Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

by Daniel Lyons

  Zack starts screaming. “What the f-f-f-fuck are you t-t-t-talking about? Jesus, Steve, you know what? You are s-s-s-so full of shit, do you know that? You really are. Well l-l-l-listen. No way am I going to go to jail for you. You wait and see.”

  I wait a moment. Then I go, “I’m sorry. I was checking my email. What did you say?”

  Click. Dial tone. I hang up too. Mrs. Jobs looks up from her copy of Mother Jones and says, “You know, this global warming business really has me terrified. Have you read about these ice floes breaking off? It’s really scary. Was that Zack? Are we still on for Saturday?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I think that’s probably not going to happen.”

  “What, because of this stock thing? He’s really upset about this?”

  “People are getting crazy over this stuff. He’s acting like it’s all personal or something.”

  “Well, it’s like they say, at times like these you find out who your friends are. I guess Zack had us all fooled.”

  “Very true,” I say.

  “I listened to the tape,” Tom Bowditch says. He means the recording of my call with Zack. Yes, we record everything.

  “I wouldn’t worry.”

  “You’re not the one facing prison time.”

  “I’m going to send some guys to talk to him. Meanwhile, can I give you some advice? Be nice to Zack. Go see him. Indicate to him, in certain ways, that you’re going to take care of him. You understand?”

  “You mean offer him money?”

  “Kid,” he says, “you don’t miss a beat, do you.”

  Paul Doezen hates Tom Bowditch. They’ve been at each other ever since Paul joined the company. During Paul’s first board meeting Tom gave him a pop quiz, just to embarrass him. The questions weren’t important. Tom asked him basic stuff, like what was our current ratio and how many days of inventory were we carrying on the balance sheet. There was no point to this. It was just Tom’s way of making Paul look stupid and humiliating him in front of the board. Tom’s a former finance guy himself and he likes to show off how smart he is. Plus, he’d wanted us to hire one of his friends instead of Paul, but the board voted against him and went with Paul instead. So he’s made a point, ever since, of trying to trip Paul up.

  So I’m not surprised when Paul tells me that during the course of his investigation into the short-selling and the leaks he’s found some strange connections to Tom.

  “I’m not saying we can connect the dots,” he says. “It’s just coincidences at this point.”

  We’re at an Olive Garden in Palo Alto. I’m having a salad. He’s having some kind of all-you-can-eat deal that features three kinds of pasta, three kinds of sauce, plus meatballs and sausage. It’s sickening to watch, but also fascinating in a weird way.

  “For one thing, short interest has doubled again,” Paul informs me. “Which is partly to be expected, since the stock has been going up so much. But still. I don’t know. It’s weird. As for the guys in the Caymans, we didn’t get much. The registrar is just some local guy, some lawyer. He’s a front. But we did manage to track down some of their trades. That’s where it gets interesting.”

  “But you don’t have any smoking gun on Tom,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “All we have is that the Caymans company has done business with another Cayman company called MNA. That company, MNA, is owned in part by Luktev, which is a Russian oil and gas company. One of Luktev’s minority shareholders is a company called the Fernway Group. Fernway’s president is Christopher Winchester. He used to be deputy chair of the NSA. He went to Yale with Tom Bowditch. And they were both in Skull and Bones.”

  “I feel like I’m in a Michael Moore movie.”

  “There’s more. Winchester’s company, Fernway, also has a partnership on some Saudi oil fields and Dubai real estate with the Carlyle Group. Carlyle recently bought a twenty-five-percent stake in the Cho-Shabi casino in Macau.”

  “Which is owned by Tom Bowditch.”

  “Bingo.” He spears a meatball with his fork and pops the entire thing into his mouth.

  “So you think Tom is the one who’s shorting our stock?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What point would there be in Tom’s shorting our stock? He’s our biggest shareholder.”

