by Daniel Lyons
“But if you did.”
I glance at Ross. He’s already talking into the microphone on his wrist, instructing our Israelis to get this guy out of the room.
I give the dead man my biggest smile.
“I won’t step down,” I say. “Never, ever. I’m Dictator for Life.”
That gets a few laughs.
“There are rumors about criminal charges.”
“Not true.”
“And the U.S. Attorney?”
“I’ve heard nothing about that.”
“Why have some of your management team hired criminal defense attorneys?”
“You’ll have to ask them,” I say, which is a lousy answer, and as soon as I say it I can see Ross wince and I want to take it back, but it’s too late.
“Is it true you fired Mike Dinsmore?”
Jesus, the Dinsmore thing again. I realize the guy’s a legend, but I didn’t realize he had a friggin fan club.
“Mike resigned,” I say. “I don’t feel comfortable discussing personnel issues here.”
It’s just starting to feel like it could get out of hand when Ja’Red, who’s made his way out into the audience and is dressed like a developer—ratty T-shirt, oversized shorts—puts up his hand and asks, “Is it true you’re going to announce a wide-screen iPod with a 100-gigabyte hard drive on Monday?”
“No comment,” I say, which of course makes these bozos think it must be true, even though it isn’t.
They burst into crazy applause, the kind that goes on and on and won’t stop. Next thing I know they’re rising up out of their chairs and cheering. I love Apple developers. Honestly, I really do.
Saturday morning things take a turn for the worse. Bob Iger calls me at home and says Disney has also discovered problems with backdated options. The problems are rooted in the Pixar division, which they bought from me.
“We just put out a release. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow,” he says.
Sure enough, there it is on Sunday morning, front page of all the Sunday papers and up on the TV news. The idiots on Fox can barely contain their glee. They’re having a field day with this, saying Steve Jobs is going to jail and maybe he should call Martha Stewart, maybe she can teach him how to make a shiv out of a toothbrush, ha ha. I flip to CNN, CNBC, the three networks—they’re all making hay on this. I switch to ESPN, and I swear to God, some guy on a sports show brings it up. Some basketball player has been arrested for drug possession, and the announcer says, “Maybe he can share a cell with Steve Jobs of Apple Computer. Have you heard about that? Seriously, it’s some bad stuff. These computer nerds, you gotta watch them. They’ll hack in and cook the books.”
On Sunday Iger calls again and says the Disney board is going to meet later this week. I’ve never really liked Iger. Put it this way. He began his career as a weatherman, and it shows. He’s fine as long as he’s standing up reading from a script. Try to have a conversation with him, and there’s just nothing there. Nice guy, sure. But no passion. No imagination. But now we’re business partners because he was crazy enough to offer me seven and a half billion dollars for my company. I knew it would be a pain in the ass to have to work with these sphincters, but there was no way to reject the offer. The price was too high. The deal made me Disney’s biggest shareholder and got me a seat on the board. But all that means is that now I have to schlep down to Los Angeles, a city that I hate, and listen to these movie guys yap. And yap. And yap.
“How bad is it gonna be?” I ask him.
“If you own a bulletproof vest,” he says, “I’d say bring it.”
I spend the rest of the day Sunday fielding phone calls from people who hate me. They’re loving this, of course. Bill Gates says he’s going to send me a book on how to survive in prison. Michael Eisner, who’s still pissed because I helped push him out of Disney, pretends he hasn’t seen the stories and is just calling to say hello. “I’m out in the Hamptons,” he says. “I’m doing a crossword puzzle and I need some help. Buddhist word, five letters, starts with K. Kurma? Korma? No, that’s some kind of Indian food. Oh wait. Karma. That’s it, isn’t it? Karma. Like if you do something bad to someone, like really fuck someone over, it comes back to bite you, right? Well, glad you’re doing so well these days. Couldn’t be happier for you. You get my drift? Peace out, as the kids say.”
Worst of all, I get a call from Al Gore informing me of his intention to step down from the Apple board.
