Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (5 page)

It seems to me that for two hundred and fifty bucks an hour the guy could go a little easier on me. But anyway, he’s right. That’s how it feels. Like I’ll die. It terrifies me.

Yes, I survived the last time Apple threw me out. But this time, I’m not so sure. I’m fifty-one years old. I’ve had cancer. I’m not as tough as I used to be.

And even the last time nearly killed me. I was thirty years old and living by myself in a mansion in Woodside with no furniture, just a huge stereo system and pillows on the floor. For months I did nothing. I’d take acid for days on end. The record was fourteen days, and believe me, that was a life-changing episode. But mostly it was this Keebler-Kahn type period in my life, with the eight stages of mourning, like anger, denial, anger again, then more anger, then rage, vindictiveness, more anger, and then revenge.

That’s when the healing could really begin, once I’d set out to get revenge on these butt-munchers who’d tossed me out. I hired away Apple’s best engineers and started a company called NeXT whose goal was to create the most amazing computer in the world. We did it. But there was one problem: The machines cost ten thousand bucks each. Nevertheless, when Apple started tanking without me, and the board of directors came begging for me to return, I brought with me the software from those NeXT machines. That software became the foundation of our new Macintosh computers. It saved Apple.

Since then I’ve bestowed upon the world other glorious devices and programs that restore a sense of childlike wonder to people’s lives. I invented the iPod, in all its incarnations, and the iTunes music store. I’ve created a hi-fi music system and a device for playing movies on your TV. Soon I will deliver the finest telephone ever created.

What happens to the world if the Jobsmeister is suddenly taken out of the game? Let me give you a hint: Microsoft. Yeah. It’s scary.

At midnight
the phone rings and it’s Larry again and I can tell by his voice that he’s even more baked than I am. He says six executives from Braid were picked up, plus two venture-fund guys who sit on the board—Barry Lunger from Greylock and Peter Michelson from Menlo.

“Those two I can see,” Larry says. “Pair of first-rate shitbags.”

He pauses to do a bong hit. He’s got this incredible collection of bongs. He buys them on eBay. One is from the sixties and supposedly was used by Jerry Garcia.

“So I was thinking,” Larry says, “of a way to take your mind off things.” He starts snickering like an idiot, the way he does when he’s stoned. “You ready? Are you? Okay. Two words:
Rat Patrol.
”

I sigh. “Oh, man, come on. I’m working.”

Which is a lie. I’m actually reading
Siddhartha
for the thousandth time. But whatever.

“Steve, seriously. It’ll be awesome.”

Rat Patrol is what Larry calls it when we drive his Hummer up to the city and cruise the Tenderloin in the middle of the night, wearing balaclavas and commando outfits and firing Super Soakers at transvestite hookers. You get points for how many you hit, with bonuses for letting them get as close as possible to the Hummer before you leap through the roof and open fire. We’ve done it a few times and I’ll admit, it’s pretty fun, especially when the trannies get all pissed off and start shouting and swearing. Larry aims for the face, and tries to blow their wigs off.

We learned this game from Arnold. He and Charlie Sheen invented it in Los Angeles with a couple of other guys. They call it Commando. But we started calling it Rat Patrol because we were hanging out the back of Larry’s Hummer like the machine gunner in the old
Rat Patrol
TV show.

How we heard about it is that one time Arnold was up in the Valley visiting T.J. Rodgers and the two of them took us along. Arnold uses paint guns instead of water cannons, which frankly I think is a little bit cruel, because those paint balls really sting when they hit you. The water cannons seem kinder.

Anyway, Arnold says we’ve got
carte blanche
on this stuff, and even if we get arrested, he guarantees us a get-out-of-jail-free card. Which I must say is exactly the kind of classy move you’d expect from Arnold. As Larry likes to say: Yes, he’s Republican, but not a
real
Republican.

“So are you in or are you in?” Larry says.

I just sigh.

“Babe,” he says, “I’m starting to worry about you.”

Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by this weird, inexplicable urge to cry. Maybe it’s the pot. It makes me weepy sometimes. By the time we hang up there are tears in my eyes. I get up and look at myself in the mirror. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I keep mirrors everywhere. I’m looking at myself and thinking,
Jobso, dude, what the hell is wrong with you? Remember who you
are,
okay, dude? Get a friggin
grip.

I go to the kitchen and call Breezeann, our house manager, at her boyfriend’s house and wake her up and have her come over

and make me a mango smoothie. Even that doesn’t cheer me up. And that
is
scary. Because if a mango smoothie can’t cheer me up, I’m definitely in bad shape.

On Sunday night
I once again have my most frequent recurring dream—the one in which I’m receiving the Nobel Prize. But this time the dream has a twist. After they give me the prize I find myself out in the street, wearing a loincloth, carrying a cross. People are yelling at me, spitting at me. Then I’m up on the cross, and beside me is Bill Gates, who’s also being crucified. “
You
I can see,” I say. “But why me?” Gates laughs and says, “You’re being crucified because you stole all your best ideas from me.”

I wake screaming. It’s dawn.

This is my life. You can’t believe the stress. It’s tough to run any company, but it’s an order of magnitude more difficult when you’re in a field driven by creativity. My business is all about what’s next. We get one product out the door, we need to have five more in the pipeline. And every product is a battle. I used to think the work would get easier as I got older. But if anything the work gets harder. Same goes for all of your creative types. Look at Picasso, or Hemingway. Somebody once asked one of them whether he found it easier to paint or write novels as he got older, since he’d already done so many paintings or novels. I can’t remember which one it was, but anyway the answer was no, it was always a struggle. Then Hemingway ended up putting a gun in his mouth, and Picasso died in a bullfight, I think, which is so cool it should be illegal.

