CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 3 page

By June 2011 the plans for the four-story, three-million-square-foot building, which would hold

more than twelve thousand employees, were ready to unveil. He decided to do so in a quiet and

unpublicized appearance before the Cupertino City Council on the day after he had announced

iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Even though he had little energy, he had a full schedule that day. Ron Johnson, who had

developed Apple’s stores and run them for more than a decade, had decided to accept an offer to

be the CEO of J.C. Penney, and he came by Jobs’s house in the morning to discuss his departure.

Then Jobs and I went into Palo Alto to a small yogurt and oatmeal café called Fraiche, where he

talked animatedly about possible future Apple products. Later that day he was driven to Santa

Clara for the quarterly meeting that Apple had with top Intel executives, where they discussed the

possibility of using Intel chips in future mobile devices. That night U2 was playing at the Oakland

Coliseum, and Jobs had considered going. Instead he decided to use that evening to show his plans

to the Cupertino Council.

Arriving without an entourage or any fanfare, and looking relaxed in the same black sweater he

had worn for his developers conference speech, he stood on a podium with clicker in hand and

spent twenty minutes showing slides of the design to council members. When a rendering of the

sleek, futuristic, perfectly circular building appeared on the screen, he paused and smiled. “It’s

like a spaceship has landed,” he said. A few moments later he added, “I think we have a shot at

building the best office building in the world.”

The following Friday, Jobs sent an email to a colleague from the distant past, Ann Bowers, the

widow of Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce. She had been Apple’s human resources director and den

mother in the early 1980s, in charge of reprimanding Jobs after his tantrums and tending to the

wounds of his coworkers. Jobs asked if she would come see him the next day. Bowers happened

to be in New York, but she came by his house that Sunday when she returned. By then he was sick

again, in pain and without much energy, but he was eager to show her the renderings of the new

headquarters. “You should be proud of Apple,” he said. “You should be proud of what we built.”

Then he looked at her and asked, intently, a question that almost floored her: “Tell me, what

was I like when I was young?”

Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very difficult,” she

replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The journey is the reward.’ That turned

out to be true.”

“Yes,” Jobs answered. “I did learn some things along the way.” Then, a few minutes later, he

repeated it, as if to reassure Bowers and himself. “I did learn some things. I really did.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

ROUND THREE

The Twilight Struggle

Family Ties

Jobs had an aching desire to make it to his son’s graduation from high school in June 2010.

“When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I

really wanted to see Reed graduate, and that got me through 2009,” he said. As a senior, Reed

looked eerily like his father at eighteen, with a knowing and slightly rebellious smile, intense eyes,

and a shock of dark hair. But from his mother he had inherited a sweetness and painfully sensitive

empathy that his father lacked. He was demonstrably affectionate and eager to please. Whenever

his father was sitting sullenly at the kitchen table and staring at the floor, which happened often

when he was ailing, the only thing sure to cause his eyes to brighten was Reed walking in.

Reed adored his father. Soon after I started working on this book, he dropped in to where I was

staying and, as his father often did, suggested we take a walk. He told me, with an intensely

earnest look, that his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a

love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making.

After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, Reed began spending his summers working in a

Stanford oncology lab doing DNA sequencing to find genetic markers for colon cancer. In one

experiment, he traced how mutations go through families. “One of the very few silver linings

about me getting sick is that Reed’s gotten to spend a lot of time studying with some very good

doctors,” Jobs said. “His enthusiasm for it is exactly how I felt about computers when I was his

age. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology

and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”

Reed used his cancer study as the basis for the senior report he presented to his class at Crystal

Springs Uplands School. As he described how he used centrifuges and dyes to sequence the DNA

of tumors, his father sat in the audience beaming, along with the rest of his family. “I fantasize

about Reed getting a house here in Palo Alto with his family and riding his bike to work as a

doctor at Stanford,” Jobs said afterward.