“It’s not because I think being on your board is going to hurt my reputation,” he says. “I really think Apple is a fantastic company. But you know, I’ve got so much on my plate these days, what with the global warming and all, and I’m still maybe gonna make a run in 2008, which is going to demand even more of my time. So I’m just way too busy. Really, really, really busy. So are we okay on this?”
I call Tom Bowditch on his mobile number. Turns out he’s in town, staying at the Garden Court. He comes over to my house and we get Al Gore on a conference call. Tom tells Al that he can’t quit, and that if he even mentions quitting again Tom will have him kidnapped and castrated.
“We’re all in this together,” Tom says. “You’re not going to run out on us the way you abandoned Clinton when he got into trouble.”
“I didn’t abandon Bill Clinton,” Al says.
“Please. You dropped him like he was on fire.”
Tom was against putting Al Gore on the board from the start. He said Al was (a) an idiot, and (b) too divisive. I figured it would be cool to have the former vice president on our board. Plus he’s got this big global warming crusade going, so he makes us seem more progressive.
“Bill Clinton let the American people down,” Gore says. “He disappointed all of us.”
“The guy got a blowjob. Big fucking deal. And you ran screaming for cover like a prissy little girl.”
“That blowjob cost me an election. The guy ruined my career.”
“Think what you need to think to get to sleep at night,” Tom says. “But we’re not letting you jump ship. You’re going to stay and do your job. You’re going to defend this company. Christ, you’re the reason we’re in this mess.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know where this is coming from. This isn’t about some asshole U.S. Attorney in San Francisco. I’ve been talking to people. This is coming from Washington. The Bushies hate you. They figure they can tar you with this scandal and ruin you for 2008. Meanwhile the rest of us get caught in the crossfire.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“What’s ridiculous is you dragging us into this mess and then trying to scoot when the shit hits the fan. You’re on the board of this company. You’re not leaving. You get it?”
Al sputters and pouts for a while and says he’s never been talked to like this in his entire life, not even by Hillary.
“You’re staying on the board,” Tom says.
“Whatever.”
“Say it. I want to hear you say it.”
Al does his big sigh and says, “I’m staying on the board.”
“Good. And fuck you for trying to leave.”
Tom hangs up. He spends the rest of the day at my house, foaming at the mouth and spraying me with spit, chewing me out for being such a dumb-ass.
After all this, on Monday morning I have to give my keynote address. I’m standing on stage at the Moscone Center and we’ve got the whole Leni Riefenstahl Triumph of the Will thing going, with the giant “X” on the wall behind me and huge seventy-foot images flashing on screens, and five thousand glassy-eyed geeks are hanging on my every word and ready to go out into the streets and kill for me if I ask them to. Usually I’d feel like the king of the world, but today I’m losing it. Just losing it.
This may be in part because our rehearsals have been so rocky. We had problems with my beard, first of all. Annalisa, my colorist, has been trying out some new products and the mix of salt versus pepper is off by three percent, and in the wrong direction—I’m
too gray. The other problem involved my mock turtlenecks. My regular supplier had its factory wiped out in some tsunami. Katarina, my couture consultant, went looking for a replacement but couldn’t find the right texture. In the rag trade they call this the “hand” of the fabric. I rehearsed wearing a bunch of different shirts and couldn’t find anything that felt right. It’s not that anyone in the audience can tell the difference. But I’ll know, and it throws me off.
The other problem we had was with the rehearsal space itself. We gutted one of our buildings on the Cupertino campus and built an exact replica of the conference hall at the Moscone Center and hired five thousand people to sit in the audience for a month and pretend to be Apple developers. (We give them Nembutal to give them that glazed, worshipful look, and we flash lights at them when it’s time to cheer wildly.) But there was something wrong. I kept telling Simon, our event producer, “This space is not correct. There are too many seats.” He insisted they’d built the space using the Moscone Center blueprints. Sure enough, however, when we sent one of our VPs up to San Francisco to check, it turned out that after they built the Moscone Center they removed two seats in the second-to-last aisle. So we pulled out two seats to match, but by then it was the last day of rehearsal.
So, yeah. I’m up here not feeling too good.
