Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

A New Campus
When Jobs was thirteen, he had looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book, called him to score a 
part he needed for a frequency counter he was trying to build, and ended up getting a summer job 
at the instruments division of Hewlett-Packard. That same year HP bought some land in Cupertino 
to expand its calculator division. Wozniak went to work there, and it was on this site that he 
designed the Apple I and Apple II during his moonlighting hours.
When HP decided in 2010 to abandon its Cupertino campus, which was just about a mile east 
of Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters, Jobs quietly arranged to buy it and the adjoining 
property. He admired the way that Hewlett and Packard had built a lasting company, and he prided 
himself on having done the same at Apple. Now he wanted a showcase headquarters, something 
that no West Coast technology company had. He eventually accumulated 150 acres, much of 
which had been apricot orchards when he was a boy, and threw himself into what would become a 
legacy project that combined his passion for design with his passion for creating an enduring 
company. “I want to leave a signature campus that expresses the values of the company for 
generations,” he said.
He hired what he considered to be the best architectural firm in the world, that of Sir Norman 
Foster, which had done smartly engineered buildings such as the restored Reichstag in Berlin and 
30 St. Mary Axe in London. Not surprisingly, Jobs got so involved in the planning, both the vision 
and the details, that it became almost impossible to settle on a final design. This was to be his 
lasting edifice, and he wanted to get it right. Foster’s firm assigned fifty architects to the team, and 
every three weeks throughout 2010 they showed Jobs revised models and options. Over and over 
he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and 
provide more alternatives.

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When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building was shaped like 
a huge winding racetrack made of three joined semicircles around a large central courtyard. The 
walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the interior had rows of office pods that allowed the sunlight 
to stream down the aisles. “It permits serendipitous and fluid meeting spaces,” he said, “and 
everybody gets to participate in the sunlight.”
The next time he showed me the plans, a month later, we were in Apple’s large conference 
room across from his office, where a model of the proposed building covered the table. He had 
made a major change. The pods would all be set back from the windows so that long corridors 
would be bathed in sun. These would also serve as the common spaces. There was a debate with 
some of the architects, who wanted to allow the windows to be opened. Jobs had never liked the 
idea of people being able to open things. “That would just allow people to screw things up,” he 
declared. On that, as on other details, he prevailed.
When he got home that evening, Jobs showed off the drawings at dinner, and Reed joked that 
the aerial view reminded him of male genitalia. His father dismissed the comment as reflecting the 
mind-set of a teenager. But the next day he mentioned the comment to the architects. 
“Unfortunately, once I’ve told you that, you’re never going to be able to erase that image from 
your mind,” he said. By the next time I visited, the shape had been changed to a simple circle.
The new design meant that there would not be a straight piece of glass in the building. All 
would be curved and seamlessly joined. Jobs had long been fascinated with glass, and his 
experience demanding huge custom panes for Apple’s retail stores made him confident that it 
would be possible to make massive curved pieces in quantity. The planned center courtyard was 
eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three 
football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s 
Square in Rome. One of his lingering memories was of the orchards that had once dominated the 
area, so he hired a senior arborist from Stanford and decreed that 80% of the property would be 
landscaped in a natural manner, with six thousand trees. “I asked him to make sure to include a 
new set of apricot orchards,” Jobs recalled. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the 
corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley.”
By June 2011 the plans for the four-story, three-million-square-foot building, which would hold 
more than twelve thousand employees, were ready to unveil. He decided to do so in a quiet and 
unpublicized appearance before the Cupertino City Council on the day after he had announced 
iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
Even though he had little energy, he had a full schedule that day. Ron Johnson, who had 
developed Apple’s stores and run them for more than a decade, had decided to accept an offer to 
be the CEO of J.C. Penney, and he came by Jobs’s house in the morning to discuss his departure. 
Then Jobs and I went into Palo Alto to a small yogurt and oatmeal café called Fraiche, where he 
talked animatedly about possible future Apple products. Later that day he was driven to Santa 
Clara for the quarterly meeting that Apple had with top Intel executives, where they discussed the 
possibility of using Intel chips in future mobile devices. That night U2 was playing at the Oakland 
Coliseum, and Jobs had considered going. Instead he decided to use that evening to show his plans 
to the Cupertino Council.
Arriving without an entourage or any fanfare, and looking relaxed in the same black sweater he 
had worn for his developers conference speech, he stood on a podium with clicker in hand and 
spent twenty minutes showing slides of the design to council members. When a rendering of the 
sleek, futuristic, perfectly circular building appeared on the screen, he paused and smiled. “It’s 
like a spaceship has landed,” he said. A few moments later he added, “I think we have a shot at 
building the best office building in the world.”
The following Friday, Jobs sent an email to a colleague from the distant past, Ann Bowers, the 
widow of Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce. She had been Apple’s human resources director and den 
mother in the early 1980s, in charge of reprimanding Jobs after his tantrums and tending to the 
wounds of his coworkers. Jobs asked if she would come see him the next day. Bowers happened 
to be in New York, but she came by his house that Sunday when she returned. By then he was sick 
again, in pain and without much energy, but he was eager to show her the renderings of the new 
headquarters. “You should be proud of Apple,” he said. “You should be proud of what we built.”

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Then he looked at her and asked, intently, a question that almost floored her: “Tell me, what 
was I like when I was young?”
Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very difficult,” she 
replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The journey is the reward.’ That turned 
out to be true.”
“Yes,” Jobs answered. “I did learn some things along the way.” Then, a few minutes later, he 
repeated it, as if to reassure Bowers and himself. “I did learn some things. I really did.”

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