Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (23 page)

“Very close.”

“So would you throw him under a bus? I mean, if you had to? To save your own ass?”

“Tough question. Let me think about that.” I press my hands together and pretend to think. “Um, yes.”

“Kid, you’re amazing. You know that? You’ve got no loyalty at all, do you? I love it. I really do. It’s why you’re one of the great ones. You remind me of Lou Gerstner sometimes. And he was, in my opinion, the greatest of the great.”

Poor Zack shows up
for the board meeting and he has no idea that he’s about to get sucker-punched. Everyone else has been prepped for the vote, and yes, fair enough, it’s against the law for members of a board of directors to meet in secret without notifying all the members, but at this point we’re so far around the bend that illegal meetings are the least of our worries.

We begin with a presentation by Charlie Sampson in which he summarizes the problems that his team has discovered so far. Tom thanks Sampson and says we need to deliberate in private. As soon as Sampson leaves, Tom says it is clear that Zack was deeply involved in this malfeasance and for the sake of the company he is presenting a motion that Zack should step down from the board.

Zack starts to protest, but he’s stammering pretty badly, and before he can say anything, the board has voted. Zack starts blabbering about how if we’re going to vote about him then we should be taking a vote of confidence in me, too, because if he was involved then certainly I was involved.

Tom ignores this and hands Zack a letter of resignation to sign. Bing! The light goes off in Zack’s head and he realizes the meeting was a setup.

“I’ll want to have my lawyer look this over before I sign anything,” he says.

“Sure thing,” Tom says. “Meanwhile, until you do sign it, for your own safety, we’re going to have some security guys from Las Vegas watch your wife and kids for you.”

Zack starts to cry. He knows it’s over. He signs the paper and runs out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Maybe this makes me an old softie, but I have to admit that for a few seconds I really feel bad for Zack. He’s an incredibly nice guy. Really honest. A good soldier, as they used to say. On the other hand, as Tom points out, Zack won’t do much prison time. Twelve to eighteen months at the most. And it’s not like he’s going to be in some super-max or anything.

But I quickly put the whole thing out of my mind because, as I’ve learned over the years, guilt is just this huge energy blocker. Mostly I’m just relieved that it’s over.

I figure we’re done. So I get up to head for the door. But Tom says, “Um, Steve? Hold on a sec.”

I turn back. None of the board members will look at me.

“Sit down,” Tom says.

Turns out Zack isn’t the only one getting sucker-punched. Tom informs me that, effective today, the company is going to have research and development reporting to Jim Bell instead of to me. Same for engineering and design. Jim’s already got manufacturing and sales, plus marketing and public relations, so what this means, basically, is that now the whole company reports to Jim.

“So I’ve been stripped of all day-to-day responsibility,” I say.

“That’s not it at all,” Tom says.

“Really? Because unless I’m mistaken, I don’t think we have any other divisions, dude.”

“We’re not taking anything away from you,” Tom says. “We’re freeing you up so you can be more creative. We’re starting a new products group, and we’re putting you in charge of it.”

“To do what? The iPhone?”

“I thought we were using a code name for that. Geronimo or something.”

“Guatama.”

“Whatever.”

“Right. So am I running that project?”

“Actually, no. That’s being rolled into engineering.”

“So what am I supposed to work on?”

“Whatever you want. That’s the beauty of it. New stuff. Next-generation stuff. Oh, and one other thing. We’ve hired Mike Dinsmore back and put him over the, um, the phone thing. Guantanamo or whatever.”

“You can’t do that.”

“We can, and we already did.”

“I fired that freak for a reason,” I say.

“A stupid reason. We hired him back for a better reason.”

I look at the rest of the board. “You’re all voting with Tom on this?”

They all kind of shrug and nod. None of them dares to actually speak to me—they’re not that bold yet—but it’s clear they’re no longer in my camp.

“We’re setting you up with a secret skunk works,” Tom says. “An advanced research lab in Palo Alto. Close to your house.”

“So now I can’t even come in to work here at my office?”

“You can do whatever you want. But we thought you’d like your own lab, and this space became available in Palo Alto, so we took out a lease. We wanted to surprise you. We thought you’d be excited! Steve, we need to get you thinking again. We don’t want you distracted by being dragged into all this crap with the SEC. We need you in an environment where you can create. Do anything you want with the building. Hire I. M. Pei or Frank Gehry. Go wild. Take a dozen of the best engineers, anyone you want. Go back to your roots, like when you invented the Macintosh. Be a pirate again. Think outside the box. We need you to invent the future of this company.”

“If that’s the case,” I say, “why does it feel like you’re throwing me out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet?”

“That,” Tom says, “is something you need to take up with your therapist.”

Mrs. Jobs
is in Atherton attending a birthday party for some venture capitalist’s five-year-old kid when I reach her. “Same old same old,” she says. “Pony rides, jugglers, clowns. They’ve got Cirque du Soleil from Las Vegas, because Debbie hired them for Noah’s party so now everybody has to do it. Then at three they’ve got Sammy Hagar doing a solo acoustic set.”

“I thought they were getting Sting.”

“Sting wanted a hundred thousand bucks, and Sammy does it for ten, and the kids don’t know the difference, so who cares. What’s up?”

“I think I just got thrown out of my company again.”

“You what?”

I explain about the meeting.

“Can they do that?” she says.

“They just did.”