I’m supposed to stay on stage for two hours, running through demos and receiving standing ovations for minor enhancements to existing products. Instead I keep running off the stage, struck by panic attacks. Ja’Red fans me with a towel and tells me I’m doing great, while Lars Aki and Jim Bell go out and cover for me. We all try to pretend that things are going according to plan, but people can tell something is wrong.
By Monday afternoon the bloggers who follow us are freaking out saying they think I have cancer again, because I looked so gaunt and worn out. You know what? You’d look worn out too if you’d had the kind of weekend I did.
Worse yet, I don’t even have time to think about it, because as soon as I walk off the stage I get into a car and drive to San Jose and hop into the Jobs Jet for a trip to China. I’m a terrible traveler. Always have been. Just going to the East Coast messes me up, no matter how much melatonin I take. Anything beyond that, like Asia or Europe, and I’m a zombie.
I’m going to China to try to undo some bad publicity that we’ve been getting because the manufacturing company that builds our iPods supposedly has some labor problems in a plant in Longhua. Some British tabloid reported that the workers there are making only fifty bucks a month and working fifteen-hour days and getting no breaks for tea and crumpets and no free backrubs either, boo friggin hoo. Frankly I don’t think this is my problem. We don’t own this plant. We just buy from them. It’s out in the middle of nowhere in this new industrial region, a landscape of mud and shit where the rivers have all been poisoned with chemicals and the air stinks and the sky has been charred black by smokestacks and cars and trucks chuffing exhaust from diesel fuel and leaded gasoline. It’s like a vision of hell—that’s what I’m thinking as we’re flying in to their crappy little airport, though Ja’Red, who’s sitting across the plane looking out the other side, seems to think it’s totally amazing.
“I can’t believe I’m in China,” he says. “I mean, China! Right? I can’t believe it! Wow. China. I can’t believe it.”
I suppose he thinks it’s going to be like going to Chinatown in San Francisco, with fortune cookies after every meal. He’s in for a big disappointment, which is partly why I brought him.
“Dude,” I say, “get a grip.”
The one cool thing about being a super-rich Westerner arriving anywhere in the developing world is that you always get this huge reception, with lots of wreaths and flowers, and endless speeches by the local big shots. It’s all good, as long as you’re super vigilant and don’t actually touch anyone.
Roughly half of the population of the province appears to be waiting for us when we get off the plane. After the speechmaking all I have to do is ride to the plant and show my face to some pack of reporters and say that we’re conducting an audit and working to ensure that the plant adheres to our high standards, mwah mwah mwah. It’s all a publicity stunt, and as soon as I’m done making my statement I want to zip back to the Jobs Jet and get the hell out of there. But the plant manager insists I go on a tour of the dorms where the workers live, so I can see how great the conditions are. I tell him there’s no need for that, and then there’s a bunch of back-and-forth and angry jibber-jabber in Chinese, and finally Ross Ziehm informs me that the manager will be deeply insulted if I just leave and that if we don’t visit the dorm we’re going to offend the honor of the country and create some huge international incident. So in we go. “Just smile and keep moving,” Ross tells me.
The walls are freshly painted and the dorm reeks of bleach, as if it’s just been scrubbed for our visit. The workers are young. They’re in their teens and early twenties. They’re scrawny. Clearly they’ve been told to smile and look happy, and they’re making a great effort in this regard. They’re lined up in rows and turned out for inspection, which unfortunately makes them look a little bit like prisoners, which I don’t think is the impression that our hosts are trying to convey. Each room houses one hundred workers. They sleep on small metal beds that butt up against each other, head to foot, four beds deep. Each bed has a thin mattress on a metal spring. The blankets are thin, ratty, patched with scraps of cloth. Quilts, I guess you’d call them, if you were absolutely full of shit. The workers are standing at attention, and they’re all wearing T-shirts, mostly from America—used clothing that’s been shipped over in containers, sold by the ton.