  “Right. And he can’t clear out his position because it would start a run on the stock. So maybe he’s holding his shares, but he doesn’t want to get crushed in a downturn, so he’s buying shorts too. He’s hedging. Or maybe he isn’t our biggest shareholder anymore. Maybe he’s unloaded his position, but he’s done it in such a way that the transactions can’t be traced. In which case he could be going short and actually trying to engineer a collapse of the stock.”

  “Dude,” I say, “that’s friggin nuts, even for you. Honestly. I mean, look, I know you don’t like Tom. I know you guys have had your issues or whatever.”

  “That’s not what this is about.”

  “Okay. Fair enough. But I’ll be frank with you. I don’t buy it. Tom’s a fucker, but I don’t think he’s that kind of fucker, if you know what I mean.”

  He shrugs. “All I do is provide information,” he says. “You do with it what you want.” He eyes a piece of garlic bread on my plate. “You going to eat that?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “Roshi, my soul is troubled. There is something I must ask

  you, but I fear I will offend you. May I speak from my heart?”

  “Of course, Sagwa.”

  Ja’Red and I are walking through the gardens at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, north of San Francisco. Here on the farm we talk in a deliberately stilted manner, like characters in a kung fu movie, and we use Zen names. Ja’Red calls me “Roshi,” which means “teacher.” I call him “Sagwa,” which I’ve told him is a Tibetan word for “student,” though actually it’s the name of a Chinese cat on a PBS Kids cartoon show.

  It’s a beautiful day for doing spiritual work: sunny, warm, a blue sky streaked with thin clouds. Down below us the ocean rolls, heavy surf heaving against black rocks.

  “Roshi,” he says, “you are an enlightened being. And yet . . . ” He pauses. “And yet you do things that seem, well, cruel. You yell at people, and insult them, and treat them with disrespect. But at the same time you say that you want to make the world a better place. You say you want to restore a sense of childlike wonder to people’s lives. How do you reconcile these things?”

  It’s a good question, and I’ve been expecting him to ask it. I remind him that Lao Tzu teaches us in the Tao Te Ching that to achieve perfection one must be ruthless. “Was it cruel of Siddhartha to abandon his wife and children? Was Buddha cruel to instruct his followers to beg for alms? One might say so.”

  He gives me this look—he’s not buying it. The thing about Ja’Red is that he may be a stoner, but he’s not stupid.

  “Sagwa,” I say, “our goal at Apple is to try to achieve perfection. Consider the iPod, or our Unix-based operating system. These are objects that approach perfection, and they could not have been realized if we were not ruthless in our design process. I believe that if Buddha were alive today he would recognize the wonder of our eighty-gigabyte video iPod. Does this help you?”

  “Not really.”

  “You will need further contemplation. Devote this day to this one thought, that enlightenment requires cruelty.”

  We return to the temple in silence. I sense that I’m losing him.

  The truth is, I’ve seen this coming ever since Ja’Red started hanging out in the cafeteria and talking to freakboy Mike Dins-more and his pack of iPhone engineers. They’re like a little band of mutineers, hanging out and talking shit about their Dear Leader. Now that Dinsmore managed to get himself re-hired the word has gone out across Apple that the iPhone engineering group is untouchable. They can do whatever they want, and they can’t get canned. That’s the message we’ve sent. Real smart, right?

  Naturally Ja’Red tells me everything he hears from these guys, an
d he’s always peppering me with questions. Did I really fire a guy for taking a day off to attend his mother’s funeral? Did I really scream and cry and fire people because our delivery vans were not the exact same shade of white as our distribution building? Did I really refuse to give Apple stock to a bunch of the earliest employees?

  I find myself saying, “Yes, but . . .” a lot. As in “Yes, but the guy didn’t have any personal days left, and it was his own fault, and he wasn’t even that close with his mother.” Or, “Yes, but people need to know that details are important and if the trucks don’t match the buildings, I can’t concentrate.” Or, “Yes, but I was the one who came up with all the ideas, and I’m the one who had to rob convenience stores to get money to make payroll in the early days, and I’m the one who took all the risk, so why should all these other guys get to come along for a free ride when it was time to cash in?”

