by Daniel Lyons
“Hold my calls,” I say.
I shut the door and lie down on my couch.
Before I can even recite my mantra the door blows open and tiny Tom Bowditch, our own little martinet, barges in, dragging Zack Johnson by the sleeve.
“Sit,” Tom says to Zack, the way you’d tell a dog to sit. “There, on the couch, next to Rain Man. Good. Now look, you idiots. I want some fucking answers.”
“I’d like some answers too,” I say. “Like what were you and Jim Bell talking about at the Garden Court yesterday.”
“Shut the fuck up.” He turns to Zack and says, “Talk.”
Zack was our CFO when this stuff happened. He’s totally a stand-up guy and also, unfortunately, a guy who grew up with a pretty serious stuttering condition. He has spent years going to classes and worked really, really hard to get the impediment under control. But now, sitting here getting grilled by Tom, all those hours of speech therapy might as well have never happened.
“Well, um, ah, ah, ah, ah . . . wwww . . . wwww . . . .”
Tom says, “Spit it the fuck out, dummy, Jesus fucking Christ!” which is incredibly uncool and also serves only to make things worse.
Zack’s face starts twitching. He’s going, “Mmmmm . . . mmmmm . . . mmmmm.”
So Tom says, “Okay. Look. Take a breath. Slow down. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have raised my voice.”
Zack closes his eyes. Finally, in fits and starts, he explains how accounting can be this gray area and how some of these things may or may not have been okay back when we did them, but now the SEC is cracking down and getting tough and interpreting things in new ways.
“We gave out some options.” He turns to me. “Remember? You got some of them. So did a bunch of other people. We backdated them to a point where the stock was cheap. This potentially enhanced the inherent value of the options. But also, the way we structured these grants enabled recipients to have a somewhat advantageous situation in regards to tax implications.”
Tom says, “Can you say that in English?”
“Not really.”
“So who did this?” Tom says. “Was it you? Did you do this? Why would you do something like this?”
“Steve told me to do it.”
“No way,” I say. “There’s no way I ever told anyone to do anything like that.”
“You did,” Zack says. “You told me to do it. You gave me a direct order.”
“I would never do that.”
“You said you’d fire me if I didn’t do it. And you’d spread some rumor in the Valley about me being fired for having kiddie porn on my office computer, so I’d never be able to work again. I distinctly told you it could be a problem.”
“I don’t remember this at all.”
“I told you it wasn’t really kosher and you said, ‘Well, there’s a difference between not really kosher and against the law, and is it against the law?’ And I said, ‘That would be a matter of interpretation.’ And you said, ‘Okay, then let’s interpret it that it’s legal.’”
“I would never say such a thing,” I say. “No one at this company would do that. Not this company. You’re not remembering correctly.”
“I have notes on these conversations,” Zack says.
Tom stands up. “All right. I’ve heard enough.”
“So what do we do now?” I say.
“Good question, kid. I’ll tell you what. You know that lotus position? My advice is you should go into your meditation room, get into that position, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.”
“Nice,” I say. “Funny.”
“And by the way, what the fuck are you thinking, firing your head of engineering on the iPhone?”
“What, now Dinsmore is calling you?”
“People called me on his behalf. And yes, I met with him. Are you crazy? This guy is your best engineer. He’s running the project. And you take him off? Why?”
“Insubordination,” I say. “He refused to fire someone.”
“Did it occur to you that the someone he didn’t want to fire was also crucial to the project?”
“Nobody is indispensable.”
“You of all people should keep that in mind, kid. Because you know what? I know what you did. You double-dipped. Wasn’t enough for you to get ten million shares.You had to backdate them, too, and try to squeeze out a little extra out of it. You guys out here all act like California is a different country or something. Maybe you figure nobody in Washington actually reads those little forms you send in every quarter. Maybe you figured nobody would care, or that they’d give you a pass because you’re the Great Steve Jobs. Well, you’re wrong. You’re in deep shit, kid. Deep, deep shit.”
