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

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every sale of your device,” Lack told him in his booming voice. “It’s a beautiful device. But our 
music is helping to sell it. That’s what true partnership means to me.”
“I’m with you,” Jobs replied on more than one occasion. But then he would go to Doug Morris 
and Roger Ames to lament, in a conspiratorial fashion, that Lack just didn’t get it, that he was 
clueless about the music business, that he wasn’t as smart as Morris and Ames. “In classic Steve 
fashion, he would agree to something, but it would never happen,” said Lack. “He would set you 
up and then pull it off the table. He’s pathological, which can be useful in negotiations. And he’s a 
genius.”
Lack knew that he could not win his case unless he got support from others in the industry. But 
Jobs used flattery and the lure of Apple’s marketing clout to keep the other record labels in line. 
“If the industry had stood together, we could have gotten a license fee, giving us the dual revenue 
stream we desperately needed,” Lack said. “We were the ones making the iPod sell, so it would 
have been equitable.” That, of course, was one of the beauties of Jobs’s end-to-end strategy: Sales 
of songs on iTunes would drive iPod sales, which would drive Macintosh sales. What made it all 
the more infuriating to Lack was that Sony could have done the same, but it never could get its 
hardware and software and content divisions to row in unison.
Jobs tried hard to seduce Lack. During one visit to New York, he invited Lack to his penthouse 
at the Four Seasons hotel. Jobs had already ordered a breakfast spread—oatmeal and berries for 
them both—and was “beyond solicitous,” Lack recalled. “But Jack Welch taught me not to fall in 
love. Morris and Ames could be seduced. They would say, ‘You don’t get it, you’re supposed to 
fall in love,’ and they did. So I ended up isolated in the industry.”
Even after Sony agreed to sell its music in the iTunes Store, the relationship remained 
contentious. Each new round of renewals or changes would bring a showdown. “With Andy, it 
was mostly about his big ego,” Jobs claimed. “He never really understood the music business, and 
he could never really deliver. I thought he was sometimes a dick.” When I told him what Jobs 
said, Lack responded, “I fought for Sony and the music industry, so I can see why he thought I 
was a dick.”
Corralling the record labels to go along with the iTunes plan was not enough, however. Many 
of their artists had carve-outs in their contracts that allowed them personally to control the digital 
distribution of their music or prevent their songs from being unbundled from their albums and sold 
singly. So Jobs set about cajoling various top musicians, which he found fun but also a lot harder 
than he expected.
Before the launch of iTunes, Jobs met with almost two dozen major artists, including Bono, 
Mick Jagger, and Sheryl Crow. “He would call me at home, relentless, at ten at night, to say he 
still needed to get to Led Zeppelin or Madonna,” Ames recalled. “He was determined, and nobody 
else could have convinced some of these artists.”
Perhaps the oddest meeting was when Dr. Dre came to visit Jobs at Apple headquarters. Jobs 
loved the Beatles and Dylan, but he admitted that the appeal of rap eluded him. Now Jobs needed 

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Eminem and other rappers to agree to be sold in the iTunes Store, so he huddled with Dr. Dre, 
who was Eminem’s mentor. After Jobs showed him the seamless way the iTunes Store would 
work with the iPod, Dr. Dre proclaimed, “Man, somebody finally got it right.”
On the other end of the musical taste spectrum was the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. He was on 
a West Coast fund-raising tour for Jazz at Lincoln Center and was meeting with Jobs’s wife, 
Laurene. Jobs insisted that he come over to the house in Palo Alto, and he proceeded to show off 
iTunes. “What do you want to search for?” he asked Marsalis. Beethoven, the trumpeter replied. 
“Watch what it can do!” Jobs kept insisting when Marsalis’s attention would wander. “See how 
the interface works.” Marsalis later recalled, “I don’t care much about computers, and kept telling 
him so, but he goes on for two hours. He was a man possessed. After a while, I started looking at 
him and not the computer, because I was so fascinated with his passion.”
Jobs unveiled the iTunes Store on April 28, 2003, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. With hair 
now closely cropped and receding, and a studied unshaven look, Jobs paced the stage and 
described how Napster “demonstrated that the Internet was made for music delivery.” Its 
offspring, such as Kazaa, he said, offered songs for free. How do you compete with that? To 
answer that question, he began by describing the downsides of using these free services. The 
downloads were unreliable and the quality was often bad. “A lot of these songs are encoded by 
seven-year-olds, and they don’t do a great job.” In addition, there were no previews or album art. 
Then he added, “Worst of all it’s stealing. It’s best not to mess with karma.”
Why had these piracy sites proliferated, then? Because, Jobs said, there was no alternative. The 
subscription services, such as Pressplay and MusicNet, “treat you like a criminal,” he said, 
showing a slide of an inmate in striped prison garb. Then a slide of Bob Dylan came on the screen. 
“People want to own the music they love.”
After a lot of negotiating with the record companies, he said, “they were willing to do 
something with us to change the world.” The iTunes Store would start with 200,000 tracks, and it 
would grow each day. By using the store, he said, you can own your songs, burn them on CDs, be 
assured of the download quality, get a preview of a song before you download it, and use it with 
your iMovies and iDVDs to “make the soundtrack of your life.” The price? Just 99 cents, he said, 
less than a third of what a Starbucks latte cost. Why was it worth it? Because to get the right song 
from Kazaa took about fifteen minutes, rather than a minute. By spending an hour of your time to 
save about four dollars, he calculated, “you’re working for under the minimum wage!” And one 
more thing . . . “With iTunes, it’s not stealing anymore. It’s good karma.”
Clapping the loudest for that line were the heads of the record labels in the front row, including 
Doug Morris sitting next to Jimmy Iovine, in his usual baseball cap, and the whole crowd from 
Warner Music. Eddy Cue, who was in charge of the store, predicted that Apple would sell a 
million songs in six months. Instead the iTunes Store sold a million songs in six