Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs

by Yukari Iwatani Kane

  Gilbert Wong was so excited by Jobs’s presence that he had trouble forming a coherent sentence. “Thank you, Mr. Jobs. We’re really excited that you call Apple our home,” the mayor said at the end of his presentation. He had probably meant to say he was glad Apple called Cupertino their home.

  Judging from the reaction that day, there was little doubt that Cupertino would approve the plan. But two questions hung in the air. Would Jobs live to see the new campus? And was Apple’s new campus meant to be a monument to Jobs, his high-tech Taj Mahal? As Jobs described it in private conversations, the new building would be so big that the middle of it could hold St. Paul’s Basilica.

  By July, Jobs’s cancer had spread to his bones and other parts of his body. He was in greater pain, and he stopped going in to the office. Though he was once sighted with a plate of French toast at a restaurant near his home, he was generally not sleeping well and could barely eat solid foods. He moved his bedroom downstairs. Whispers were starting to circulate around Silicon Valley. He had promised the public that he would step down when he was no longer fit to run the company. That time had come.

  Jobs called Cook one weekend.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” Jobs said.

  “Fine,” said Cook. “When?”

  “Now.”

  Cook drove over to Jobs’s house. It only took a few minutes because they lived less than two miles apart. When Cook arrived, Jobs told him that he wanted his steward to be the next CEO.

  “There has never been a professional transition at the CEO level in Apple,” he said. “Our company has done a lot of great things, but has never done this one.” Jobs wanted to set an example of how to transfer power right.

  “I have decided, and I am recommending to the board, that you be the CEO, and I’m going to be the chairman.”

  Cook looked at his mentor. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” said Jobs. When Cook asked again, Jobs told him not to ask him anymore. His mind was made up.

  The two then spoke about what that would mean. Jobs was very clear about what he didn’t want.

  “I saw what happened when Walt Disney passed away. People looked around and they kept asking what Walt would have done. The business was paralyzed and people just sat around in meetings and talked about what Walt would have done.”

  In a refrain that would later be repeated throughout the company, Jobs then advised Cook, “I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what’s right.”

  The date Jobs chose to make the announcement was August 24, 2011, the day of the company’s board meeting. Jobs wasn’t strong enough to get to the office himself, so arrangements were made to have him driven there and taken into the boardroom as discreetly as possible by wheelchair.

  Jobs arrived just before 11 a.m. After the board members had finished with their committee reports and other routine business, Jobs asked for a moment because he had something personal to say. They knew what was coming. Cook and some of the other executives who were present left the room. This was a board matter.

  He began to read from a letter he had prepared.

  I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come. I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee. As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple. I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role. I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you for all the many years of being able to work alongside you.

  A long silence descended. His friend Bill Campbell sat with tears in his eyes. Al Gore and Mickey Drexler acknowledged his contributions to Apple. Art Levinson praised Jobs for the smooth execution of the leadership transition. Some Apple shareholders had never believed that Apple had a succession plan because it had refused to disclose it. But there had been a plan in place since the day Jobs had been diagnosed in 2003.

  Jobs stayed for lunch, during which Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller showed some mockups of products the company was working on. Jobs asked questions and shared his thoughts about features in future phones. When Forstall demonstrated Siri, a new virtual personal assistant app that Apple was planning to launch that fall, Jobs wanted to try it out for himself.

  “Give me the phone,” he commanded.

  Jobs started with an easy question about the weather. Then he threw a curveball.

  “Are you a man or a woman?”

  The room broke into laughter as Siri answered.

  “They did not assign me a gender.”

  Back home, Jobs found his wife harvesting honey from the hives they kept in the backyard with help from their youngest daughter, Eve. When they walked into the house with the honey pot, they were joined by his son Reed and other daughter, Erin. They gathered in the kitchen to taste their harvest. Jobs took a spoonful, pronouncing it “wonderfully sweet.”

  Apple had been his life for more than two decades. It was his company, yet it was no longer his to run. He still had ideas and there was so much he wanted to do. He intended to stay involved as long as he could, but the media was writing about his accomplishments as if he were finished.

  Jobs picked up the phone to call the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, who had been furiously pounding away on a story about his legacy. Jobs wanted to talk to someone about his mixed feelings and explain how he was stepping down but was still planning to stay involved.

  After discussing his health, Jobs talked about Cook and the succession plan. He believed that he had a deep bench of executives on the leadership team and he was confident about Apple’s future.

  “You know, people criticize me for never publicizing it, but we did have one and that plan calls for Tim to become the CEO,” he said. “I just thought rather than waiting until I died and having it done in chaos . . . I meant what I said in that letter. I don’t feel I can do the job as fully as I need to. I have to narrow my focus. I have to be selective on certain things. There’s a lot that I’m not going to be able to do.”

  But he wanted Mossberg to understand that he was still going to be working on projects. He alluded to products Apple was working on.

  “I want you in a couple of months to come out,” he told Mossberg. “I’d love for you to come out to see it.”