“Dude, awesome!” Ja’Red says to a kid who’s wearing a Phish T-shirt, and I’m not sure but I think Ja’Red believes the kid is a big fan of Phish, like maybe Ja’Red figures these kids all own eighty-gigabyte iPods and sit around at night downloading music and movies from the iTunes music store over their free high-speed broadband WiFi routers. I don’t have the heart to tell him. He and the kid are now trading high fives.
The translator proudly informs us that even after paying rent to live in the dorm a good worker can easily make more than two dollars for a fifteen-hour workday. The translator also says that all of the workers are at least sixteen years old. In fact they look very much like the teenagers who hang out on University Avenue in Palo Alto with skateboards and cell phones, only slightly less miserable and surly. One of them, this skinny dude with a messed-up harelip and big huge eyes like a kid in some Margaret Keane painting, keeps staring at me with this weird tranquil expression on his face. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt with a picture of Elmo from Sesame Street. He’s standing with his hands at his sides. I look into his big dark eyes and read his thoughts and discover, to my dismay, that he believes we’re from some dogooder organization like Amnesty International and that we’re here to bring him home to his village. He’s looking at me with those huge eyes and thinking: “Thank you.”
The translator breezes along, pointing out how clean the dorms are and how each worker has his own bucket for washing his clothes and his own two-foot-by-two-foot locker for storage.
He tells us how happy and proud these workers are to be sending money home to their families and how grateful they are to Apple for giving them this opportunity.
When we get to the door I look back at that kid with the messed-up lip. He’s gazing at me with those big eyes, looking betrayed.
“Just smile and keep moving,” Ross Ziehm says, pulling my arm. “Smile and keep moving.”
Ja’Red, following behind, is slapping high fives with all the kids, moving down the line like he’s some kind of rock star greeting his fans.
Back outside, I put on a fake smile and talk to the reporters again, and the whole time I’m feeling my soul curling up inside me, huge pieces of it shriveling and dying.
From Longhua we fly to Beijing for a meeting with some government ministers, and we all work very hard, on both sides, to make sure we say noth
ing of any real significance. Then we’re off to Taiwan for a meeting with the top guys at the parent company that owns the manufacturing plant in Longhua. They’re scared that we’re going to pull our contract, so they offer us a twenty percent price cut; we were only going to ask for ten.
Next is Tokyo for a meeting with Sony, because we use their batteries in our laptops and the things have been overheating and blowing up. Sony hates us because they know we’re moving in on their turf in consumer electronics, but we’re a big customer of their component division and they can’t afford to lose our business. So they’re stuck. To show their contrition the Sony bozos make us endure a tour of the facility where Sony builds laptop batteries, so they can show off all the new processes and safeguards they’ve put in place. Honestly, I haven’t a clue what any of this stuff is about, and by this point I’m so messed up with jet lag and sleep deprivation that for a moment I’m thinking we’re back in China at the factory run by teenagers.
I’m dead. I’m exhausted. Back on the jet, I get into bed. But now, of course, I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of that kid with the messed-up lip. He’s haunting me. I close my eyes and see his face. Ja’Red brings me an Ambien. When I wake up we’re in Moscow, where I attend the grand opening of an Apple retail store. Everyone is effusive and happy. Men with beards are bear-hugging me and kissing me on both cheeks. I’m foggy from the Ambien and I can’t understand a word anyone says. The moment we’re back in the car I’ve forgotten who we met and why we were there.
Next stop is Paris for a meeting with Vivendi. We discuss music downloads, I think. Next we fly to London to meet Yoko Ono and beg her, for the millionth time, to stop being an idiot and let us sell Beatles music on iTunes. But when we get there we find out Yoko has flown back to New York. At the airport we cross paths with Howard Stringer of Sony, who was just hosting us in Tokyo. I believe we have a meal together in London. I have a hazy memory of being in a restaurant with him.
From London we chase Yoko to New York, only to be told, after we’ve driven all the way into the city, that she needs to reschedule. She does this on purpose to drive people nuts. It’s a negotiating tactic. Back to Teterboro we go, and I take another Ambien and sleep until we land in Los Angeles, where somehow, by some magic, it is only Thursday evening. I don’t know how that’s possible.