Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (14 page)

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.