  My fears about Ja’Red are confirmed on the ride home in the limousine when he starts hitting me with more questions, like “Isn’t it weird to go to a Buddhist retreat in a limo?” and “Didn’t Buddha, like, give up his kingdom to seek enlightenment? So why don’t you do the same?”

  “Sagwa,” I say, “I have no interest in money. My wealth could go away tomorrow and I wouldn’t care. I didn’t seek it out. I didn’t ask for it. If anything, the money is a burden.”

  “Dude,” he says, “I read the papers, okay? You forced the company to pay you more money than they wanted to pay you. They offered you one thing, and you demanded more. You have five billion dollars, you’re one of the richest people in the world, and yet you still haggled with them for like eight months over how much they were going to pay you.”

  He suggests that I should give away all of my money. This is something every rich person hears eventually and honestly it is just about the stupidest suggestion in the world. Think about it. What point would there be in making money if you were just going to give it away? But I don’t say that. Instead, I take a deep breath, and fold my hands in front of me, and I do the thing where I act like I’m taking his comments very, very seriously, even though really I’m thinking about something completely different, like what I’m going to have for dinner or something.

  At last I speak, but when I do it’s in this very soft voice, as if he’s hurt my feelings but I’m going to forgive him for that and try to explain some higher truth to him.

  “So here’s the thing,” I say. “I understand where you’re coming from, because for a long time I struggled with the issue of money myself. I really did. And then, after a lot of contemplation, I had this really huge realization, which is this: I’m not a regular person. And there’s no sense in me pretending to be a regular person. Jesus didn’t go around being humble about who he was, did he?”

  “Um, well . . .”

  “Did Jesus pretend that he wasn’t Jesus? No. He said, ‘Dudes, I’m Jesus, and I’m the son of God, and you will all just have to deal with it, because I have to deal with this too.’ It’s the same for me. Do you think I enjoy this money? It’s a curse. It’s a cross for me to bear. I hope this doesn’t sound vain. I’m not comparing myself to Jesus.”

  “Actually,” he says, “I think you did.”

  “No,” I say, “it was a metaphor. Now you suggest I should give away my money. Let’s look at what happens if I do that. The poor people get the money and they rush out and buy fifty-inch flat-panel TVs and bags of crack and all sorts of other useless shit. No matter how much you give them, in two weeks they’re back where they started. The money will flow through them and arrive back where it started, piled up with people like me. Does this make sense?”

  “Not really,” he says.

  “Poor people are like sieves. Money just flows right through them. That’s why they’re poor. But for some special people, and like it or not I am one of these people, money gets drawn to us and attaches itself to us. There’s like this aggregating force at work, a magnetic force. Money likes to be with other money. Money has an instinct. It seeks out certain people and sticks to them.”

  He says he still thinks there’s a contradiction between the image I portray to the public of being all holy and pious and the reality of who I really am. I mean he’s about this close to saying I’m a hypocrite.

  I take one last run at him.

  “Ja’Red, the only thing that any of us can do is to be who we really are. If you’re Picasso, you paint. If you’re John Lennon, you write songs. If you’re Homer, you tell stories. You put your work out into the world and hope it helps people. If money comes to you, there is no way you can stop it. For me, right now, all I want to do is finish this iPhone and put it out into the world. Does that make sense?”

  He doesn’t answer. He just sits there, gazing out the window, looking either pissed off or depressed or both. When we drop him off at his house he gets out without saying good-bye. The next morning when I arrive at the Jobs Pod and greet him with a bow and say, “Namaste,” he gives me this smirk and rolls his eyes and says, “Yeah right. Hey. Here’s your green tea. Your mail is on your desk.”

  So fair enough, Ja’Red is disillusioned. It happens to everyone who gets close to me. First they worship me; then they realize I’m an asshole. But it’s all a necessary part of the journey. Frankly I think failure and disillusionment are essential to personal growth. It happened to me when I was nineteen. I ran off to India and made a fool of myself. I went there hoping to study with a guru named Krishna Neeb Baba. He was an American, a psychology professor at Harvard who renounced his possessions and moved to India and supposedly had achieved enlightenment.