  As usual, the conversation was off the record, but when Mossberg hung up, he changed one thing in the piece he was working on.

  “To be very clear, Jobs, while seriously ill, is very much alive. Extremely well-informed sources at Apple say he intends to remain involved in developing major future products and strategy and intends to be an active chairman of the board, even while new CEO Tim Cook runs the company day to day,” he wrote. “This is not an obituary.”

  Jobs continued to feel somewhat melancholy about the transition. When his biographer Walter Isaacson asked him what it was like to leave the company he founded, he flew off the handle.

  “Why do you think I’m leaving?” he demanded. “I just said in the statement, I just told you! I’m going to stay. I’m going to be advisor.”

  Even though he was very weak by then, he told Isaacson, “I’m going to be okay. I’m going to be okay. I’m going to get to the next lily pad.”

  Once Jobs announced his resignation, the secret was out. Jobs’s time was limited. More calls and emails from friends, colleagues, and other people in the industry who knew him came pouring in. Jobs responded to a few of them, but he didn’t seem to be checking his email very much anymore. He declined invitations to farewell dinners and ceremonies to accept various awards. His wife turned away most requests for a final visit. He saw only his closest friends. He watched a movie with Campbell. He had sushi at Jin Sho in Palo Alto with physician Dean Ornish, a well-known adv
ocate of changing diet and lifestyle to prevent heart disease.

  Jobs also offered advice to Apple executives on the unveiling of the iPhone 4S, scheduled for Tuesday, October 4. While Cook welcomed reporters to his first product launch event as CEO, Jobs lay dying. He called his sister Mona Simpson on the phone and asked her to come to Palo Alto. When he started saying his farewells, Simpson cut him off.

  “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

  “I’m telling you now,” Jobs told her gently, “because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

  When Simpson arrived, her brother was still lucid, surrounded by his wife and his children. Jobs told her that he was sorry they wouldn’t be able to grow old together. Later that day, his breathing slowed and then became labored. That afternoon, he looked at his sisters, then his children, then his wife. Simpson later wrote that Jobs’s final words were “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

  The death certificate cited respiratory arrest and metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor as the cause. The news was announced in an email from Cook to Apple’s employees:

  Team,

  I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today. Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. . . . No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.

  Tim

  Everyone had known Jobs was gravely ill. A photo that was published on celebrity news site TMZ shortly after he resigned showed him so frail that his skin looked nearly translucent. He looked like he’d aged decades since his last public appearance at the Cupertino City Council. Still, no one could have anticipated his passing so soon after. Most employees found out at the same time as the public. Apple’s executive team was devastated.

  Flags were flown at half-staff at Microsoft and Walt Disney World as well as at Apple. A photo of Jobs was displayed on the big screen at NASDAQ in New York, where the ticker normally ran. Apple’s shares plunged 7 percent in after-hours trading.

  Tributes poured forth from Gates, from Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, even from Barack Obama. The president called Jobs “among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”

  Twitter and Facebook also lit up with the news as soon as it was announced. Teary-eyed fans flocked to Steve Jobs’s home and Apple’s offices to pay their respects. They took photos and left behind flowers, candles, handmade cards, and other mementos at makeshift shrines. One fan showed up at headquarters in a Scottish kilt and bagpipe and played “Amazing Grace.” Some left apples with a bite taken out of them.

  In Apple Stores in Mexico City and Prague, computers displayed a black-and-white photo of Jobs with his name and the years he had lived, “1955–2011.” A Beijing store switched off the large Apple logo that was usually lit up. Fans left stickies with messages at every location.

  Thank you Steve for transforming our lives, said one at San Francisco’s flagship location.

  Thank you and go well, said another.

  In Japan and San Francisco, fans held a vigil, holding up iPads and iPhones with an image of a candle.

  6

  Ghost and Cipher

  His ghost loomed everywhere. Obituaries blanketed the front pages of newspapers and websites. TV stations ran lengthy segments glorifying how he had changed the world. Essays by anyone who had been touched by him circulated on the Internet. Jobs’s former software chief Avie Tevanian posted a remembrance on his Facebook page about Jobs’s bachelor party. Only Tevanian and another friend had shown up because everyone else had been afraid of being in a social situation with him. Even those with whom he had toxic run-ins wrote glowingly about him. Gizmodo’s editor in chief, Brian Lam, expressed his regrets over the blog’s handling of the iPhone 4 prototype in a eulogy titled “Steve Jobs Was Always Kind to Me (Or, Regrets of an Asshole).”

  Recounting how he had forced Jobs to send a letter formally claiming the device, Lam wrote, “If I could do it again, I’d do the first story about the phone again. But I probably would have given the phone back without asking for the letter. And I would have done the story about the engineer who lost it with more compassion and without naming him. Steve said we’d had our fun and we had the first story but we were being greedy. And he was right. We were. It was sore winning. And we were also being short sighted.” Lam confessed that he’d had moments when he’d wished they had never found the phone at all.

  Though a handful of negative pieces recalled Jobs’s tyranny, the vast majority of the coverage was reverential.