Reed had grown up fast in 2009, when it looked as if his father was going to die. He took care

of his younger sisters while his parents were in Memphis, and he developed a protective

paternalism. But when his father’s health stabilized in the spring of 2010, he regained his playful,

teasing personality. One day during dinner he was discussing with his family where to take his

girlfriend for dinner. His father suggested Il Fornaio, an elegant standard in Palo Alto, but Reed

said he had been unable to get reservations. “Do you want me to try?” his father asked. Reed

resisted; he wanted to handle it himself. Erin, the somewhat shy middle child, suggested that she

could outfit a tepee in their garden and she and Eve, the younger sister, would serve them a

romantic meal there. Reed stood up and hugged her. He would take her up on that some other

time, he promised.

One Saturday Reed was one of the four contestants on his school’s Quiz Kids team competing

on a local TV station. The family—minus Eve, who was in a horse show—came to cheer him on.

As the television crew bumbled around getting ready, his father tried to keep his impatience in

check and remain inconspicuous among the parents sitting in the rows of folding chairs. But he

was clearly recognizable in his trademark jeans and black turtleneck, and one woman pulled up a

chair right next to him and started to take his picture. Without looking at her, he stood up and

moved to the other end of the row. When Reed came on the set, his nameplate identified him as

“Reed Powell.” The host asked the students what they wanted to be when they grew up. “A cancer

researcher,” Reed answered.

Jobs drove his two-seat Mercedes SL55, taking Reed, while his wife followed in her own car

with Erin. On the way home, she asked Erin why she thought her father refused to have a license

plate on his car. “To be a rebel,” she answered. I later put the question to Jobs. “Because people

follow me sometimes, and if I have a license plate, they can track down where I live,” he replied.

“But that’s kind of getting obsolete now with Google Maps. So I guess, really, it’s just because I

don’t.”

During Reed’s graduation ceremony, his father sent me an email from his iPhone that simply

exulted, “Today is one of my happiest days. Reed is graduating from High School. Right now.

And, against all odds, I am here.” That night there was a party at their house with close friends and

family. Reed danced with every member of his family, including his father. Later Jobs took his

son out to the barnlike storage shed to offer him one of his two bicycles, which he wouldn’t be

riding again. Reed joked that the Italian one looked a bit too gay, so Jobs told him to take the solid

eight-speed next to it. When Reed said he would be indebted, Jobs answered, “You don’t need to

be indebted, because you have my DNA.” A few days later Toy Story 3 opened. Jobs had nurtured

this Pixar trilogy from the beginning, and the final installment was about the emotions

surrounding the departure of Andy for college. “I wish I could always be with you,” Andy’s

mother says. “You always will be,” he replies.

Jobs’s relationship with his two younger daughters was somewhat more distant. He paid less

attention to Erin, who was quiet, introspective, and seemed not to know exactly how to handle

him, especially when he was emitting wounding barbs. She was a poised and attractive young

woman, with a personal sensitivity more mature than her father’s. She thought that she might want

to be an architect, perhaps because of her father’s interest in the field, and she had a good sense of

design. But when her father was showing Reed the drawings for the new Apple campus, she sat on

the other side of the kitchen, and it seemed not to occur to him to call her over as well. Her big

hope that spring of 2010 was that her father would take her to the Oscars. She loved the movies.

Even more, she wanted to fly with her father on his private plane and walk up the red carpet with

him. Powell was quite willing to forgo the trip and tried to talk her husband into taking Erin. But

he dismissed the idea.

At one point as I was finishing this book, Powell told me that Erin wanted to give me an

interview. It’s not something that I would have requested, since she was then just turning sixteen,

but I agreed. The point Erin emphasized was that she understood why her father was not always

attentive, and she accepted that. “He does his best to be both a father and the CEO of Apple, and

he juggles those pretty well,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know

the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s really cool, so I’m fine. I don’t really need

more attention.”

Jobs had promised to take each of his children on a trip of their choice when they became

teenagers. Reed chose to go to Kyoto, knowing how much his father was entranced by the Zen

calm of that beautiful city. Not surprisingly, when Erin turned thirteen, in 2008, she chose Kyoto

as well. Her father’s illness caused him to cancel the trip, so he promised to take her in 2010,

when he was better. But that June he decided he didn’t want to go. Erin was crestfallen but didn’t

protest. Instead her mother took her to France with family friends, and they rescheduled the Kyoto

trip for July.

