Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

by Daniel Lyons

  In walks Michael wearing a red cape and black tights and a blue shirt with a white H on it. He explains that he will play a character called Holy Man who is born on Earth but is really a divine being from another planet, and who is called upon to save the Earth from an evil villain.

  Iger, with a straight face, says, “Michael, um, since the character’s name is Holy Man, how would you feel about having the costume have holes in it? Wouldn’t that make sense?”

  Michael gets exasperated and says, “Bob, it’s not that kind of holy, okay? It’s holy as in, you know, like God. Like holy.”

  The Disney dicks are snickering and kicking each other under the table. Michael appears not to notice. Iger goes, “I see, okay, my bad. Sorry. Continue.”

  Michael says this is guaranteed to be the biggest movie of all time, so he wants fifty million dollars in cash before shooting begins and twenty percent of the gross receipts.

  “Look, you white devils, I grew up in this business. I know all of your dirty white devil tricks. If you won’t meet my terms I’ll walk across the street and get some other batch of white devils to bankroll me. You have twenty-four hours to give me an answer.”

  He snaps his fingers and does his little Michael Jackson sideways kick thing. His crew takes off in formation. The Disney guys burst out laughing, then wander back to their offices where they will spend the rest of the day pretending to check email or make phone calls or whatever it is that passes for work in Hollywood.

  Worse yet is my afternoon meeting with Ivan Arsim at Massive Records. This meeting was set up months ago, for reasons neither of us can remember. There is no point to it, since we already carry their music on iTunes. But it’s on our calendars, so here we are. Ivan is an enormous guy from the Bronx who started out promoting rappers. Then he launched a music label which got bought by one company which was bought by another company and now here he is, the top executive at a publicly traded company with a market value of three billion dollars, sitting in an office on the thirtieth floor of a glass tower in Los Angeles with a marble desk and big plasma screens everywhere and loads of gold records hanging on the walls.

  He’s six-foot-five and all muscle, with close-cropped hair and a permanent tan, a shiny black shirt and black suit, thick gold chain around his neck and another at his wrist. The first time I met him I thought he was one of the bodyguards. He looks like he should be working as a bouncer at a club. Or a repo man.

  To be sure, the other top music executives aren’t any better. Tommy Mottola? Every time he opens his mouth I have to fight the urge to burst out laughing. Then you’ve got the rap guys, who are just ridiculous. You talk business, and then if you want to buy a Glock or an eight-ball of coke on the way out they can take care of that too. Even the older guys who supposedly are more professional really aren’t much different once you scratch the surface. They just speak better English and know how to hold a knife and fork.

  So here’s Ivan, who supposedly once beat a guy into a coma, wearing a Brioni suit and a very big shiny stupid wristwatch and crossing his legs to show off his hideously ugly custom-made Olga Berluti shoes. Yes, Ivan takes himself very seriously, so we all have to pretend to take him seriously too.

  “So,” he says.

  We’re sitting on leather couches in his office. A girl comes in with a cart bearing bottles of Bling H20 water, which costs forty dollars a bottle and was invented by a guy in Hollywood so that people like Ivan could feel important.

  “You like this water, right? I remember from last time.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “It’s the best water there is,” he says.

  “Right.”

  “You want something else instead?”

  “This is fine,” I say. “Thanks.”

  He sits back, satisfied that I’ve been suitably impressed.

  “So.” He lays his big gorilla arm across the back of his couch. He drums his fingers. “How’s business.”

  “Great,” I say. “You?”

  “Fantastic. Never better.”

  That’s a lie, but I’m not going to call him on it. Fact is, the music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of banking, though it’s really more like loan-sharking: They put up money to make records, and then they force recording artists to pay the money back, plus loads of interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them. We’ve seen what the Internet has done to music retailers. Next to go are the big stupid warehouses. The label guys know it, which is why these bastards are fighting like cornered rats.