  For a month I traveled along the Ganges, begging each day for my food and shelter. Krishna Neeb Baba’s ashram was in the north of the country, in a pass surrounded by craggy mountains whose tips were covered in snow even in summer. Every day a stream of pilgrims trickled up the mountainside and gathered to hear the baba speak. Some stayed only a day or two. Others stayed for months. We ate one meal a day, and slept on a stone floor.

  The baba was enormously fat, with a big mane of gray hair and a long flowing gray beard. He dressed in beautiful robes. Every day he would come sit with us and tell stories. Then he would leave. That was it. Sometimes he would not speak at all, but would just sit in a trance and meditate, or lie down on a bench and sleep.

  It took me ten days to realize that he was completely full of shit.

  Apparently I didn’t hide this very well because that day at the end of his sermon the baba singled me out and asked me to come with him on a walk. He asked me my name and where I was from. I told him. We stopped at a well. He washed my hair, then produced a razor and shaved my head.

  “Do you know why I did this?” he asked.

  “I think so.” I was shaking, a little bit. This, in fact, was the reason I’d come all the way to India. It’s what I’d always suspected about myself and wanted someone else to confirm. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but even now, after realizing the guy was a fraud, there was still part of me that wanted him to tell me I was special.

  “I’m the chosen one, right? I’ve always known it. I’m the reincarnation of Buddha, right?”

  “Not quite.” He scowled. “You have lice. That’s why I shaved your head. You can’t go home to America with lice.”

  “I’m going back to America?”

  “Hey, you pick things up fast. Come on.”

  He led the way up a rocky path to a large stone house on the back side of the mountain. The house was huge, with wooden porches and a wood-shingled roof. Inside there were high ceilings, dark wood, enormous beams. The place was a palace, basically. The walls and floors were covered with Himalayan rugs. The baba had a pack of women waiting on him, including some very young teenage girls. There also were a lot of little kids running around and calling him “daadaa.” I didn’t ask.

  Instead of the porridge and weak tea on which the pilgrims subsisted, the baba ate mutton and chicken, with lentil soup and side dishes of flavored rice and an eggplant dis
h that we ate with our hands, using pieces of hot bread. We sat on pillows at a low wooden table and ate until we were stuffed. The girls poured us tea and brought us clean plates for each new course of the meal.

  “So you figured me out,” he said. “Right? I could tell by looking at you.”

  “You mean that you’re a fake?”

  “Exactly. These sermons I give? I just make them up as I go along. I just say anything that comes into my head. They’re pointless. You’re smart enough to know that. That’s why you’re going home. There’s no reason for you to stay here now that you know the truth.”

  “Our guru in Oregon told us you were a divine being. He came here four years ago and studied with you.”

  “From Oregon? Who’s that? You mean Dave?”

  “Baba Shripakdeva.”

  “Dave McMillan. I remember him.” He reached into his mouth and pulled out a piece of gristly mutton and threw it on the floor. A girl ran over, picked it up, and hurried away. “What did he say?”

  “He said you were divine. That you had achieved enlightenment.”

  “Shit. He knows better than to be spouting that guff. Young man, there is no divine. God is dead. Have you read Nietzsche? Have you heard of him at least?”

  “I’ve read Nietzsche,” I said.

  “Well then what the fuck are you doing here?”

  My face felt hot. I felt ashamed of myself—even though, let’s face it, he’s the one who should have been ashamed. Only he wasn’t. He was completely happy with himself.

  Outside, in the courtyard, kids were chasing each other, screeching. Through the open window we had a view of the mountains.

  “So it’s all a racket,” I said. “You and Dave and all the rest of them, you’re all in on it.”

  “Not at all. My goodness, no. It is not a racket. Most emphatically, no. Look, is Catholicism a racket? Is Christianity a racket? Or Judaism, or Islam? Just because you and I don’t believe in those religions doesn’t mean they’re rackets. They serve a purpose. A very good and noble purpose. So do I.”