Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (27 page)

“I don’t think your client fully comprehends what’s going on here.” Then, to me, he says, “You can’t just come in here throwing out some big number.”

“I’m not just throwing it out. It’s a real offer. And it’s on the table.” I slide an imaginary box onto the center of the table, in front of him. “It’s right there in front of you. A billion dollars. Take it. You’re the big hero who nailed Steve Jobs.”

“There’s no point in you doing this.”

“
Au contraire,
” I say. “There is most definitely a point. You know what the point is? To find out what you’re after. And now I know. I’ve offered you a billion dollars to settle this, and you’ve said no. Obviously you’re not interested in settling this. You want a big trial. You want the free publicity. You want to launch a political career, and you’re drafting on my celebrity to get yourself some attention. That’s what I’m comprehending. And that’s what I’m going to say when the Wall Street analysts and the media start calling me and asking me what’s going on. I’m going to tell them I offered to pay a fine of one billion dollars, and you refused.”

“I can’t believe you’d come in here making threats,” Doyle says.

“Well, believe it,” I say. “Because I’ll roll right over you, you fuckwit.”

He starts sputtering. “You of all people,” he says. “Facing the kind of trouble you’re facing.”

“You’re jealous,” I say. “You’re jealous of me because I’m richer than you, and I’m smarter than you, and I’m better than you. That’s what this is all about, right? You’re jealous. How sad is that?”

“I don’t think you appreciate who I am, and what I can do,” he says.

“And I don’t think you realize what will happen if I’m prevented from developing new computers. Do you want a world where everyone uses Microsoft software? Do you want that on your head? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”

“I like Windows,” he says.

“You what?”

“I think Windows is great.”

I’m astounded. I could fall out of my chair. Maybe this is because I live in the Bay Area, but in all of my life I’ve never heard anyone actually say that they liked Windows.

“You like rebooting twenty times a day?” I say. “You like having apps interfering with each other and causing the system to hang? You like having to go look up drivers? You like spyware?”

“That doesn’t happen on our machines.” Poon says. “And by the way, my Zune kicks the crap out of the iPod.”

“Come on. Please.” But then something occurs to me. “Wait a minute. Is Microsoft putting you up to this? Is that what this is about? Are they paying you? Friggin Gates. I wouldn’t put it past him. Look, whatever they’re paying you, I’ll pay you double that.”

Doyle tells Bobby, “I’m warning you right now. You need to get control of your client.”

Bobby puts his hand on my arm and says we should go. At this point I shift into my pissed-off three-year-old routine: crying, shouting, pounding my fists on the table.

“You’re killing me!” I say. “You’re killing me! You’re trying to kill me!”

Doyle stands up. Poon does too. He’s smiling so hard it looks like his face is going to crack. He’s loving this.

“Thanks for your time,” Doyle says. “We’ll be in touch.”

Outside, Bobby and I stand on the steps watching traffic go by on Golden Gate. Bobby is being all weird and quiet. He hasn’t said a word since we left the conference room. It’s just past noon, and the plaza is filled with frigtards having their brown bag lunches and talking about last night’s
American Idol,
or whatever it is that frigtards discuss at lunch. For a moment I almost feel jealous of these morons. I wonder what it would be like to be fat and oblivious and blissful, munching away on a sandwich made of cancer-causing chemical-laden cold cuts and thinking how great life is.

“Steve,” Bobby says, “I’m sorry to say this, but we’re going to have to rethink our arrangement.”

“What, you’re raising your rates now, because I’m a difficult client?”

“Um, no. Not that. I’m resigning.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m dropping you as a client. I don’t handle Kevorkian cases.”

“Kevorkian cases?”

“Assisted suicide. It’s not my bag, baby. You need to find a different lawyer.”

“Look, Bobby. I’m sorry. Okay? I’ll behave better.”

“No you won’t. You can’t. It’s not in your nature. I told Tom this from the start. There’s only one kind of person that I won’t represent. You know what that is? Sociopaths. You know why? Not because they’re evil. Because they don’t take direction. They don’t listen. You know what else? Every CEO I’ve ever met is a sociopath.”

He takes a pair of Oakley sunglasses from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and slides them onto his face. He gives me a big

smile, and shakes my hand. “Good luck to you,” he says, and takes off down the steps, his gelled hair glistening in the sun. No great loss. Frankly I didn’t think he was doing such a hot job anyway.

One of my great strengths
—maybe my greatest strength— is that I never listen to anything that anyone else says. But somehow that comment from Bobby D. about me being a sociopath gets stuck in my head. And it’s bugging me. I keep asking myself, “Am I really a sociopath?” Certainly there is evidence to support this thesis. Zack Johnson hates me. My wife almost hates me. My board hates me. My management team hates me, so much that they’ve leased a building for me in a different city and stuck me out there by myself. Even Ja’Red refuses to work with me. He’s staying at headquarters and sends me my mail by courier.

So maybe I am a sociopath. Certainly my soul has gone down a dark path. For this I blame the corrosive, karma-destroying people with whom I now must associate. In the old days my job involved hanging out with geeks and engineers, throwing parties in the parking lot on Friday night and going out for pineapple pizza and talking about microprocessors and memory caches. I loved that life. I loved making products. I loved the moment when you put together a prototype and you flip the switch and the electrons begin coursing through the circuits and suddenly, as if by magic, your machine comes to life.