I ask Tom what he’d do if he were in my shoes.
He says, without missing a beat, “I’d leave the country.”
Later on, I’m getting ready to go home when Paul Doezen shows up carrying his MacBook. “There’s something you need to see,” he says.
He pulls up the Yahoo! Finance page and goes to our message board.
“See this guy?” he says, pointing to a commenter who calls himself socratech. “He’s a basher. He’s up here all the time. Look.”
He clicks some button that pulls up a list of every post this guy has made about us. He’s put up more than fifteen hundred items in the past two months.
“So he’s a nut,” I say. “The world’s full of them.” “Maybe. But look here.” He opens up the guy’s latest item, posted an hour ago:
Reliable source sez Apple board held secret emergency meeting this afternoon. Bad news found!!! TBA later this week & will tank the stock hard fer sure. Word to the wise, take yr profits & clear yr positions on this overhyped POS before the proverbial shit hits the proverbial spinning blades.
“Someone’s talking,” Paul says. “Which, okay, that happens. Usually I’d say it’s just random. Someone tells their wife, or goes to lunch and tells their friend. Not supposed to do that, but it happens, and word travels. But this,” he says, pointing to the screen, “this is different. This guy puts up fifteen hundred items about us, all negative. Now he knows when our board meets?
And he knows what they say? This guy’s working for someone. Somebody’s feeding him.”
My phone buzzes. It’s Ja’Red. He says he has Ross Ziehm on the line, and it’s urgent.
“Put him through,” I say.
“Are you alone?” Ross says.
“I’m here with Paul. You’re on speaker.”
“Okay. Look, there’s a story on the Dow Jones wire. I’m going to send you a link on iChat. Here. You got it?”
There’s a ping as the message arrives. I pull up the page and glance at the headline: “Trouble found at Apple.” It’s a six-paragraph story based on “sources close to the matter” saying that Apple was about to announce that its internal investigation had turned up problems regarding backdated options.
“I’m already getting calls,” Ross says.
I tell him to come up. We try to figure out who’s leaking. Paul thinks it could just be that the Dow Jones reporter saw the Yahoo message and ran with it.
“Can’t be,” Ross says. “They wouldn’t run without their own source.”
“So whoever told the Yahoo guy also told the Dow Jones reporter.”
“Probably. And whoever it is, it’s someone that Dow Jones trusted, or else they wouldn’t run the story. It’s someone who knows what they’re talking about, and is actively trying to put this out there.”
Ross says it must be a board member, but he can’t imagine anyone on the board being stupid enough to do something like that.
“It’s not a board member,” I say. “It’s Sampson. Or one of his guys. It’s got to be.”
“Why them?” Ross says.
“You saw him in the board meeting. That fight about whether we could hold the news until after the developers confer
ence. He figures I want to stall. He’s trying to force our hands.”
“We
told him we’d put it out now.”
“Maybe he wants to make sure. Maybe he’s trying to send us a message.”
“I don’t know.”
“Lawyers are the worst leakers in the world. Look at any merger talks that get leaked, it’s always the lawyers.”
“There’s at least two dozen people who know there was a meeting,” Paul says. He’s got a yellow legal pad and is making a list. “Figure everyone on the board, plus whoever keeps their schedules for them. Plus all the chauffeurs and pilots and travel agents. Sampson and his three guys, plus their admins and assistants. The people in my office. The people in your office. Anyone in PR who’s been brought in to work on the release.”
“We could pull the phone logs,” Ross says. “And search the email system. Steve?”
I don’t answer. I’m looking out the window, out over the rooftops of Cupertino, toward Homestead High, where I went to school, and, past that, the neighborhood in Los Altos where I grew up. I’m thinking about the day when we first moved the company out of my parents’ house and into a real office building on Stevens Creek Boulevard. I was twenty-two years old. Our delivery system was a ten-year-old Plymouth station wagon. Our biggest concern was keeping the car running. I miss those days.
