Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (2 page)

It is Tuesday afternoon.
I am barefoot, sitting on a cushion in the lotus position, gazing at a circuit board. This board, no bigger than a playing card, has taken years to create. It is the heart of the iPhone, the most important object my engineers have ever assembled. And it is wrong. I do not know why, exactly. But it is wrong. By this I do not mean that the board does not func
tion correctly. It functions perfectly. But it lacks beauty. My engineers argue that a circuit board need not be beautiful, since no one will ever see it.

“Yes,” I say, “but I will know it is there. And I will know that it is not beautiful.”

So I have come to the Tassajara meditation room. The room is windowless, white, perfectly silent. I focus on my breathing. I gaze at the circuit board. I allow my mind to empty itself of distraction. Slowly, like a blind man moving along a hallway, I make my way toward the still center, toward nothingness.

I’m almost there when someone knocks at the door. At first I can’t believe it. I ignore them. They knock again, and this time they open the door. I turn. It’s Paul Doezen and Sonya Bourne, looking grim.

“I’m sorry,” Sonya says.

Sonya runs our legal department. She’s bony and beak-nosed, high-strung and always freaked out about something.

She’s also well aware of our company policy regarding which people can speak to me and under what circumstances. We have ten tiers of access, arranged by rank—the highest people can speak to me by appointment, the mid-tiers can speak to me when I’ve spoken to them first, and the lowest can never speak to me, and in fact can be fired for trying to speak to me or even for speaking to other people in my presence. Those executives who are allowed to speak to me can do so only during certain time periods, which are arranged into a kind of matrix (certain people have access to more time periods than others) which is available to all of them on iCal under my public folder. It’s right there; just sign in, click on my folder, and boom, you can see whether you’re allowed to speak to me at the present time, and if not, you can see when your next available window will be. Right now I’m in total black-out mode. No one at Apple is ever allowed to interrupt me when I’m meditating, or doing yoga or tai chi, or getting my weekly high colonic. And when I say never, I mean
never.
Like, if there’s an earthquake, or a fire, leave the building and I’ll figure it out for myself, once my butt is fully flushed or whatever. But don’t even think about taking out that hose before I’m done. Because I’m a total health nut. I’m totally serious about this.

Yet here they are. Breaking the rules.

“It’s an emergency,” Paul says. He’s our chief financial officer, a big fat guy who just joined the company last year. I usually don’t hire fat people, just on principle. But he came highly recommended.

“Is the building on fire?”

“No.”

“Are we having an earthquake?”

“No.” He shakes his head.

“Are there some Goth kids in the lobby with automatic weapons?”

“Huh?”

I hold up my hand. I sigh, dramatically. I close my eyes. It’s too late. I’ve lost my focus. I press my hands together in front of me, and rest my chin on my fingertips—a gesture meant to indicate that I am thinking, even though actually I’m not. At last I get up from the floor and we go down the hall to my office.

“Speak,” I say.

Sonya does the talking. I can see her mouth moving, but I’m still so furious about being interrupted that I can’t understand a word she says. All I hear is blah, blah, mwah, mwah. But gradually through the din I begin to apprehend that somehow, somewhere, something bad has happened. She’s rambling on about stock options and stock prices and government regulators and how all these companies are getting letters raising questions about their accounting. Or something like that.

“That’s it?” I say.

“It’s important,” she says.

“You know,” I say, “I’m sure this is all very exciting in your weird little world of numbers and laws and big giant textbooks, but I was
meditating,
do you get it? If you’ve got some work that needs to be done involving numbers and laws and nasty little people who deal with such things, then go deal with those nasty little people and leave me out of it. That’s why I have you here, right? That’s
your
job. My job is to make beautiful objects. I cannot do that if I’m disrupted by negative people.”

Paul opens his enormous maw and starts to say something and I’m like, “Paul, have you heard of the iPod? You have? Good. Now tell me. Do you want more such beautiful things in your life? Do you want your children to grow up in a world of beautiful objects that do marvelous things? Then leave me alone.”

Sonya jumps in and starts explaining how, apparently, sometime way back in the past before iPods were even invented, Apple gave me ten million options, but I never sold them or I never made any money on them or I traded them in for some stock or something. At least I think this is what she tells me. I really don’t think about things like options or how much money I have. I’m all about the creativity.

“Sonya,” I say, “whatever it is, just do whatever, pay a fine or whatever, but I don’t want to spend a minute on this. I didn’t want to hear about it.”

Yet when I open my eyes she’s still there. I’m stunned. She says she doesn’t think I understand. People are talking about criminal charges. She says the way we gave out options was we dated them so they were granted on days when the stock price was low, so that whoever got the options made an instant profit. Apparently at one time this was considered okay, or maybe not, but in the old days nobody cared, but then some idiots in Washington changed the laws because of Enron and now they’re going around busting people.

“Steve,” she says, “this is serious. The SEC is sending lawyers here and they’re going to go through our books. The U.S. Attorney has contacted us too. Some of these backdated options went to you. Do you understand?”

“No, I do
not
understand, and look, I’m not stupid. Just because I didn’t finish college doesn’t mean you have to speak to me like I’m a child. I could understand this if I wanted to. I just don’t want to. So just take it out of my bank account or whatever. Jesus. Do I have to do everything for you guys?”