  This is also why I try to be exceedingly polite and humble and respectful around music business guys and why I have to make stupid, pointless courtesy calls to cavemen like Ivan. As awful as it is to actually sit in the same room and breathe the same air as this guy, it’s necessary. It’s a performance. My method is simply to go all Zen and say as little as possible. If they ever try to talk business with me I say things like, “Let’s let the lawyers hammer out the details.” The idea is to keep them all feeling very important while we gradually redirect their industry’s profit stream so it flows to us instead of to them.

  “Question for you,” Ivan says.

  “Shoot.”

  “The parent company is doing a reorg, and they’re gonna give me a new title. What’s better, CEO or chairman? Which should I be?”

  “That’s easy. CEO. Definitely. The CEO is the guy who runs the company. The chairman is just a figurehead.”

  “But the chairman’s above the CEO, right?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well why did Sinatra call himself the chairman of the board? He wasn’t the CEO, he was chairman.”

  “Well,” I say, “you’ve got a point there.”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna be Chairman.” He stands up. I guess this means our meeting is over. “Thanks for coming by, Steve. I think we’ve really got a really synergistic arrangement that’s, uh, mutually beneficial to, uh, to both of us, right? It’s a win-win for everybody.”

  I’m halfway out the door when he says, “Jeez, I almost forgot. There’s something I was gonna tell you. I heard you’re trying to get the Beatles to sign up for iTunes, only the dragon lady is giving you hassles.”

  “Basically.”

  “I’ve got an idea for you. You got a minute? Come back and sit down. I think you’re gonna like this.”

  Dinner with a movie studio boss rounds out my wonderful day in Los Angeles. Jake Green is the head of Poseidon Films. They’ve made some of the biggest movies in Hollywood history, and we’ve been trying to get their archives onto iTunes for years. But all we do is meet and talk, meet and talk. We’ll agree on something, and I’ll fly home, and two weeks later I’ll find out nothing has happened. Whoever we dealt with isn’t there anymore and now we have to start over with someone else.

  Jake is a small guy with gray eyes and what appears to be an expensive manicure. He speaks very, very quietly, so you have to lean in to hear him. He’s very polished. Knows exactly what wine to order. But I’ve always heard that beneath the veneer he’s a total hard case. He grew up in Detroit and came up in the music business, booking bands. Then he started distributing films, just weirdo B-movie stuff, sci-fi and horror. From there he got into bankrolling pictures himself. A couple of them hit it big, and now he’s running a major. In all our meetings I’ve never seen the tough side of him. He’s always been a complete gentleman. He even does yoga, or so he says.

  After dinner we’re walking to the limo, which is parked down the street, and on the way we get approached by a very aggressive homeless guy. Jake tenses up but I’m like, “Hey, let me handle this.” I whip out an iPod Shuffle and give it to the guy. I do this all the time. It’s part of my belief that music has the power to transfor
m people’s lives. I always carry a handful of Shuffles with me, pre-loaded with Dylan and Joan Baez, stuff like that, which I give out to homeless people. Usually these folks just fall speechless and start being all grateful.

  Not this guy. He goes, “Hey man, what’m I sposeta do with this thing?” I try to explain what it is and he goes, “Fuck you, jack-off, I know what the fuck it is, and lemme axe you sumfin’. Can I smoke this thing? Will it get me high? No. It will not. Now I need some crack, okay? I need to smoke some goddamn crack, right now. So gimme some goddamn fucking green cash money so I can buy some goddamn crack.”

  We keep walking, and I tell him that we don’t have any money but he should listen to the Shuffle, and if not, it’s worth a lot of money, so maybe he could sell it. The guy starts working on Jake, saying, “Hey man, tell your yuppie friend not to be so cheap, man, tell your buddy give me some money.”

  Jake won’t look at the guy or even acknowledge him, which only gets the guy more pissed off. Finally we get to the limousine and the guy starts going on about how we must be fucking millionaires and yet we won’t even help him out with a few bucks.

