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

The Romantic
When it came to women, Jobs could be deeply romantic. He tended to fall in love dramatically, 
share with friends every up and down of a relationship, and pine in public whenever he was away 
from his current girlfriend. In the summer of 1983 he went to a small dinner party in Silicon 

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Valley with Joan Baez and sat next to an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania named 
Jennifer Egan, who was not quite sure who he was. By then he and Baez had realized that they 
weren’t destined to be forever young together, and Jobs found himself fascinated by Egan, who 
was working on a San Francisco weekly during her summer vacation. He tracked her down, gave 
her a call, and took her to Café Jacqueline, a little bistro near Telegraph Hill that specialized in 
vegetarian soufflés.
They dated for a year, and Jobs often flew east to visit her. At a Boston Macworld event, he 
told a large gathering how much in love he was and thus needed to rush out to catch a plane for 
Philadelphia to see his girlfriend. The audience was enchanted. When he was visiting New York, 
she would take the train up to stay with him at the Carlyle or at Jay Chiat’s Upper East Side 
apartment, and they would eat at Café Luxembourg, visit (repeatedly) the apartment in the San 
Remo he was planning to remodel, and go to movies or (once at least) the opera.
He and Egan also spoke for hours on the phone many nights. One topic they wrestled with was 
his belief, which came from his Buddhist studies, that it was important to avoid attachment to 
material objects. Our consumer desires are unhealthy, he told her, and to attain enlightenment you 
need to develop a life of nonattachment and non-materialism. He even sent her a tape of Kobun 
Chino, his Zen teacher, lecturing about the problems caused by craving and obtaining things. Egan 
pushed back. Wasn’t he defying that philosophy, she asked, by making computers and other 
products that people coveted? “He was irritated by the dichotomy, and we had exuberant debates 
about it,” Egan recalled.
In the end Jobs’s pride in the objects he made overcame his sensibility that people should 
eschew being attached to such possessions. When the Macintosh came out in January 1984, Egan 
was staying at her mother’s apartment in San Francisco during her winter break from Penn. Her 
mother’s dinner guests were astonished one night when Steve Jobs—suddenly very famous—
appeared at the door carrying a freshly boxed Macintosh and proceeded to Egan’s bedroom to set 
it up.
Jobs told Egan, as he had a few other friends, about his premonition that he would not live a 
long life. That was why he was driven and impatient, he confided. “He felt a sense of urgency 
about all he wanted to get done,” Egan later said. Their relationship tapered off by the fall 
of 1984, when Egan made it clear that she was still far too young to think of getting married.
Shortly after that, just as the turmoil with Sculley was beginning to build at Apple in early 1985, 
Jobs was heading to a meeting when he stopped at the office of a guy who was working with the 
Apple Foundation, which helped get computers to nonprofit organizations. Sitting in his office 
was a lithe, very blond woman who combined a hippie aura of natural purity with the solid 
sensibilities of a computer consultant. Her name was Tina Redse. “She was the most beautiful 
woman I’d ever seen,” Jobs recalled.
He called her the next day and asked her to dinner. She said no, that she was living with a 
boyfriend. A few days later he took her on a walk to a nearby park and again asked her out, and 
this time she told her boyfriend that she wanted to go. She was very honest and open. After dinner 
she started to cry because she knew her life was about to be disrupted. And it was. Within a few 
months she had moved into the unfurnished mansion in Woodside. “She was the first person I was 
truly in love with,” Jobs later said. “We had a very deep connection. I don’t know that anyone will 
ever understand me better than she did.”
Redse came from a troubled family, and Jobs shared with her his own pain about being put up 
for adoption. “We were both wounded from our childhood,” Redse recalled. “He said to me that 
we were misfits, which is why we belonged together.” They were physically passionate and prone 
to public displays of affection; their make-out sessions in the NeXT lobby are well remembered 
by employees. So too were their fights, which occurred at movie theaters and in front of visitors to 
Woodside. Yet he constantly praised her purity and naturalness. As the well-grounded Joanna 
Hoffman pointed out when discussing Jobs’s infatuation with the otherworldly Redse, “Steve had 
a tendency to look at vulnerabilities and neuroses and turn them into spiritual attributes.”
When he was being eased out at Apple in 1985, Redse traveled with him in Europe, where he 
was salving his wounds. Standing on a bridge over the Seine one evening, they bandied about the 
idea, more 