PART TWO
Dark Night of the Steve
My parents did not hide the fact of my adoption from me. I always knew. So did our neighbors. So did their kids. When I was seven years old the taunting began. In the schoolyard, in the street. Until then I had not given any thought to what it meant to be adopted. But now, stung by teasing, it hit me. My birth parents, a pair of snooty intellectual graduate students, had taken one look at me and said, “No thanks.” They gave me up. They abandoned me.
You do not need to be a trained psychologist to understand what this does to a person. Shame? You have no idea. That word does not begin to describe it. I would hide under my bed. I would cry and refuse to come out. I would lie on my back, with my eyes closed, trying to will myself into becoming invisible. I prayed—in those days I believed in God—that I could fall asleep and wake up a different person.
I became obsessed with adoption narratives. Especially those in which an orphan grows up to accomplish great deeds. Jane Eyre. Cinderella. Oedipus. Romulus and Remus. Pip in Great Expectations. Siegfried in Norse mythology. Krishna. Little Orphan Annie—I followed her adventures every day in the San Jose Mercury News.
My favorite was Superman. Born on another planet, raised by humble parents, secretly possessing superhuman abilities. I devoured the comic books. I sat transfixed on the floor watching the old black-and-white TV show with George Reeves. I became convinced that I, too, was a kind of Superman. I suppose this was my way of coping with the shame, compensating for the loss.
I saw myself as a hero. As different. Better than the people around me. A savior, destined to do great things.
Was I also bitter? Yes. Am I still? Very much so. But I have learned to transform my bitterness into fuel. I have harnessed my anger, the way a hydroelectric plant harnesses the force of a river.
Every day I tell myself that somewhere out in the Midwest there are two snobby academics who gave birth to the greatest figure of our age, but they were so self-absorbed and shortsighted that they could not recognize their son’s inherent coolness.
These two fools could have had a son who’s worth five billion dollars. They could be zooming around in the world in a private jet, zipping from their ski house in Aspen to their island in Tahiti.
That’s right, you jerks. You’re the Pete Best of parents. I hope you enjoy living out your days in some cut-rate assisted-living facility, eating creamed chip beef on toast. Yum.
Twice a year I get to play messiah, arriving in an auditorium filled with people who worship me like a living god and hang on every word I say. These people spend huge amounts of money and travel from all around the world to see me in person. Some of them camp out overnight, sleeping on the sidewalk, so they can be first to get into the auditorium when the doors open in the morning.
The first event where I do this is Macworld, which is a conference we created for ordinary run-of-the-mill dweebs who use Macs. The second and more prestigious is our annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which is aimed at the guys—and yes, they are almost all guys—who write software that runs on our computers and have built companies around our machines. They’re mostly middle-aged dweebs, fat and pasty. An alarmingly high percentage wear ponytails and travel with short-scale guitars so they can have jam sessions in their hotel rooms and record themselves using our GarageBand software and upload their songs onto .mac homepages. Sad. I know.
“Look at them out there,” Ross Ziehm says. “Talk about pathetic.”
“You think they’ll give me shit about the options?”
“I’d be shocked if they didn’t.”
It’s Friday evening, three days before the developers conference kicks off, and we’re hosting a special dinner for one hundred of our biggest partners. We’ve rented out a Shinto temple in Campbell, near our headquarters. Ja’Red and I are hanging out backstage with Ross, waiting for the dorks to get seated.
Talk about bad timing. Last night we put out the release saying that we’d found some irregularities in our accounting. The story was in every newspaper this morning, and has been on TV shows all day. All the stories zoomed in on me. Steve Jobs, criminal mastermind. Will he step down? Can Apple survive without him? Our stock is getting clobbered. And somewhere, in some cramped kitchen, Francis X. Doyle must be creaming in his relaxed fit jeans.
“Just stick to the script,” Ross says.