Powell worried that her husband would again cancel, so she was thrilled when the whole family

took off in early July for Kona Village, Hawaii, which was the first leg of the trip. But in Hawaii

Jobs developed a bad toothache, which he ignored, as if he could will the cavity away. The tooth

collapsed and had to be fixed. Then the iPhone 4 antenna crisis hit, and he decided to rush back to

Cupertino, taking Reed with him. Powell and Erin stayed in Hawaii, hoping that Jobs would return

and continue with the plans to take them to Kyoto.

To their relief, and mild surprise, Jobs actually did return to Hawaii after his press conference

to pick them up and take them to Japan. “It’s a miracle,” Powell told a friend. While Reed took

care of Eve back in Palo Alto, Erin and her parents stayed at the Tawaraya Ryokan, an inn of

sublime simplicity that Jobs loved. “It was fantastic,” Erin recalled.

Twenty years earlier Jobs had taken Erin’s half-sister, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, to Japan when she

was about the same age. Among her strongest memories was sharing with him delightful meals

and watching him, usually such a picky eater, savor unagi sushi and other delicacies. Seeing him

take joy in eating made Lisa feel relaxed with him for the first time. Erin recalled a similar

experience: “Dad knew where he wanted to go to lunch every day. He told me he knew an

incredible soba shop, and he took me there, and it was so good that it’s been hard to ever eat soba

again because nothing comes close.” They also found a tiny neighborhood sushi restaurant, and

Jobs tagged it on his iPhone as “best sushi I’ve ever had.” Erin agreed.

They also visited Kyoto’s famous Zen Buddhist temples; the one Erin loved most was Saihō-ji,

known as the “moss temple” because of its Golden Pond surrounded by gardens featuring more

than a hundred varieties of moss. “Erin was really really happy, which was deeply gratifying and

helped improve her relationship with her father,” Powell recalled. “She deserved that.”

Their younger daughter, Eve, was quite a different story. She was spunky, self-assured, and in

no way intimidated by her father. Her passion was horseback riding, and she became determined

to make it to the Olympics. When a coach told her how much work it would require, she replied,

“Tell me exactly what I need to do. I will do it.” He did, and she began diligently following the

program.

Eve was an expert at the difficult task of pinning her father down; she often called his assistant

at work directly to make sure something got put on his calendar. She was also pretty good as a

negotiator. One weekend in 2010, when the family was planning a trip, Erin wanted to delay the

departure by half a day, but she was afraid to ask her father. Eve, then twelve, volunteered to take

on the task, and at dinner she laid out the case to her father as if she were a lawyer before the

Supreme Court. Jobs cut her off—“No, I don’t think I want to”—but it was clear that he was more

amused than annoyed. Later that evening Eve sat down with her mother and deconstructed the

various ways that she could have made her case better.

Jobs came to appreciate her spirit—and see a lot of himself in her. “She’s a pistol and has the

strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s like payback.” He had a deep understanding

of her personality, perhaps because it bore some resemblance to his. “Eve is more sensitive than a

lot of people think,” he explained. “She’s so smart that she can roll over people a bit, so that

means she can alienate people, and she finds herself alone. She’s in the process of learning how to

be who she is, but tempers it around the edges so that she can have the friends that she needs.”

Jobs’s relationship with his wife was sometimes complicated but always loyal. Savvy and

compassionate, Laurene Powell was a stabilizing influence and an example of his ability to

compensate for some of his selfish impulses by surrounding himself with strong-willed and

sensible people. She weighed in quietly on business issues, firmly on family concerns, and fiercely

on medical matters. Early in their marriage, she cofounded and launched College Track, a national

after-school program that helps disadvantaged kids graduate from high school and get into college.

Since then she had become a leading force in the education reform movement. Jobs professed an

admiration for his wife’s work: “What she’s done with College Track really impresses me.” But

he tended to be generally dismissive of philanthropic endeavors and never visited her after-school

centers.

