Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (15 page)

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 nothing 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.

I’ve never been able
to take Disney board meetings seriously. First of all we sit around a conference table whose legs are carved to look like the Seven Dwarves from Snow White. These are intended to match the pillars holding up the roof on the outside of the headquarters building, which are also Disney cartoon figures, only they’re nineteen feet tall. Who can work in a place like this? Everywhere you go there are pictures of Mickey and Minnie and Goofy. Face it. It’s weird.

I used to think the movie business would be kind of glamorous. In fact most of the work gets done in crappy-looking office parks or on lots that have all the charm of an airplane hangar. At the executive level these companies are run by moronic MBAs, just like every other big company. Talk to any BlackBerry-toting movie-company vice president and you might as well be visiting a company that makes cars, or potato chips, or pharmaceuticals. If you’re wondering if this is why so many movies suck so badly, it is.

At the board level it’s even worse. Most movie companies are run by absolute idiots. Disney’s board includes a guy from an electric utility; a guy from a cosmetics company; a guy from Sears; a guy from a liquor company; a guy from Procter & Gamble; a guy from Starbucks; a Latina lady from some Mexican newspaper who’s here, let’s face it, because she knocks down two diversity categories with one shot; a guy from a software company that’s practically out of business; and a woman whose big claim to corporate fame is that she used to work at Cisco Systems.

Now these mental giants, these paragons of virtue, these captains of industry, are sitting around the Mickey Mouse table drumming their fingers and giving me dirty looks. And I’m feeling sick. Not metaphorically, but literally. Ja’Red and I spent the night at Larry’s house in Malibu. I broke into the liquor cabinet and drank too much vodka, trying once again to erase the image of that kid in Longhua. I slept on the couch, in my clothes, and woke up with creatures chasing each other around inside my intestines. Larry’s housekeeper was cooking eggs. I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

“Steve,” Iger says, “nobody’s saying this is your fault. We’re just saying that as the guy who was running Pixar, and the guy who I presume is most intimately familiar with how that company was run, you’re going to have to be our point man on this issue. And so we’d like it if you could kind of walk us through what happened with regard to these options and various other issues regarding compensation. But as I said, nobody is saying it’s your fault.”

Translation: It’s your fault.

Whatever. Now I’m actually grateful that I’m hung over. I try to explain to them what happened. I tell them how a few years ago John Lasseter started making noise about leaving Pixar. He was making these threats, ironically enough, because Disney was trying to lure him away.

Thing is, John Lasseter was the creator of
Toy Story.
He’s the greatest animator who ever lived, a genius on the level of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo.

There was no way we were going to lose him. So we wrote John a new contract, with a huge bonus, a huge raise, and a load of stock options. To sweeten things a little bit more we backdated the options so they’d be more valuable. He stayed. He went on to make
Finding Nemo
and
The Incredibles,
both of which won Oscars and raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for us.

“My opinion? I think we did the right thing,” I say. “You can hate me if you want to, but I will not apologize for keeping John Lasseter attached to Pixar. Also, has it not occurred to you that the reason I had to do what I did was that you guys, right here at Disney, were trying to poach him away from Pixar? Do you realize that? If anything, this mess is
your
fault. You guys caused it. Now you’re trying to blame me. I think you should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

Rule Number One when talking to people who think they’re powerful is this: Insult them. Tell them they’re stupid. Challenge them. Unlike the rest of the world, they’re not used to this kind of abuse. Nobody ever talks to them like this. The disrespect knocks them back on their asses real fast.

Sure enough Iger starts backpedaling about how there’s no need to get angry here or to make personal attacks but we need to figure out how to solve the problem, blah blah, so I cut him off and say, “Robert, you know not whereof you speak. Please stop talking. Are you done? Good. Now I’d like you to take a deep breath, and hold it, and don’t let it out until I say so.”

Then, in a matter of seconds, I hypnotize the other frigtards, and in an extremely patronizing voice, a voice you might use when talking to a group of third graders, I explain that I want them all to go home tonight and sit down in a quiet place and do some real soul-searching. “Look into your hearts,” I say, “and ask yourselves how you really feel about what you’ve all tried to do to me here today. If you want to apologize to me now, you can. Or you can send me a note later. Or a phone call. Thank you for your time. I won’t be taking questions. Goodbye.”

