, and with regret over my last conversation with Steve, which had occurred earlier that summer. He called to ask if I wanted to go for a walk with him and chat. In retrospect, I understand that it was an invitation to have one of those farewell talks that he had with quite a few people that summer. But I was in a dark mood then for a variety of reasons, and I didn’t realize how very, very sick he was. So instead of responding to his invitation I lit into him, telling him my grievances about our relationship, especially my anger at the fact that he had refused to work with me on Fortune stories after my battle with meningitis. He seemed stunned. After a few minutes, once I’d had my say, there was a silence on the line. And then he said he was really sorry. He sincerely meant it, I’m sure. He also told me that he would still like me to come see him, and maybe go for a walk around the neighborhood. I made a halfhearted attempt to schedule a visit with his assistant, but when there was a slight complication I quickly gave up, to my everlasting regret.
Had I gone to the reception after the memorial service in the Rodin Sculpture Garden of the Cantor Arts Center, a short stroll from the Stanford Chapel, I would have received a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book The Autobiography of a Yogi, which was handed to each guest, in brown paper wrapping. I also would have walked into a who’s who of Silicon Valley, a gathering of the men, and a smattering of women, who had started the PC and Internet revolutions. John Doerr, Eric Schmidt, and Michael Dell were there, and the younger generation was represented by Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang and Marc Andreessen. But the core members from Apple’s birth were there, too; Woz, Regis McKenna, Bud Tribble, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and others. Lee Clow and James Vincent were there, as were NeXT veterans such as Susan Barnes and Mike Slade. The latter came with Bill Gates in tow.
“When Bill had gone to visit Steve at his house in May,” says Slade, “he got to know Steve’s youngest daughter, Evie, because both she and Bill’s daughter, Jennifer, do horse showing. After we got to this reception I kind of ditched Bill because I knew more people there than he does. I kind of felt bad, but I was like, oh, whatever, he’s a big boy. Half an hour goes by and I’ve lost track of him. So I went to find him. In the middle of the sculpture garden they had set up these really long couches in a rectangle where the family was. Laurene was there, and the kids were there. And that’s where Bill was, over on a couch, talking to Evie about horses. He just sat there and had been talking to her for a half an hour. He didn’t talk to anybody else.”
THE LAST MEMORIAL service occurred at the Apple campus in Cupertino, on October 20. Nearly ten thousand people gathered on the lawn within the ellipse formed by the campus’s main buildings. Every Apple retail outlet around the globe had been closed for the occasion, with the store employees gathered to watch video of the event streamed live to them over Apple’s virtual network. Tim Cook was the first speaker. Coldplay and Norah Jones, whose music had been featured in Apple television advertisements, played short sets for the crowd. But two speakers provided the highlights: Jony Ive and Bill Campbell, the Apple board member who had been a close adviser of Steve for many, many years.
“Steve changed,” said Campbell. “Yes, he had been charismatic and passionate and brilliant. But I watched him become a great manager. He saw things others couldn’t see. He dismissed as arrogant the tech leaders in the world who thought we were all stupid because we couldn’t use these devices. He said, ‘We’re stupid if they can’t use these devices.’ ” And then Campbell went on to address the Steve he had known personally. “In the last seven and a half years, as he became more vulnerable, he made sure that those he loved, those who were closest to him, knew it. To those people he exuded the phenomenal warmth and humor he shared. He was a true friend.”
Speaking later, Ive too talked about friendship. “He was my closest and most loyal friend. We worked together for fifteen years,” said the Brit, “and he still laughed at the way I said ‘aluminium.’ ” But mostly Ive talked about work, the pleasures of work, and the pleasures of working specifically with Steve. “Steve loved ideas and loved making stuff, and he treated the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence. He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished. His was a victory for beauty, for purity, and, as he would say, for giving a damn.”
The ceremony, which anyone can watch these days on their iMac or iPhone or iPad, or on their Samsung Galaxy or Microsoft Surface if they prefer, was both sober and rousing. “Look right, look left, look ahead of you and behind you,” said Campbell. “You’re it. Results counted. You’re the people who made this happen.” It was an event that celebrated the past, and that also made clear, as Steve would have, that there was much still to be done. “We won�
�t keep you too long,” said Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, as they launched into a song to close the ceremony. “We know Steve would want you to get back to work.”
Source Notes
Having reported and written about Steve Jobs from 1986 through 2011, Rick and I have literally thousands of pages of our own notes and transcripts, hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, scores of published stories, and who knows how many unrecorded experiences to draw from. We suppose it would have been easier in some ways to simply recycle parts of what I wrote at the time because that was when it was freshest in my mind and when the impressions were most vivid.
But those stories were written with a different and more immediate objective than what we are trying to achieve with this book, which is this: providing a deeper understanding of Steve Jobs’s ever-evolving arsenal of entrepreneurial skills and capabilities, and the deepening of his almost messianic drive to have an impact on his world. We want to show how it was fueled to an unusual degree by his unique gift for being an autodidact, and by genuine idealism as well as his occasionally scary obsessions, his rigid and austere yet consistently well-thought-out aesthetic standards, his often pompous sense of mission. All along, he held a genuine compassion for the anxieties and needs of ordinary people who want to find new tools to empower and improve themselves in a world that grows more complex, cacophonous, and confounding every day.
Becoming Steve Jobs Page 45