In February 2010 Jobs celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday with just his family. The kitchen was

decorated with streamers and balloons, and his kids gave him a red-velvet toy crown, which he

wore. Now that he had recovered from a grueling year of health problems, Powell hoped that he

would become more attentive to his family. But for the most part he resumed his focus on his

work. “I think it was hard on the family, especially the girls,” she told me. “After two years of him

being ill, he finally gets a little better, and they expected he would focus a bit on them, but he

didn’t.” She wanted to make sure, she said, that both sides of his personality were reflected in this

book and put into context. “Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not

extraordinary in every realm,” she said. “He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting himself in

other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind, the advancement of

humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands.”

President Obama

On a trip to Washington in the early fall of 2010, Powell had met with some of her friends at the

White House who told her that President Obama was going to Silicon Valley that October. She

suggested that he might want to meet with her husband. Obama’s aides liked the idea; it fit into his

new emphasis on competitiveness. In addition, John Doerr, the venture capitalist who had become

one of Jobs’s close friends, had told a meeting of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory

Board about Jobs’s views on why the United States was losing its edge. He too suggested that

Obama should meet with Jobs. So a half hour was put on the president’s schedule for a session at

the Westin San Francisco Airport.

There was one problem: When Powell told her husband, he said he didn’t want to do it. He was

annoyed that she had arranged it behind his back. “I’m not going to get slotted in for a token

meeting so that he can check off that he met with a CEO,” he told her. She insisted that Obama

was “really psyched to meet with you.” Jobs replied that if that were the case, then Obama should

call and personally ask for the meeting. The standoff went on for five days. She called in Reed,

who was at Stanford, to come home for dinner and try to persuade his father. Jobs finally relented.

The meeting actually lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. “You’re headed for

a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration

needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in

China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of

regulations and unnecessary costs.

Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and

crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope

for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial

assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they

were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the

year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a

board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and

interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.

Jobs offered to put together a group of six or seven CEOs who could really explain the

innovation challenges facing America, and the president accepted. So Jobs made a list of people

for a Washington meeting to be held in December. Unfortunately, after Valerie Jarrett and other

presidential aides had added names, the list had expanded to more than twenty, with GE’s Jeffrey

Immelt in the lead. Jobs sent Jarrett an email saying it was a bloated list and he had no intention of

coming. In fact his health problems had flared anew by then, so he would not have been able to go

in any case, as Doerr privately explained to the president.

In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama in

Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in

Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric

Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John Chambers, Oracle’s

Larry Ellison, Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Jobs’s attention to the

details of the dinner extended to the food. Doerr sent him the proposed menu, and he responded

that some of the dishes proposed by the caterer—shrimp, cod, lentil salad—were far too fancy

“and not who you are, John.” He particularly objected to the dessert that was planned, a cream pie

tricked out with chocolate truffles, but the White House advance staff overruled him by telling the

caterer that the president liked cream pie. Because Jobs had lost so much weight that he was easily

chilled, Doerr kept the house so warm that Zuckerberg found himself sweating profusely.

Jobs, sitting next to the president, kicked off the dinner by saying, “Regardless of our political

persuasions, I want you to know that we’re here to do whatever you ask to help our country.”

Despite that, the dinner initially became a litany of suggestions of what the president could do for

the businesses there. Chambers, for example, pushed a proposal for a repatriation tax holiday that

would allow major corporations to avoid tax payments on overseas profits if they brought them

back to the United States for investment during a certain period. The president was annoyed, and

so was Zuckerberg, who turned to Valerie Jarrett, sitting to his right, and whispered, “We should

be talking about what’s important to the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for

him?”

Doerr was able to refocus the discussion by calling on everyone to suggest a list of action items.

When Jobs’s turn came, he stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any

foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the United States should be given a visa to

stay in the country. Obama said that could be done only in the context of the “Dream Act,” which

would allow illegal aliens who arrived as minors and finished high school to become legal

residents—something that the Republicans had blocked. Jobs found this an annoying example of

how politics can lead to paralysis. “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us

reasons why things can’t get done,” he recalled. “It infuriates me.”

Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000

factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers onsite

to support those workers. “You can’t find that many in America to hire,” he said. These

factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic

engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could

train them. “If you could educate these engineers,” he said, “we could move more manufacturing

plants here.” The argument made a strong impression on the president. Two or three times over

the next month he told his aides, “We’ve got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing

engineers that Jobs told us about.”