But that’s not my job anymore. Now my job involves flying back and forth to Los Angeles and having meaningless meetings with shitbags from the music and movie business.

Consider that the day after Bobby tells me I’m Charles Man-son Junior, I’m all by myself in the Jobs Jet, zipping down to Los Angeles, where I’ll ride by myself in a limousine and stay by myself in the penthouse at the Chateau. The only interactions I’ll have are with people I absolutely despise. They make my skin crawl, every single one of them.

I swear they are the darkest souls on the planet. I feel nauseated just being in a room with them, having to breathe the same air as they do. I need to wash in holy water after I spend time in their presence. These aren’t engineers or inventors. They don’t create anything. They don’t build anything. All they do is make deals. They’re criminals, basically.

Worse yet, there is no point to any of these meetings. It’s all a form of Kabuki theater. All of the actual work gets done by lawyers. Nevertheless, every record label boss and movie studio chief insists on having a million meet-and-greets with El Jobso, where we both have to tell each other how important the other guy is and how much we value this relationship and how important it is to build personal connections and to have respect for one another.

Of course as soon as I turn my back they lie and cheat and go back on their word. These are people who will look you in the eye and tell you something, then turn around later and swear they never said any such thing. You can spend years negotiating a deal with these sons of whores, fighting over every sentence, every word, and finally you come to an agreement and you think, “Okay, we’re done.” But you’re not done. Signing a piece of paper means nothing. It might as well have never happened. They just keep at you, every day, pushing, cheating, pushing some more, changing the terms, trying to raise the price of songs above ninety-nine cents or to find a way to get a bigger slice for themselves. It’s like being attacked by bees. You’ve got this swarm of crooks feeding on you.

That’s how I feel every time I’m in Los Angeles. These guys are like a cross between Tony Soprano, Bill Gates, and the monster from
Alien.
Even when you catch them cheating they don’t apologize. They just move on to the next swindle. And they’re really good at it, because they’ve been doing it for so long. They’ve spent decades practicing on recording artists and actors and screenwriters. But their biggest skill doesn’t involve being extremely sly or clever—it’s simply having the balls to be brazen and shameless and just plain awful. They’re like guys who steal purses from old ladies. It’s not that it’s hard to do, but what kind of person does it? This is the movie business. This is the music business. They’ve been operating this way for so long that they don’t know any other way to behave.

This trip to Los Angeles begins with a meeting at Disney. First Iger has to spend thirty minutes giving me grief about the Pixar options stuff. Then we have a meeting with Michael Jackson, who is shopping around a superhero movie called
Holy Man.
Disney has no intentions of ever making this movie, but Iger and his guys thought it would be hilarious to hear Michael make his pitch. Twenty top Disney execs are sitting around a table, and Michael’s Fruit of Islam bodyguards are assembled all around the edges of the room. Then Tito comes in and does a big introduction and goes, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . Holy Man!”

In walks Michael wearing a red cape and black tights and a blue shirt with a white H on it. He explains that he will play a character called Holy Man who is born on Earth but is really a divine being from another planet, and who is called upon to save the Earth from an evil villain.

Iger, with a straight face, says, “Michael, um, since the character’s name is Holy Man, how would you feel about having the costume have holes in it? Wouldn’t that make sense?”

Michael gets exasperated and says, “Bob, it’s not that kind of holy, okay? It’s holy as in, you know, like God. Like holy.”

The Disney dicks are snickering and kicking each other under the table. Michael appears not to notice. Iger goes, “I see, okay, my bad. Sorry. Continue.”

Michael says this is guaranteed to be the biggest movie of all time, so he wants fifty million dollars in cash before shooting begins and twenty percent of the gross receipts.

“Look, you white devils, I grew up in this business. I know all of your dirty white devil tricks. If you won’t meet my terms I’ll walk across the street and get some other batch of white devils to bankroll me. You have twenty-four hours to give me an answer.”

He snaps his fingers and does his little Michael Jackson sideways kick thing. His crew takes off in formation. The Disney guys burst out laughing, then wander back to their offices where they will spend the rest of the day pretending to check email or make phone calls or whatever it is that passes for work in Hollywood.

Worse yet
is my afternoon meeting with Ivan Arsim at Massive Records. This meeting was set up months ago, for reasons neither of us can remember. There is no point to it, since we already carry their music on iTunes. But it’s on our calendars, so here we are. Ivan is an enormous guy from the Bronx who started out promoting rappers. Then he launched a music label which got bought by one company which was bought by another company and now here he is, the top executive at a publicly traded company with a market value of three billion dollars, sitting in an office on the thirtieth floor of a glass tower in Los Angeles with a marble desk and big plasma screens everywhere and loads of gold records hanging on the walls.

He’s six-foot-five and all muscle, with close-cropped hair and a permanent tan, a shiny black shirt and black suit, thick gold chain around his neck and another at his wrist. The first time I met him I thought he was one of the bodyguards. He looks like he should be working as a bouncer at a club. Or a repo man.

To be sure, the other top music executives aren’t any better. Tommy Mottola? Every time he opens his mouth I have to fight the urge to burst out laughing. Then you’ve got the rap guys, who are just ridiculous. You talk business, and then if you want to buy a Glock or an eight-ball of coke on the way out they can take care of that too. Even the older guys who supposedly are more professional really aren’t much different once you scratch the surface. They just speak better English and know how to hold a knife and fork.