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

Even Steve Jobs
.” Simpson was stunned. “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was a sweet guy, 
and a big tipper,” her father added. Mona was able to refrain from blurting out, 
Steve Jobs is your 
son!
When the visit was over, she called Jobs surreptitiously from the pay phone at the restaurant 
and arranged to meet him at the Espresso Roma café in Berkeley. Adding to the personal and 
family drama, he brought along Lisa, now in grade school, who lived with her mother, Chrisann. 
When they all arrived at the café, it was close to 10 p.m., and Simpson poured forth the tale. Jobs 
was understandably astonished when she mentioned the restaurant near San Jose. He could recall 
being there and even meeting the man who was his biological father. “It was amazing,” he later 
said of the revelation. “I had been to that restaurant a few times, and I remember meeting the 
owner. He was Syrian. Balding. We shook hands.”

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Nevertheless Jobs still had no desire to see him. “I was a wealthy man by then, and I didn’t 
trust him not to try to blackmail me or go to the press about it,” he recalled. “I asked Mona not to 
tell him about me.”
She never did, but years later Jandali saw his relationship to Jobs mentioned online. (A blogger 
noticed that Simpson had listed Jandali as her father in a reference book and figured out he must 
be Jobs’s father as well.) By then Jandali was married for a fourth time and working as a food and 
beverage manager at the Boomtown Resort and Casino just west of Reno, Nevada. When he 
brought his new wife, Roscille, to visit 
Simpson in 2006, he raised the topic. “What is this thing about Steve Jobs?” he asked. She 
confirmed the story, but added that she thought Jobs had no interest in meeting him. Jandali 
seemed to accept that. “My father is thoughtful and a beautiful storyteller, but he is very, very 
passive,” Simpson said. “He never contacted Steve.”
Simpson turned her search for Jandali into a basis for her second novel, 
The Lost Father,
published in 1992. (Jobs convinced Paul Rand, the designer who did the NeXT logo, to design the 
cover, but according to Simpson, “It was God-awful and we never used it.”) She also tracked 
down various members of the Jandali family, in Homs and in America, and in 2011 was writing a 
novel about her Syrian roots. The Syrian ambassador in Washington threw a dinner for her that 
included a cousin and his wife who then lived in Florida and had flown up for the occasion.
Simpson assumed that Jobs would eventually meet Jandali, but as time went on he showed even 
less interest. In 2010, when Jobs and his son, Reed, went to a birthday dinner for Simpson at her 
Los Angeles house, Reed spent some time looking at pictures of his biological grandfather, but 
Jobs ignored them. Nor did he seem to care about his Syrian heritage. When the Middle East 
would come up in conversation, the topic did not engage him or evoke his typical strong opinions, 
even after Syria was swept up in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “I don’t think anybody really 
knows what we should be doing over there,” he said when I asked whether the Obama 
administration should be intervening more in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. “You’re fucked if you do 
and you’re fucked if you don’t.”
Jobs did retain a friendly relationship with his biological mother, Joanne Simpson. Over the 
years she and Mona would often spend Christmas at Jobs’s house. The visits could be sweet, but 
also emotionally draining. Joanne would sometimes break into tears, say how much she had loved 
him, and apologize for giving him up. It turned out all right, Jobs would reassure her. As he told 
her one Christmas, “Don’t worry. I had a great childhood. I turned out okay.”
Lisa
Lisa Brennan, however, did not have a great childhood. When she was young, her father almost 
never came to see her. “I didn’t want to be a father, so I wasn’t,” Jobs later said, with only a touch 
of remorse in his voice. Yet occasionally he felt the tug. One day, when Lisa was three, Jobs was 
driving near the house he had bought for her and Chrisann, and he decided to stop. Lisa didn’t 
know who he was. He sat on the doorstep, not venturing inside, and talked to Chrisann. The scene 
was repeated once or twice a year. Jobs would come by unannounced, talk a little bit about Lisa’s 
school options or other issues, then drive off in his Mercedes.
But by the time Lisa turned eight, in 1986, the visits were occurring more frequently. Jobs was 
no longer immersed in the grueling push to create the Macintosh or in the subsequent power 
struggles with Sculley. He was at NeXT, which was calmer, friendlier, and headquartered in Palo 
Alto, near where Chrisann and Lisa lived. In addition, by the time she was in third grade, it was 
clear that Lisa was a smart and artistic kid, who had already been singled out by her teachers for 
her writing ability. She was spunky and high-spirited and had a little of her father’s defiant 
attitude. She also looked a bit like him, with arched eyebrows and a faintly Middle Eastern 
angularity. One day, to the surprise of his colleagues, he brought her by the office. As she turned 
cartwheels in the corridor, she squealed, “Look at me!”
Avie Tevanian, a lanky and gregarious engineer at NeXT who had become Jobs’s friend, 
remembers that every now and then, when they were going out to dinner, they would stop by 
Chrisann’s house to pick up Lisa. “He was very sweet to her,” Tevanian recalled. “He was a 