“You should leave anyway. They don’t deserve you. How about we do some traveling? You want to go to Nepal? We should go before all the snow melts from the global warming.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Poor baby.”

“I know.”

“It’s the price you pay for the gift you have. Nobody ever loves an artist.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.” My eyes are starting to well up. I don’t want her to hear me cry. “I should go.”

“Oh shit, hold on,” she says. There’s commotion in the background. “Shit, some kid just fell off the climbing wall. I’ll call you back, okay? I love you.”

“Love you too,” I say, but she’s already hung up.

Ross Ziehm
puts out a press release announcing that we’ve found yet more problems with our accounting. We include a quote that Ross wrote for me in which I apologize to the shareholders and pretend to be contrite. We also announce that Sonya has left the company and that Zack is leaving the board. We’re pretty sure people can read between the lines and understand that those two are to blame for everything, and that I’m just the victim of their shenanigans.

By evening the announcement has hit all the news sites and all the investor shows on TV. As expected, they skewer Zack and Sonya and gloss over any mention of me.

Next morning when the market opens our stock has gone
up
two dollars.
On bad news.
This is the power of communications. It’s one area where Apple really outperforms every other company in the world, and I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to achieve.

I’m home having breakfast when Zack calls. He’s sobbing, which is really annoying because I’m really trying to focus on my cantaloupe. Also, he’s back in his full-blown stammering and stuttering mode, which I swear is worse for me than it is for him.

“Steve,” he says, “h-h-h-how could you d-d-d-do this to me?”

He says he never got anything out of this, and it was all for my benefit, not his own, and he was doing it to help me, he bent the rules because he was loyal to me, and because he was my friend.

“And n-n-n-now,” he says, “you’re throwing m-m-m-me to the w-w-w-wolves?”

“Zack, I think you’re being a little bit melodramatic here, don’t you?”

“To the
w-w-w-wolves,
Steve. You’re throwing me to the
wolves.
”

I do my Zen thing and start talking to him in riddles. I tell him the story of the Zen master who was asked by a student, “If you believe in freedom, why do you keep your bird in a cage?” So the Zen master opened the cage and the bird flew away out the window. The Zen master then told his student, “Now you owe me a bird.”

Zack starts screaming. “What the f-f-f-fuck are you t-t-t-talking about? Jesus, Steve, you know what? You are s-s-s-so full of shit, do you know that? You really are. Well l-l-l-listen. No way am I going to go to jail for you. You wait and see.”

I wait a moment. Then I go, “I’m sorry. I was checking my email. What did you say?”

Click. Dial tone. I hang up too. Mrs. Jobs looks up from her copy of
Mother Jones
and says, “You know, this global warming business really has me terrified. Have you read about these ice floes breaking off? It’s really scary. Was that Zack? Are we still on for Saturday?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I think that’s probably not going to happen.”

“What, because of this stock thing? He’s really upset about this?”

“People are getting crazy over this stuff. He’s acting like it’s all personal or something.”

“Well, it’s like they say, at times like these you find out who your friends are. I guess Zack had us all fooled.”

“Very true,” I say.

“I listened to the tape,”
Tom Bowditch says. He means the recording of my call with Zack. Yes, we record everything.

“I wouldn’t worry.”

“You’re not the one facing prison time.”

“I’m going to send some guys to talk to him. Meanwhile, can I give you some advice? Be nice to Zack. Go see him. Indicate to him, in certain ways, that you’re going to take care of him. You understand?”

“You mean offer him money?”

“Kid,” he says, “you don’t miss a beat, do you.”

Paul Doezen hates
Tom Bowditch. They’ve been at each other ever since Paul joined the company. During Paul’s first board meeting Tom gave him a pop quiz, just to embarrass him. The questions weren’t important. Tom asked him basic stuff, like what was our current ratio and how many days of inventory were we carrying on the balance sheet. There was no point to this. It was just Tom’s way of making Paul look stupid and humiliating him in front of the board. Tom’s a former finance guy himself and he likes to show off how smart he is. Plus, he’d wanted us to hire one of his friends instead of Paul, but the board voted against him and went with Paul instead. So he’s made a point, ever since, of trying to trip Paul up.

So I’m not surprised when Paul tells me that during the course of his investigation into the short-selling and the leaks he’s found some strange connections to Tom.

“I’m not saying we can connect the dots,” he says. “It’s just coincidences at this point.”

We’re at an Olive Garden in Palo Alto. I’m having a salad. He’s having some kind of all-you-can-eat deal that features three kinds of pasta, three kinds of sauce, plus meatballs and sausage. It’s sickening to watch, but also fascinating in a weird way.

“For one thing, short interest has doubled again,” Paul informs me. “Which is partly to be expected, since the stock has been going up so much. But still. I don’t know. It’s weird. As for the guys in the Caymans, we didn’t get much. The registrar is just some local guy, some lawyer. He’s a front. But we did manage to track down some of their trades. That’s where it gets interesting.”

“But you don’t have any smoking gun on Tom,” I say.

He shakes his head. “All we have is that the Caymans company has done business with another Cayman company called MNA. That company, MNA, is owned in part by Luktev, which is a Russian oil and gas company. One of Luktev’s minority shareholders is a company called the Fernway Group. Fernway’s president is Christopher Winchester. He used to be deputy chair of the NSA. He went to Yale with Tom Bowditch. And they were both in Skull and Bones.”