  In New York, Simon & Schuster rushed out Isaacson’s biography a month early. Jobs had no control over the book’s content, but he had argued hard over the cover. In one of the initial versions, the publisher had proposed a cover with the Apple logo and Jobs’s picture. The title was “iSteve.” Jobs had been so infuriated that he threatened to withdraw his cooperation.

  “This is the ugliest fucking cover. It sucks!” he had yelled at Isaacson. “You have no taste. I don’t even want to deal with you anymore. The only way I’ll deal with you again is if you let me have some say on the cover.”

  Isaacson agreed to allow him input. As it turned out, he would have needed Jobs’s approval anyway because Apple owned the rights to every portrait of him that was any good.

  A few months before Jobs died, the two exchanged endless emails about the photo and the font that would grace the cover. Isaacson persuaded Jobs to go with a Fortune magazine photo from 2006 in which the CEO stares out intensely through his round glasses with a hint of mischief. When celebrity photographer Albert Watson had shot it, he had asked Jobs to look 95 percent at the camera while thinking about the next project he had on the table.

  Jobs won the argument to use a black-and-white version on the basis that he was “a black-and-white type of guy.” Isaacson also acquiesced to Jobs’s demand to print the title in Helvetica, a sans serif typeface that Apple had used in the past for corporate materials, but he refused to make the title, Steve Jobs, gray. Isaacson felt strongly that the title should be printed in black with his own name in gray.

  “They’re not reading Walter Isaacson’s take on Steve Jobs,” Isaacson had told him. “They’re reading Steve Jobs as much as I can convey by getting out of the way.”

  One idea that had been floated by Simon & Schuster was to release the book with no title on the cover—publishing’s version of the White Album. But Jobs rejected it, saying that it would appear arrogant. In the end, they settled on a sleek, elegant, and simple cover, much in the style of Apple’s products.

  When Jobs died, Apple chose the iconic image as the tribute photo on its home page. Both the photo and its effect were so quintessentially Jobsian that his friends and colleagues marveled at how the late CEO seemed to have orchestrated the narrative from beyond the grave.

  Even the rituals of remembrances unfolded as though Jobs had staged them himself. A memorial service on a Sunday evening at Stanford University was organized by his longtime event planner. The guest list read like a Who’s Who of notables in Jobs’s life—Bill Gates, Larry Page, Michael Dell, Rupert Murdoch, and the Clinton family, among others. Pixar was represented by John Lasseter, who made Jobs’s favorite movie, Toy Story, and actor Tim Allen, the voice behind the character Buzz Lightyear.

  Folksinger Joan Baez, Jobs’s onetime girlfriend, sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Bono performed Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand.”

  “Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake,” Bono sang. “Like Cain, I now behold thi
s chain of events that I must break.”

  Yo-Yo Ma brought his cello at the personal request of Jobs before his death. Steph Adams, Jobs’s event planner, roamed around with a headset, making sure nothing was amiss. Afterward, the attendees moved to a sculpture garden nearby and enjoyed hors d’oeuvres and wine in the brisk evening air. The event was tasteful, perfect, and unforgettable.

  Jobs was gone, but not gone. Somehow he had transcended death to obsess over the launch of one last product: his own legacy.

  Tim Cook was at the service but did not make a speech. Unreadable as always, the new CEO kept a relatively low profile. People saw him that evening but gave him little thought.

  Even as he took control of Apple’s sprawling empire, Cook could not escape his boss’s shadow. The question was, how would Cook leave that shadow behind? How could anyone compete with a visionary so brilliant and unforgettable that not even death could make him go away? He was now officially larger-than-life.

  The genius trap had been set long before for Jobs’s successor.

  Jobs was a superstar without whom Apple would not exist. The entire company had been defined by him for more than a decade, and few decisions were made without his input. Design, product development, and marketing strategies hinged on his opinions and tastes, while his executive team was handpicked based on their compatibility with Jobs and their ability to compensate for his weaknesses and bolster his strengths. Though Apple’s accomplishments were not Jobs’s alone, he had taken credit for most of them, which fed into his legend as a once-in-a-lifetime visionary. One employee even owned a car with the vanity plate: WWSJD—What Would Steve Jobs Do?

  The legend of resurrection and triumph, carefully burnished and nurtured, had worked in Apple’s favor when he had been at the helm. But without him, the empire was lost. To prevent it from collapsing, Cook would have to construct a different narrative quickly. To add to the challenge, Apple was a global corporation now, and it had to find a way to sustain itself as such while continuing with the transformative innovations for which Jobs had been so famous. In all likelihood, Jobs himself would have struggled to manage the company’s bigger scale. Even before his death, he had demonstrated a reluctance to accept that Apple was no longer a nimble start-up. But his passing made managing the company that much more difficult. The next CEO didn’t have the quasi-religious authority that Jobs had radiated. His every decision would be examined by current and former employees and executives, investors, the media, and Apple’s consumers. He would also have to contend with the sky-high expectations that Jobs had conditioned the public to have for Apple.