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romantic than serious, of just staying in France, maybe settling down, perhaps indefinitely. 
Redse was eager, but Jobs didn’t want to. He was burned but still ambitious. “I am a reflection of 
what I do,” he told her. She recalled their Paris moment in a poignant email she sent to him twenty
-five years later, after they had gone their separate ways but retained their spiritual connection:
We were on a bridge in Paris in the summer of 1985. It was overcast. We leaned against the smooth 
stone rail and stared at the green water rolling on below. Your world had cleaved and then it paused, 
waiting to rearrange itself around whatever you chose next. I wanted to run away from what had come 
before. I tried to convince you to begin a new life with me in Paris, to shed our former selves and let 
something else course through us. I wanted us to crawl through that black chasm of your broken world 
and emerge, anonymous and new, in simple lives where I could cook you simple dinners and we could 
be together every day, like children playing a sweet game with no purpose save the game itself. I like to 
think you considered it before you laughed and said “What could I do? I’ve made myself 
unemployable.” I like to think that in that moment’s hesitation before our bold futures reclaimed us, we 
lived that simple life together all the way into our peaceful old ages, with a brood of grandchildren 
around us on a farm in the south of France, quietly going about our days, warm and complete like loaves 
of fresh bread, our small world filled with the aroma of patience and familiarity.
The relationship lurched up and down for five years. Redse hated living in his sparsely 
furnished Woodside house. Jobs had hired a hip young couple, who had once worked at Chez 
Panisse, as housekeepers and vegetarian cooks, and they made her feel like an interloper. She 
would occasionally move out to an apartment of her own in Palo Alto, especially after one of her 
torrential arguments with Jobs. “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the 
hallway to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how uncaring he 
could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-
centered. Caring deeply about 
someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish 
on anyone, she said.
They were different in so many ways. “On the spectrum of cruel to kind, they are close to the 
opposite poles,” Hertzfeld later said. Redse’s kindness was manifest in ways large and small; she 
always gave money to street people, she volunteered to help those who (like her father) were 
afflicted with mental illness, and she took care to make Lisa and even Chrisann feel comfortable 
with her. More than anyone, she helped persuade Jobs to spend more time with Lisa. But she 
lacked Jobs’s ambition and drive. The ethereal quality that made her seem so spiritual to Jobs also 
made it hard for them to stay on the same wavelength. “Their relationship was incredibly 
tempestuous,” said Hertzfeld. “Because of both of their characters, they would have lots and lots 
of fights.”
They also had a basic philosophical difference about whether aesthetic tastes were 
fundamentally individual, as Redse believed, or universal and could be taught, as Jobs believed. 
She accused him of being too influenced by the Bauhaus movement. “Steve believed it was our 
job to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like,” she recalled. “I don’t share 
that perspective. I believe when we listen deeply, both within ourselves and to each other, we are 
able to allow what’s innate and true to emerge.”
When they were together for a long stretch, things did not work out well. But when they were 
apart, Jobs would pine for her. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he asked her to marry him. She 
couldn’t do it. It would drive her crazy, she told friends. She had grown up in a volatile household, 
and her relationship with Jobs bore too many similarities to that environment. They were 
opposites who attracted, she said, but the combination was too combustible. “I could not have 
been a good wife to ‘Steve Jobs,’ the icon,” she later explained. “I would have sucked at it on 
many levels. In our personal interactions, I couldn’t abide his unkindness. I didn’t want to hurt 
him, yet I didn’t want to stand by and watch him hurt other people either. It was painful and 
exhausting.”
After they broke up, Redse helped found OpenMind, a mental health resource network in 
California. She happened to read in a psychiatric 
manual about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and decided that Jobs perfectly met the criteria. 
“It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with, that I realized expecting him 

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to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see,” she said. “It also explained 
some of the choices he’d made about his daughter Lisa at that time. I think the issue is empathy—
the capacity for empathy is lacking.”
Redse later married, had two children, and then divorced. Every now and then Jobs would 
openly pine for her, even after he was happily married. And when he began his battle with cancer, 
she got in touch again to give support. She became very emotional whenever she recalled their 
relationship. “Though our values clashed and made it impossible for us to have the relationship we 
once hoped for,” she told me, “the care and love I felt for him decades ago has continued.” 
Similarly, Jobs suddenly started to cry one afternoon as he sat in his living room reminiscing 
about her. “She was one of the purest people I’ve ever known,” he said, tears rolling down his 
cheeks. “There was something spiritual about her and spiritual about the connection we had.” He 
said he always regretted that they could not make it work, and he knew that she had such regrets 
as well. But it was not meant to be. On that they both agreed.

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