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vegetarian, and so was Chrisann, but she wasn’t. He was fine with that. He suggested she order 
chicken, and she did.”
Eating chicken became her little indulgence as she shuttled between two parents who were 
vegetarians with a spiritual regard for natural foods. “We bought our groceries—our puntarella, 
quinoa, celeriac, carob-covered nuts—in yeasty-smelling stores where the women didn’t dye their 
hair,” she later wrote about her time with her mother. “But we sometimes tasted foreign treats. A 
few times we bought a hot, seasoned chicken from a gourmet shop with rows and rows of 
chickens turning on spits, and ate it in the car from the foil-lined paper bag with our fingers.” Her 
father, whose dietary fixations came in fanatic waves, was more fastidious about what he ate. She 
watched him spit out a mouthful of soup one day after learning that it contained butter. After 
loosening up a bit while at Apple, he was back to being a strict vegan. Even at a young age Lisa 
began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and 
minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from 
arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t 
know: Things led to their opposites.”
In a similar way, the absence and coldness of her father made his occasional moments of 
warmth so much more intensely gratifying. “I didn’t live with him, but he would stop by our 
house some days, a deity among us for a few tingling moments or hours,” she recalled. Lisa soon 
became interesting enough that he would take walks with her. He would also go rollerblading with 
her on the quiet streets of old Palo Alto, often stopping at the houses of Joanna Hoffman and Andy 
Hertzfeld. The first time he brought her around to see Hoffman, he just knocked on the door and 
announced, “This is Lisa.” Hoffman knew right away. “It was obvious she was his daughter,” she 
told me. “Nobody has that jaw. It’s a signature jaw.” Hoffman, who suffered from not knowing 
her own divorced father until she was ten, encouraged Jobs to be a better father. He followed her 
advice, and later thanked her for it.
Once he took Lisa on a business trip to Tokyo, and they stayed at the sleek and businesslike 
Okura Hotel. At the elegant downstairs sushi bar, Jobs ordered large trays of unagi sushi, a dish he 
loved so much that he allowed the warm cooked eel to pass muster as vegetarian. The pieces were 
coated with fine salt or a thin sweet sauce, and Lisa remembered later how they dissolved in her 
mouth. So, too, did the distance between them. As she later wrote, “It was the first time I’d felt, 
with him, so relaxed and content, over those trays of meat; the excess, the permission and warmth 
after the cold salads, meant 
a once inaccessible space had opened. He was less rigid with himself, even human under the 
great ceilings with the little chairs, with the meat, and me.”
But it was not always sweetness and light. Jobs was as mercurial with Lisa as he was with 
almost everyone, cycling between embrace and abandonment. On one visit he would be playful; 
on the next he would be cold; often he was not there at all. “She was always unsure of their 
relationship,” according to Hertzfeld. “I went to a birthday party of hers, and Steve was supposed 
to come, and he was very, very, late. She got extremely anxious and disappointed. But when he 
finally did come, she totally lit up.”
Lisa learned to be temperamental in return. Over the years their relationship would be a roller 
coaster, with each of the low points elongated by their shared stubbornness. After a falling-out, 
they could go for months not speaking to each other. Neither one was good at reaching out, 
apologizing, or making the effort to heal, even when he was wrestling with repeated health 
problems. One day in the fall of 2010 he was wistfully going through a box of old snapshots with 
me, and paused over one that showed him visiting Lisa when she was young. “I probably didn’t go 
over there enough,” he said. Since he had not spoken to her all that year, I asked if he might want 
to reach out to her with a call or email. He looked at me blankly for a moment, then went back to 
riffling through other old photographs.