That’s it. I walk out. In the car on the way to the airport I gaze out the window at the palm trees and the garish buildings and I wonder how anyone lives here. I hate Los Angeles. I always have. I hate all of the people here. The fawning, the flattery, the obvious insincerity, the constant backstabbing. What really bugs me is the way people kiss my ass everywhere I go. Sure, the adulation is nice. But they worship me for the wrong reasons. They don’t have any idea of who I am or what I’ve accomplished. All they know is that they’ve seen me on TV or in the pages of
Vanity Fair.
I’m famous. If they’re slightly more clued in they know that I ran Pixar and I’m the biggest shareholder in Disney; so, in their miserable little movie business, which as far as anyone down here is concerned is the only business that exists, I’m a big shot.

Never mind that Apple alone is twice the size of the entire

U.S. box office for all movies combined. Never mind that the computer industry as a whole dwarfs all of Hollywood, and that no movie studio will ever make the kind of profit margins that a software company like Microsoft does. Never mind that the morons who run the movie business have created a high-cost, high-risk business model that any clever child could tell you makes no sense, and that ninety-five percent of what they do involves churning out garbage and praying it sells. No, down there they really believe their own hype. They really believe they’re important, and that what they do matters.

On the jet I sleep. By Friday evening I’m home in Palo Alto and seriously considering selling my shares in Disney and walking away from the movie business altogether.

“Who needs the hassle?” I tell Mrs. Jobs, as we’re doing our bedtime yoga. “For that matter, maybe I should quit Apple too. See how well they do without me.”

“They wouldn’t last a year,” she says. I tell her about the kid in Longhua, the one who kept staring at me. “Poor you,” she says. “You shouldn’t have to see that.”

“I know, right?”

I’ve been giving some thought to the China situation and how we might fix things there. One obvious solution is we could start paying decent wages. But according to Paul Doezen, who ran the numbers, this would mean we’d have to charge seven hundred dollars for our high-end iPod instead of three hundred and forty-nine dollars. Bottom line: it’s a non-starter. If we’re going to make products that people can afford, these products need to be assembled in Chinese sweatshops. And I have to go there to China and see them and feel my soul being fed into a wood-chipper.

“This is the price we pay,” Ross Ziehm told me on the plane. “This is the sacrifice that we make so that millions of people might have beautiful objects that restore a sense of childlike wonder to their lives. Is it painful? Yes. Does it harm us? Yes. But we must do this. We must suffer so that others can be happy. It is what we are called to do.”

“A guy can only take so much,” I say to Mrs. Jobs.

“Just breathe,” she says. “Let it out. That’s it. Breathe.”

“I’m slipping,”
I say. “I can’t focus. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. Or when I do sleep, I’m having bad dreams. Nightmares.”

This is in my shrink’s office, in Los Gatos, an emergency visit. It’s Saturday night, and he’s supposed to be watching his kid in a school play, but I got him to skip that and see me instead. My shrink specializes in treating orphans and adoptees. He does past life regressions, karmic repatterning, soul clearing, and journey-work. Bruce Upstein, Ph.D., is the name on his office door and on his bills, but during our sessions he goes by Linghpra. He’s in his late fifties, freakishly thin, and sports a ponytail that reaches halfway down his back.

“Tell me about the nightmares,” he says.

We’re sitting on pads on the floor, in the lotus position. There’s no furniture in the office, just rugs and mats. The walls are hung with Tibetan tapestries. The room is on the seventh floor of an office building, with a glass wall looking out toward the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I tell him about my dream where I’m being crucified next to Bill Gates.

“Actually,” he says, “a lot of people have that dream.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shrugs. “Windows users. They hate the guy.”

“They should.”

“That software takes a toll on people. I see it every day. A lot of people want to see bad things happen to Gates. We see a lot of Windows-related disorders. Post-traumatic stress, that kind of thing.”