  “Don’t tell me you ain’t got no money, you riding in a car like this, so gimme some fucking change, man, or better yet, gimme twenny bucks so I can go buy a rock. Come on, man, gimme a twenny so I can go get me some crack.”

  We start to get into the car when out of nowhere, the guy produces a knife. Not a big one, but a knife nonetheless.

  Jake sees this and hurries around the car, saying, “Okay, sir, look, now, wait, hold on, okay? Just hold on. We’ll help you out, okay? We’ll give you some money.”

  He reaches into his pocket as if he’s going to take out some money, but instead he does this little karate-type move, whack-whack-whack. The knife falls out of the guy’s hand and clatters onto the pavement. Jake grabs him by the head, spins him around and snaps his neck. Bam. He’s down and he’s not getting up. Because his head is now screwed on sideways, looking out over his shoulder, and his tongue is hanging out of his mouth, and his eyes are rolled up in his head.

  Jake says, “Get in the car. Don’t talk. Just get in the car. Let’s go.”

  We drive off, saying nothing. After a few minutes Jake says, in this tight voice, “So that never happened, right?”

  I point out to him that someone could have seen us and called the cops, or that the guy might have some friends who’ll come looking for him, and for sure people are going to find the body there and they’ll know there was a limo parked there. My left knee is bouncing up and down. I can’t control it. I feel like I might throw up.

  “We can call the cops ourselves,” I say. “We’ll tell them what happened. The guy came at me with a knife. It was self-defense. You saved my life. I’ll back you up on that.”

  Jake says, “Hey. Look. Do we have a problem here? Do we? ’Cause if we do, I gotta know that right now.”

  He waits. I say nothing. He’s glaring at me. He’s got these dead black eyes. Then he goes, “I’m gonna ask you again. That never happened, right?”

  I look down at my hands. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I say.

  “Good. Very good. Okay. Well, that was a very nice restaurant, wasn’t it? I should not have had that dessert though. I’m going to regret that tomorrow on the treadmill. Well, anyway. Thank you for an enjoyable evening. I’m really looking forward to doing business together.”

  When I get to the hotel I call Larry and tell him what happened. He’s up at his house in Malibu, where I was supposed to stay on this trip, except at the last minute Larry called and told me I was still welcome to stay over but he was coming to Los Angeles and he was going to be having a three-way with two girls he met on Craigslist, and he knows that kind of thing makes me uncomfortable, especially since it might involve what Larry refers to as “some heavy shit.” So Ja’Red called the Chateau and they moved Harvey Weinstein into the smaller penthouse, which I’ll admit is kind of satisfying.

  Larry insists that Jake did not really kill any homeless guy, and that the whole thing was a fake. He swears he heard a story about Jake doing the exact same thing in front of someone else.

  “It’s a psych-out,” he says. “Makes him look like a tough guy. He’s trying to intimidate you. He’s fucking with your head. Plus you feel indebted to him, because he protected you. I know it’s fucked up. But that’s how everything is in Los Angeles. It’s all an act. That homeless guy was probably some actor, working for free so he can get a part in some movie.” “The guy’s head was on sideways,” I say.

  “So maybe a stunt man. They can do stuff like that. Trust me, as soon as you drove off the guy got up and walked away. It was all staged. Come on, these are movie guys. It’s what they do.” He takes a deep hit off a joint and holds it. “How you doing otherwise?”

  I’m not quite sure how to answer that. I just sigh and say nothing.

  “What?” he says.

  “I’m tired,” I say. “I’m feeling old.”

  “You and me both, brother.”

  “You got the two girls there?”

  “They’re tied up in the dungeon room. I’m taking a break.”

  After we hang up I go out on the terrace and sit looking out at the lights of Los Angeles. All I have to do is be patient, and eventually all of this will be mine. The movie business, the music business. All of it.

  Then I think of the meetings I have scheduled for tomorrow, and how much I dread them. I try to imagine doing this job for another ten years. Or even one year. I don’t think I can do it.

  In my bag I still have the card that Matt, the CIA guy, left with me. I fetch my phone to dial his number, but just as I pick up the phone it begins to buzz.

