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From iCEO to CEO
Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the
interim
in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was
baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. “I make 50 cents for
showing up,” he liked to joke, “and the other 50 cents is based on performance.” Since his return
in July 1997, Apple stock had gone from just under $14 to just over $102 at the peak of the
Internet bubble at the beginning of 2000. Woolard had begged him to take at least a modest stock
grant back in 1997, but Jobs had declined, saying, “I don’t want the people I work with at Apple to
think I am coming back to get rich.” Had he accepted that modest grant, it would have been worth
$400 million. Instead he made $2.50 during that period.
The main reason he clung to his
interim
designation was a sense of uncertainty about Apple’s
future. But as 2000 approached, it was clear that Apple had rebounded, and it was because of him.
He took a long walk with Laurene and discussed what to most people by now seemed a formality
but to him was still a big deal. If he dropped the
interim
designation, Apple could be the base for
all the things he envisioned, including the possibility of getting Apple into products beyond
computers. He decided to do so.
Woolard was thrilled, and he suggested that the board was willing to give him a massive stock
grant. “Let me be straight with you,” Jobs replied. “What I’d rather have is an airplane. We just
had a third kid. I don’t like flying commercial. I like to take my family to Hawaii. When I go east,
I’d like to have pilots I know.” He was never the type of person who could display grace and
patience in a commercial airplane or terminal, even before the days of the TSA. Board member
Larry Ellison, whose plane Jobs sometimes used (Apple paid $102,000 to Ellison in 1999 for
Jobs’s use of it), had no qualms. “Given what he’s accomplished, we should give him five
airplanes!” Ellison argued. He later said, “It was the perfect thank-you gift for Steve, who had
saved Apple and gotten nothing in return.”
So Woolard happily granted Jobs’s wish, with a Gulfstream V, and also offered him fourteen
million stock options. Jobs gave an unexpected response. He wanted more: twenty million options.
Woolard was baffled and upset. The board had authority from the stockholders to give out only
fourteen million. “You said you didn’t want any, and we gave you a plane, which you did want,”
Woolard said.
“I hadn’t been insisting on options before,” Jobs replied, “but you suggested it could be up to
5% of the company in options, and that’s what I now want.” It was an awkward tiff in what should
have been a celebratory period. In the end, a complex solution was worked out that granted him
ten million shares in January 2000 that were valued at the current price but timed to vest as if
granted in 1997, plus another grant due in 2001. Making matters worse, the stock fell with the
burst of the Internet bubble. Jobs never exercised the options, and at the end of 2001 he asked that
they be replaced by a new grant with a lower strike price. The wrestling over options would come
back to haunt the company.
Even if he didn’t profit from the options, at least he got to enjoy the airplane. Not surprisingly
he fretted over how the interior would be designed. It took him more than a year. He used Ellison’
s plane as a starting point and hired his designer. Pretty soon he was driving her crazy. For
example, Ellison’s had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button. Jobs
insisted that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished stainless steel of the
buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones. But in the end he got the plane he
wanted, and he loved it. “I look at his airplane and mine, and everything he changed was better,”
said Ellison.
At the January 2000 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh operating
system, OSX, which used some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT three years
earlier. It was fitting, and not entirely coincidental, that he was willing to incorporate himself back
at Apple at the same moment as the NeXT OS was incorporated into Apple’s. Avie Tevanian had
taken the UNIX-related Mach kernel of the NeXT operating system and turned it into the Mac OS
kernel, known as Darwin. It offered protected memory, advanced networking, and preemptive
multitasking. It was precisely what the Macintosh needed, and it would be the foundation of the
Mac OS henceforth. Some critics, including Bill Gates, noted that Apple ended up not adopting
the entire NeXT operating system. There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap
into a completely new system but instead to evolve the existing one. Application software written
for the old Macintosh system was generally compatible with or easy to port to the new one, and a
Mac user who upgraded would notice a lot of new features but not a whole new interface.
The fans at Macworld received the news with enthusiasm, of course, and they especially
cheered when Jobs showed off the dock and how the icons in it could be magnified by passing the
cursor over them. But the biggest applause came for the announcement he reserved for his “Oh,
and one more thing” coda. He spoke about his duties at both Pixar and Apple, and said that he had
become comfortable that the situation could work. “So I am pleased to announce today that I’m
going to drop the interim title,” he said with a big smile. The crowd jumped to its feet, screaming
as if the Beatles had reunited. Jobs bit his lip, adjusted his wire rims, and put on a graceful show
of humility. “You guys are making me feel funny now. I get to come to work every day and work
with the most talented people on the planet, at Apple and Pixar. But these jobs are team sports. I
accept your thanks on behalf of everybody at Apple.”
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