Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (19 page)

“Fantastic,” Misho says. “Another guy who can’t keep his dick in his pants. You two must get along great. How do you lure him out here? Tell him you found a new glory hole up in the Castro?”

“That’s it exactly,” Larry says.

“Well, ladies.” Misho slaps his knees and stands up. “It’s been a pleasure. But I’m leaving. I promise I’ll come visit you in prison. Or I’ll pay someone to do it for me, probably. Okay? Good luck to you.”

So Larry actually manages
to put together a war council. He sets it up at John Doerr’s house in Woodside, because Doerr is tight with Bill Clinton these days and supposedly he’s angling to get some cabinet post in a Hillary administration.

I arrive late, because to hell with getting anywhere early and sitting around waiting. The house looks like some drug lord’s palace from a Chuck Norris movie, with a bunch of black armored SUVs and—I swear to God—a helicopter hovering overhead. They’ve got snipers on the roof, and a bunch of ape-looking guys with the earbuds standing out front. I’ve been to enough of these things to know what Secret Service agents look like. I’m pretty sure the show is Larry’s doing, because he gets off on the whole James Bond effect.

The gorillas frisk me and find a lighter in my jeans. They tell me I’ll have to leave it with them and pick it up on the way out and I say, “Well, there goes my plan to torch the place, but whatever.”

I go inside and there’s little Doerr, all ninety-seven pounds of him, with his too-big eyeglasses and his freako metabolism and the usual stick up his ass. He takes me to this room where all the big-shots from the Valley are sitting around a table. It’s like the meeting of the Five Families scene from Godfather One. There’s Otellini and Ruiz and T.J. Rodgers and some other chip guys, plus the Googletards who are playing with Legos, and McNealy, Schwartz, Hurd, Barksdale, Andreesen, Chambers, plus the money guys like Khosla and Jurvetson and McNamee and a bunch of other random VC assholes. Then there are a dozen or so guys I sort of kind of recognize from conferences, guys who work for second-tier outfits.

I figure there’s two hundred billion dollars sitting in this room. That’s just personal net worth. If you added up the market value of the companies these guys control, you’re talking close to a trillion. They’re all sitting around with notepads in front of them, expecting, I guess, to make big speeches.

In walk the Clintstones with George Soros. No smiles, no small talk. Hillary sits down and tells us in this pissed off Tony Soprano voice that there’s two years till this motherfucking election but she isn’t gonna fuck it up like Kerry and Gore, she’s gonna lock this motherfucker down now, she’s goddamn well gonna win and nobody is gonna get in her way, so we can all either get on the train or get run over by it, and she’s here to tell us how much money she wants each of us to put in.

Larry butts in and says that we’d arranged this meeting hoping to discuss ways in which we might put an end to the persecution and witch hunt that is currently taking place in the Valley. He’s smooth enough not to mention words like “coup” and “assassination,” but Hillary gives him this withering look anyway and says, “If you don’t mind, Barry, I’d like to continue.”

Larry looks at Bill, and in a voice that’s pretty controlled, considering that he’s given these people thirty million dollars over the years, he says, “Um, did we get our wires crossed here or something?”

Bill gives him this battered spouse look, as if to say,
Hell, brother, don’t get me into hot water here, okay? Ix-nay on the alking-tay.

“Excuse me, Bill’s not running this meeting,” Hillary says, and then she starts in again, saying everybody else pays their share, the oil guys pay five percent of net right off the top, and meanwhile we’re out here making our little chips and paying whatever we feel like, which for some of us, too many of us in fact, is zero.

“That bullshit,” she says, “is gonna stop. Right here and now.”

She tells us we can all check with George Soros on the way out and he’ll tell us how to move the money so it can’t be traced, using a bunch of these phony baloney environmental groups. She goes right around the table and gives everyone their number and what they’ll get if they do or don’t play ball.

Doerr gets oil prices bumped to a hundred bucks a gallon so his green tech fund can pop out a few winners. The Googletards get net neutrality so they can keep abusing copyright and selling ads against other people’s content. McNealy can sell his overpriced Sun boxes to government agencies, and Hillary will lift some export restrictions so he can sell supercomputers to the North Koreans. McNealy says he’d also like a fresh DOJ case on Microsoft, but Hillary says no can do because Gates is putting up half a billion to buy a free pass.

In my case the nut is twenty million dollars, and if I go along, the SEC and U.S. Attorney drop the charges on the options stuff and the feds buy iMacs for every school system in America. If I don’t, the options hassle continues, plus the DOJ will join with the Europeans who are raping us over the iPod being a closed system.

“Ya know, Steve,” she says, “the Euros ain’t the only ones who can bend you over and stick it up your ass.”

So I kind of laugh and go, “Well, ma’am, I appreciate your offer to help us out, but the thing is, with some of this stuff, like the options witch hunt, well, we need some help on this stuff right now, you see? We can’t really wait until 2008. Also, the thing is, I’m planning to endorse Al Gore, if he runs, because he’s on my board, and he’s going to save the planet from melting, and he’s going to make my pal Bono the head of the Supreme Court or something.”

She stares at me with this flabbergasted look, as if she can’t believe that someone else actually dared to speak instead of genuflecting and doing whatever she tells them, which is I guess what most people do around her.

Then she says, in that stupid chipmunk voice of hers, “You know, I really didn’t come here for a dialogue, I just wanted to give you information and leave, but since you raised the issue, let me reassure you, the world isn’t melting, Steve. Honestly. Al made that movie to scare people. Although if you want to know what’s really scary it’s the prospect of having that hillbilly in the White House. Do you know how much of a mess he made during our time there? Do you have any idea what it was like to be constantly stamping out his stupid ideas! I mean Kyoto? Fuck me, seriously.