I pull back the curtain and peek out. I never get stage fright, but suddenly I’m getting butterflies.
“They look hostile,” I say.
“They’re fine. They love you. They worship you. You just have to reassure them, that’s all.”
Ja’Red hands me a bottle of water, and then pats my face with a towel and brushes me with some powder to take off any shine. I peek out again. Unlike most companies, which dish out Australian lobster tails and bottles of hundred-year-old cognac at events like this, at Apple we bring them to a temple and serve miso soup, brown rice and steamed vegetables. Tiny portions. To drink, just water. After dinner, hot water with lemon. No alcohol, no caffeine, no sugar.
Tonight I wish we were serving tequila shots and hits of four-way blotter acid. But no. The Apple faithful want answers. At times like these the cult leader has to step up and reassure the flock.
So we let the dweebs get seated. We make them wait. The suspense builds. Then we zap the house lights, smash a gong, and there, on stage, in a spotlight, like Buddha in blue jeans, I appear.
The room goes silent. I stand there. I look at them. I press my hands together. I’m wearing my patented JobsWear outfit: jeans, black turtleneck, and rimless eyeglasses that cost more than most of these guys make in a month. I keep looking at them. I make sure they can feel my power. They are small, I am large. They are followers, I am the leader.
“Welcome,” I say. “Namaste. Peace.”
I bow, and smile. There’s a smattering of nervous applause. I wait again. I let them look at me. I let them see that I’m not afraid. I look left. I look right. I do this stiffly, self-consciously, as I always do. I pretend that I am making eye contact with individuals when really I am looking just over their heads.
Finally I speak.
“Options,” I say. “That’s what everyone wants to talk about. You’ve read the papers. You’ve seen the news on TV. What’s the big story today? The reliability of OS X? The new iLife suite of software applications? The new iPhoto, which can hold fifty thousand photos? Fifty. Thousand. Photos. Is this what they’re writing about? Nope. Not the things we’re doing to exploit Intel’s dual-core architecture and 64-bit computing, either. Not our roadmap for quad-core chips, and our next-generation bus architecture. Nope. Let’s talk about options. Let’s drop all sorts of innuendoes. Let’s imply that maybe people have cheate
d, or lied, or committed crimes. Let’s gossip.”
They sit there looking ashamed of themselves. Perfect. So now I flip it around on them.
“You know what? I don’t blame you. You love this company. You want to know that everything is all right. That is what I am here to tell you. Everything. Is. All. Right. We have not done anything wrong. Of this I can assure you.”
I glance backstage at Ross Ziehm. He gives me a thumbs up.
A guy in back puts up his hand.
“They said in the Journal—”
I cut him off.
“That story was unauthorized. We did not give the Journal permission to print that story. It was full of inaccuracies. We told them not to print it and they went ahead anyway.”
Another guy says, “In your press release you said there were irregularities. Can you expand on that?”
I look down at my hands. I smile like a patient Zen master. It’s the look that’s meant to convey that although this guy is brain-damaged I will be tolerant of him because I’m such an amazing human being.
“Sir,” I say, “I’m no expert, but from what I’m told, that term is a way of indicating that there is nothing seriously wrong. As you probably know, I don’t care about money. I care only about creativity. I care about making beautiful objects. That’s my passion. You wanted beautiful iMacs. Boom, we delivered. You wanted a smaller iPod. Boom, we created the Nano and the Shuffle. You wanted video. Boom, we gave you built-in cameras and free videoconferencing software on all Macs. Now look. I’m not a lawyer. I’m also not an MBA. I have those people on my staff, and they take care of stock market stuff. What I am is an artist. Like Andy Warhol. You think people ever hassled Andy Warhol about stock options? Man oh man.”
Hands keep flying up.
“Are you going to step down?”
“Absolutely not.”
“If you do step down, who will run the company? What’s your succession plan?”
“I’m not going to step down. The question is moot.”