“Well, paying a fine would be one scenario.”

She looks at me.

I’m like, “Dude, what? Spit it out.”

“Well,” she goes, “some people are facing criminal trials. Some people might be going to . . . well, in some cases, certain charge may carry potential penalties that could include fines or even, possibly, in some scenarios, the possibility of incarceration.”

That’s a strange word,
incarceration,
and after she says it a weird silence comes over the room. Suddenly the air feels really, really cold, and it’s so quiet that I can hear the air conditioning whirring in the walls, and I’m thinking to myself,
Holy friggin mother of Jesus, I am so going to
kill
the a-holes who did the HVAC work in this place.
Because I specifically told them I want this place
silent.
Not
quiet.
Silent. Like a friggin tomb, I told them. Yet there’s this whirring in the walls as if we’re up in a jet at thirty thousand feet. How am I supposed to concentrate? This is how I’m supposed to work? I can’t even hear myself think.

Paul stands there, sweat beading on his monstrous forehead, his chest still heaving from the exertion of walking down the hall ten minutes ago, or maybe from the extremely hard work of having to stand up instead of sitting down. He won’t even look at me; instead he’s taking a great interest in the carpet, which, to be fair, is an exquisitely soft carpet that was hand-woven, hand-tufted and hand-dyed by master Tibetan craftspeople who are living in exile in Nepal. It’s based on one of my designs.

Then it dawns on me, and I’m like, “Wait a minute! You ass-holes! Oh, God, I friggin
hate
you guys! I’m being punked, right? Where are the cameras? Where’s Ashton? Dude, get out here! I friggin hate you, you a-hole! Oh man, you guys are soooo gonna get nailed for this one, I’m not even kidding, I’m gonna call Larry Ellison and we are totally going to cook something up, you better watch your friggin backs!”

But they just stand there giving me this pitiful look. They look the way people do when they’re about to have their dog put to sleep, or when they’ve been to visit someone in this hospital who’s terminally ill and they don’t really want to be in the hospital looking at all the freaky machines and smelling that skanky stale hospital smell and it takes all their strength just to stand there and smile and make small talk, and then at last they’ve fulfilled their obligation and it’s over and they can rush outside and breathe fresh air again and feel the sunshine on their faces, thinking,
Man oh man, there but for the grace of God go I, right?

Yeah, it’s just like that. Either the dog thing or the terminally ill hospital visit thing. Or maybe a mix of both.

“Steve,” Sonya says, “we’re not punking you. I promise. Do you know what it means when the SEC says it wants to investigate you?”

“As a matter of fact,” I say, “I don’t. But let me ask you something. Do you know the rule about interrupting me when I’m meditating?”

“I’m aware of the policy,” Sonya says.

“You’re aware. Okay. Good. So here’s what I’d like you to do. I’d like you both to leave this room and go back to your offices and fire yourselves. Okay? Thank you.”

They leave. I go back to the Tassajara room and resume meditating. Within ten minutes I’ve forgotten that I ever spoke to them.

But that evening, after dinner, as I’m doing my digestion yoga, I get a call from Tom Bowditch, our biggest shareholder. Tom is also a member of our board of directors. He says we’re having an emergency meeting of the board on Sunday to discuss this situation with the SEC.

“I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to ask my permission if you want to have a board meeting,” I say.

He growls. I’m not kidding. Like a dog. He says, “Just be there, you fuckwit,” and hangs up.

I’m not sure, but I’m guessing from his tone that maybe there really is something to be concerned about.

“Sure I know
about the SEC inquiry. They’re going after everybody,” Larry Ellison says. “It’s a witch hunt. A hundred companies got letters.”

We’re at his Japanese Zen palace in Woodside, walking along a carefully raked gravel path beside the man-made pond in the Japanese garden. We both wear formal tea-ceremony kimono, in black, and wooden sandals. Birds are whistling in the trees. These are special teeny-tiny bonsai birds that Larry imports from Japan. They don’t fly away because he feeds them special Japanese bird food.

“Some U.S. Attorney wants to run for governor, and now the asshats from the SEC are jumping in too. These are pygmies, Steve. These are guys who spent all that money to go to law school and now they’re making a hundred and fifty grand and they can’t afford to buy a house in the Bay Area. Meanwhile they see all these freako engineers with Asperger’s syndrome driving Ferraris. For this they blame guys like you and me, because we’ve committed the great sin of creating jobs and generating wealth. We’ve spawned a valley full of obnoxious nerd millionaires, and the lawyers hate us for it. And you know what? I don’t blame them. Look at us. Thursday afternoon and we’re dressed like Japanese warlords and having a tea ceremony. I’d hate us too.”

This is one area where Larry and I disagree. I agree that people hate us, but I don’t believe the hatred is justified. Larry, on the other hand, is a very insecure guy. He’s way too nice. His company, Oracle, has been in business for thirty years, and during that time its software has done more to improve the world than almost any other product I can think of. Plus Oracle has enriched its business partners and gone out of its way to treat its customers with care and respect.

To be sure, Larry doesn’t pull too many eighteen-hour days at Oracle anymore. But that’s because he’s so busy helping out in soup kitchens and animal shelters and halfway houses for homeless disabled kids born to crack-addicted mothers. Don’t look for any stories on that stuff, though.