Every day I come to work and try to create something magical, and instead I spend all my time putting out fires and fighting this shitstorm of emergencies and distractions, with a million people trying to get in to see me, or hounding me on the phone, and a zillion emails piling up in my inbox. Greenpeace is hounding me because our computers don’t turn themselves into compost when you’re done with them. Some European Commission is pissed because iTunes and the iPod are designed to work smoothly together. Microsoft, the scourge of the planet, has been chasing me for thirty years, copying everything I do.

On the other hand, I have to admit, in many ways my life is pretty amazing. Thanks to years of exercise and careful attention to dieting, in my early fifties I remain in fantastic physical condition. I am also a talented hypnotist, able to work with individuals in a one-on-one setting or with large groups—like the people who attend Apple press conferences and Macworld shows. The hypnotic power is so powerful that sometimes I have to consciously work on dialing it down. For example, when I walk into the Starbucks on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, the girls who work there start flirting with me, and I can tell that they know who I am and they’re all nervous, like they’re meeting Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or something. Then their eyes start getting glassy and I know that if I snapped my fingers they would do me right there behind the coffee machine. Or maybe in the restroom, which might be more comfortable and afford us some privacy. Not that I would do that, because I wouldn’t. But it’s very cool to know that I could.

On the career front, I’m doubly blessed. In addition to running a computer company, I also run a movie studio. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called Disney. Yeah.
That
Disney. Before Disney I ran a movie company called Pixar. We made a few movies that some people have heard of, like
Toy Story
and
Find
ing Nemo.
I bought Pixar for ten million dollars and sold it to Disney for seven and a half billion. Not a bad return.

Which leads me to my next point. The money issue. For a while I developed a complex about it. But fortunately I’m also a very spiritual person, having devoted many years to the study of Zen Buddhism, and this spirituality has really helped me deal with the guilt. My big breakthrough came on the day when my net worth hit the billion-dollar mark. It’s a big deal; ask anyone who’s been there. It freaks you out. Because at that point there’s no more denying that you’re just a regular person. You’re not. You’re a billionaire.

It’s like being in one of those movies where the hero realizes he’s got telekinetic powers and it’s just too bad if he doesn’t want them, he’s got them. I remember standing in front of a mirror in my office at Apple, naked, looking at myself. Which is something I do. I check out my body. Once a month I take a photo, and I save them in a digital album that I created in less than a minute using our iPhoto software. Anyway. I’m standing there in front of the mirror on the day that I became a billionaire and I’m going, Steve is a
billionaire.
Steve is a
billionaire.
A
billionaire.
Just saying it over and over, listening to the sound of that word.

The thing about becoming a billionaire is that first you’re elated; then you’re freaked out; and then you start feeling guilty. But here is where my Zen training helped me. I sat down and meditated and forced myself to not think about my wealth. I was sitting there moaning my syllable, and then I opened my eyes and came out of my trance and I said, out loud, in this really booming voice, to this imaginary critic guy that I imagined was standing there criticizing me for having so much money, I shouted right at him, as loud as I could: “Frig you, ass-munch, because I’m
smarter
than you, I’m
better
than you, I’m
changing the world,
and I
deserve
this.”

It was this amazing moment of total humility and self-negation. Two days later I woke up and invented the concept for the iPod. True story.

The way I see it, I can’t really take credit for being so rich. But it’s also not my fault, either. It just is what it is. It’s beyond my control. Here’s another way to look at it. The other day I was listening to a piece of music. It was a symphony by Mozart, written when he was nine years old. I thought to myself, How the hell does this happen? How does someone like Mozart come to exist? Fair enough, a musical genius spins up out of the gene pool. That probably happens pretty regularly. But in this case the genius happens to land in Salzburg, Austria, in the eighteenth century—the most fertile musical environment that has ever existed. And his father is a music teacher. Boom. Lightning strikes.

Same for me. I was born in San Francisco, in 1955, to a pair of graduate students who put me up for adoption. I landed with a modest couple in a sleepy town called Mountain View, California—which, as luck would have it, was situated right in the heart of what was about to become Silicon Valley. Maybe this was totally random, just natural selection at work. But I wonder if there isn’t also some kind of invisible hand of fate moving in our lives. Because imagine that I’d been born in a different century, or in a different place. Imagine I’d been born in some remote village in China. Or imagine that my birth parents didn’t put me up for adoption. Imagine my mother kept me, and I grew up in Berkeley with a pair of doofball intellectual parents, and instead of taking a summer job at Hewlett-Packard and meeting Steve Wozniak, I spent my teenage years hanging out in coffee shops reading Sartre and Camus and writing lame-ass poetry.

The point is, my adoption was necessary. It needed to happen. It’s like Moses being left in the bullrushes. If that doesn’t happen—if Moses stays home with his Jewish mother, and doesn’t grow up with Pharaoh’s family—well, the Jews don’t get out of Egypt, so there’s no Ten Commandments, and no Passover, which means no Easter. All of history is changed. Same with me. Without the fluke of my adoption, there’s no Apple Computer, no Macintosh, no iMac, no iPod, no iTunes.

I realize how I sound. I sound like a dick. Self-centered. Obnoxious. I’m told all the time that I seem like a narcissistic egomaniac. You know what I say? I say, “Look, wouldn’t you be an egomaniac if you woke up one day and found out you were me? You know you would.”

Of course the bad part of being such a mega-rich mega-famous mega-creative genius is that there are always some jerks looking to take a shot at you.

In my case those jerks include the United States government, and despite everything I’ve done for the world—or maybe because of it—they are determined to put me out of business.