  It’s Mrs. Jobs. She wants to know how I’m doing. She says she’s sorry for yelling at me, and if I really want to flee the country, she’ll go with me. Which, oddly enough, makes me not want to flee after all.

  “Let’s hang in there,” I say. “We’ll give it a little more time.”

  “Have you seen it?” Ja’Red says. He’s sitting behind his desk looking like a kid on Christmas morning. I’m back at headquarters for the first time since my banishment to Palo Alto. I’ve been told only that I should be prepared for a huge surprise. For all I know this will involve FBI agents and handcuffs. But now, seeing the smile on Ja’Red’s face, I don’t think so.

  “It’s incredible,” he says. “It’s like . . . it’s like looking into the face of God.”

  I go into my office. Lars Aki is there, beaming. Beside him is Mike Dinsmore, so pale he seems to be glowing.

  “It’s done,” Lars says.

  He hands me a box—a beautiful glossy black box made of heavy cardboard and hinged on the back like a jewelry case. Inside, cushioned in black velvet, is the iPhone. They’re right. It’s beautiful. Silver and black, with rounded edges. It’s the most beautiful object I’ve ever seen. I take it out of the case, and hold it in my hand. It is sleek and thin and light. But solid. Like a piece of really well-crafted jewelry. Perfect.

  “Turn it on,” Lars says.

  “It works?”

  He nods. I press the power button—which, because of the incredibly intuitive design, I am able to identify without reading a manual. The screen blinks and lights up. The phone comes to life. Icons fill the screen.

  Tears begin streaming down my face. I can’t help it. I turn to the window.

  “All those people,” I say. “Billions of them. The whole world. They have no idea what is coming. This product—this changes everything.”

  “Everything,” Lars says, nodding.

  “The world,” Mike Dinsmore says, “will never be the same.”

  Mike looks at me. I look at him. All of the bad blood, all of the fighting, all of the heartaches and struggles are behind us now. I reach out to him. We embrace. Then Lars joins in too. For a long time the three of us just stand there, holding each other in a three-way man hug. It’s one of the most powerful moments of my life.r />
  November flies by in a blur. I’m totally back in charge again, running things at headquarters, putting in long hours in planning meetings and putting the finishing touches on our advertising and marketing campaign around the iPhone.

  Up in San Francisco, Doyle has convened a grand jury, or so we’ve been told. The whole thing is top secret, and frankly I can’t be bothered to worry about it. For now they’re leaving me alone, and that’s all I care about. Our sales are going crazy. Every morning I get a report that rolls up our business from the day before, breaking things down by make and model and market—iPods in India, iMacs in Brazil, whatever. Everything’s booming. There’s not a weak spot in the lineup.

  On Thanksgiving we’ve got a big crowd: Larry and Mrs. Larry; Bono and The Edge; Sting and Trudie Styler; Tom Bow-ditch; Lars Aki and some guy named Michael that he met at a club; Al Gore, who’s on the outs with Tipper because she says he’s “gone Hollywood” and so he’s living in California for the time being, and wearing sandals letting himself get fat again; Ja’Red and his girlfriend, the smoothie maker slash modern dancer; Sergey Brin from Google and his Uncle Fetya, who arrived in a bus with a dozen Stanford coeds.

  We put out a big spread, with Tofurky and butternut squash and cranberry sauce and three kinds of brown rice, followed by organic apple pie with soy-based ice cream, then some digestion yoga in the backyard. It’s a totally intense and eclectic salon-type gathering with loads of really brilliant conversation and philosophical debates over huge issues like net neutrality and the long tail theory and the patent system and digital rights management.

  The highlight of the evening comes when I break out some iPhones, which everyone just raves about, except for The Edge, who has had a wee bit too much to drink and is asleep outside in a lawn chair, and Uncle Fetya, who seems to believe the iPhone is a miniature television and hands it back in disgust after Sergey, in Russian, explains that he cannot change the channel to a Russian-language station.