“You do realize that Al has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, right? They keep him medicated beyond belief. That’s why he talks like that. Every so often he’ll go off his meds and cook up some stupid idea. Whenever he did, the rest of us would all have to go racing around to find his shrink and get him shot up with something or other and put back in his straitjacket.”

“Well,” I say, “if Al doesn’t run, then I’m probably going for Jerry Brown. Or Ralph Nader. Or maybe Obama.”

“Stevie, honey, you can endorse Osama bin Laden for all I care. You can go stand on a street corner wearing a fucking sandwich board and dance around in your tighty-whities. I just want your
money,
sweetie. It’s really simple. If you pay up, I help you. If you don’t, I won’t. Okay? By the way, what is up with those hippie eyeglasses? There’s these things called contact lenses now, have you heard of them?”

Now I’m the one who’s stunned. Nobody makes fun of my John Lennon glasses. Nobody. Seriously.

For a long time I just sit there, staring down at my hands, trying to stay calm. Doerr, who knows how I feel about my glasses, says, “Steve, whatever you’re thinking, just let it go, okay? Let it go.”

But I can’t help myself. I go, “Lady, let me tell you something. I grew up in this Valley, okay? And nobody comes into our Valley and talks to us like this. You see the guys in this room? We’re guys who build things. All right, with the exception of the VCs, who are parasites. But I’m talking about the rest of us. We’re engineers. We’re the guys who built the friggin Internet, with our bare hands. Do you understand? Me personally, I’ve been through hell and back. I’ve been fired from my own company. I’ve survived cancer. Then I invented the friggin iPod. I’m not scared of you. Let’s get something straight. I’ve got five billion dollars. If you want some of that, you come here and you
ask
me. Not
tell
me. You
ask.
You kiss the ring, just like your husband and everybody else. You got that straight?”

“Well,” she says, “that was a lovely speech. You know in Washington we have this thing called etiquette. Have you heard of it?”

“You know,” I say, “in California we have this thing called Pilates. Have you heard of it? You should check it out, because let me tell you, you’ve got a really big fat lumpy ass. I mean you can’t even tell if there’s actually an ass in there. It’s like two big garbage bags full of oatmeal. Seriously.”

Her face starts to shake. Beside her, I swear, Bill is working very hard at not laughing. The rest of the room is silent.

Finally, way down at the far end of the table, T.J. Rodgers stands up and starts doing a slow clap. Some others join in. Soon the whole room is clapping and shouting,
Steve, Steve, Steve
— except for Doerr, who’s all bummed out because his Secretary of State job just went up in smoke.

The Clintstones and Soros make for the door, with Doerr scrambling after them apologizing and begging them not to leave, but Hillary says, “Fuck you, gerbil, don’t call me ever again,” and she throws us all the finger. We all roar laughing and give her the finger right back. Ha! Thanks for coming to California, lady. Come back anytime!

We all file out past Doerr, who is standing in his foyer looking all shattered because he really, really wants to be a cabinet member. Doerr gives us this fake little smile and says, “Thanks for coming, guys. Great seeing you, as always.”

When I got to my car, no lie, somebody has keyed my door. I know it was one of the Clintons. Probably Hillary. Fat ass.

I’m less than a mile
down the road when my cell phone rings. It’s Tom Bowditch. He’s already heard what happened.

“Kid,” he says, “you are your own worst enemy. You know that? You’ve actually managed to make things worse.”

In the background there’s music playing. Girls are shrieking, and someone is shouting in Russian.

“Where are you?” I say.

“The Black Sea. Place called Sochi. On my boat.” The vehicle which Tom calls a boat is a three-hundred-foot-long mega-yacht that cost him a hundred million dollars. It attracts Russian hookers like light bulbs attract moths.

“You need a lawyer,” he says. “I’ve got one for you.”

It’s a guy in New York who represented a bunch of investment bankers and analysts who got in trouble after the dotcom crash. He also consulted on the Martha Stewart case and for some of the Enron guys. And he does a lot of work for the Mob, but only on the high-end cases and always behind the scenes.

“Trust me,” Tom says, “this guy is the best. He did the John Gotti case. Donald Trump keeps him on permanent retainer just to handle sexual harassment cases.”

“I’m surprised he has time to do anything else.”

“You and me both. Look, get ready to spend some money, because this guy costs a fortune. But when I tell you this guy’s the best, I mean he’s pure evil. And tough. Grew up in the Bronx. This guy could fuck a bag of broken glass and make it cry.”

“I’ll be sure to bring one with me when I meet him.”

“He’s coming to you. I sent my jet to get him. He’ll come to your house, not the office. He’s a freak about secrecy. Okay? Don’t say I never did you a favor.”

Bobby DiMarco is the guy’s name and yes, it’s
Bobby,
not Robert or Bob.
Bobby.
“Or some people call me
Bobby D,
” he says, and he’s one of those guys who shakes your hand and keeps pumping it and doesn’t let go. Hoo boy.

He’s in his late forties, about five-foot-five, and appears to be almost as wide as he is tall, with jet-black hair combed back from his face and a big brush mustache that makes him look like Geraldo Rivera. He’s wearing a navy blue suit which appears to be very expensive, and some very strong cologne. He’s carrying an aluminum briefcase with a lock on it.