Jobs was pleased that Obama followed up, and they talked by telephone a few times after the

meeting. He offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. (He had made the

same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t

totally deferential.) “I think political advertising is terrible. I’d love to get Lee Clow out of

retirement, and we can come up with great commercials for him,” Jobs told me a few weeks after

the dinner. Jobs had been fighting pain all week, but the talk of politics energized him. “Every

once in a while, a real ad pro gets involved, the way Hal Riney did with ‘It’s morning in America’

for Reagan’s reelection in 1984. So that’s what I’d like to do for Obama.”

Third Medical Leave, 2011

The cancer always sent signals as it reappeared. Jobs had learned that. He would lose his appetite

and begin to feel pains throughout his body. His doctors would do tests, detect nothing, and

reassure him that he still seemed clear. But he knew better. The cancer had its signaling pathways,

and a few months after he felt the signs the doctors would discover that it was indeed no longer in

remission.

Another such downturn began in early November 2010. He was in pain, stopped eating, and

had to be fed intravenously by a nurse who came to the house. The doctors found no sign of more

tumors, and they assumed that this was just another of his periodic cycles of fighting infections

and digestive maladies. He had never been one to suffer pain stoically, so his doctors and family

had become somewhat inured to his complaints.

He and his family went to Kona Village for Thanksgiving, but his eating did not improve. The

dining there was in a communal room, and the other guests pretended not to notice as Jobs,

looking emaciated, rocked and moaned at meals, not touching his food. It was a testament to the

resort and its guests that his condition never leaked out. When he returned to Palo Alto, Jobs

became increasingly emotional and morose. He thought he was going to die, he told his kids, and

he would get choked up about the possibility that he would never celebrate any more of their

birthdays.

By Christmas he was down to 115 pounds, which was more than fifty pounds below his normal

weight. Mona Simpson came to Palo Alto for the holiday, along with her ex-husband, the

television comedy writer Richard Appel, and their children. The mood picked up a bit. The

families played parlor games such as Novel, in which participants try to fool each other by seeing

who can write the most convincing fake opening sentence to a book, and things seemed to be

looking up for a while. He was even able to go out to dinner at a restaurant with Powell a few days

after Christmas. The kids went off on a ski vacation for New Year’s, with Powell and Mona

Simpson taking turns staying at home with Jobs in Palo Alto.

By the beginning of 2011, however, it was clear that this was not merely one of his bad patches.

His doctors detected evidence of new tumors, and the cancer-related signaling further exacerbated

his loss of appetite. They were struggling to determine how much drug therapy his body, in its

emaciated condition, would be able to take. Every inch of his body felt like it had been punched,

he told friends, as he moaned and sometimes doubled over in pain.

It was a vicious cycle. The first signs of cancer caused pain. The morphine and other painkillers

he took suppressed his appetite. His pancreas had been partly removed and his liver had been

replaced, so his digestive system was faulty and had trouble absorbing protein. Losing weight

made it harder to embark on aggressive drug therapies. His emaciated condition also made him

more susceptible to infections, as did the immunosuppressants he sometimes took to keep his body

from rejecting his liver transplant. The weight loss reduced the lipid layers around his pain

receptors, causing him to suffer more. And he was prone to extreme mood swings, marked by

prolonged bouts of anger and depression, which further suppressed his appetite.

Jobs’s eating problems were exacerbated over the years by his psychological attitude toward

food. When he was young, he learned that he could induce euphoria and ecstasy by fasting. So

even though he knew that he should eat—his doctors were begging him to consume high-quality

protein—lingering in the back of his subconscious, he admitted, was his instinct for fasting and for

diets like Arnold Ehret’s fruit regimen that he had embraced as a teenager. Powell kept telling him

that it was crazy, even pointing out that Ehret had died at fifty-six when he stumbled and knocked

his head, and she would get angry when he came to the table and just stared silently at his lap. “I

wanted him to force himself to eat,” she said, “and it was incredibly tense at home.” Bryar Brown,

their part-time cook, would still come in the afternoon and make an array of healthy dishes, but

Jobs would touch his tongue to one or two dishes and then dismiss them all as inedible. One

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