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

Intel Inside
Apple’s innovations were more than skin-deep. Since 1994 it had been using a microprocessor, 
called the PowerPC, that was made by a partnership of IBM and Motorola. For a few years it was 
faster than Intel’s chips, an advantage that Apple touted in humorous commercials. By the time of 
Jobs’s return, however, Motorola had fallen behind in producing new versions of the chip. This 
provoked a fight between Jobs and Motorola’s CEO Chris Galvin. When Jobs decided to stop 
licensing the Macintosh operating system to clone makers, right after his return to Apple in 1997, 
he suggested to Galvin that he might consider making an exception for Motorola’s clone, the 
StarMax Mac, but only if Motorola sped up development of new PowerPC chips for laptops. The 
call got heated. Jobs offered his opinion that Motorola chips sucked. Galvin, who also had a 
temper, pushed back. Jobs hung up on him. The Motorola StarMax was canceled, and Jobs 
secretly began planning to move Apple off the Motorola-IBM PowerPC chip and to adopt, instead, 
Intel’s. This would not be a simple task. It was akin to writing a new operating system.
Jobs did not cede any real power to his board, but he did use its meetings to kick around ideas 
and think through strategies in confidence, while he stood at a whiteboard and led freewheeling 
discussions. For eighteen months the directors discussed whether to move to an Intel architecture. 
“We debated it, we asked a lot of questions, and finally we all decided it needed to be done,” 
board member Art Levinson recalled.
Paul Otellini, who was then president and later became CEO of Intel, began huddling with Jobs. 
They had gotten to know each other when Jobs was struggling to keep NeXT alive and, as Otellini 
later put it, “his arrogance had been temporarily tempered.” Otellini has a calm and wry take on 
people, and he was amused rather than put off when he discovered, upon dealing with Jobs at 

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Apple in the early 2000s, “that his juices were going again, and he wasn’t nearly as humble 
anymore.” Intel had deals with other computer makers, and Jobs wanted a better price than they 
had. “We had to find creative ways to bridge the numbers,” said Otellini. Most of the negotiating 
was done, as Jobs preferred, on long walks, sometimes on the trails up to the radio telescope 
known as the Dish above the Stanford campus. Jobs would start the walk by telling a story and 
explaining how he saw the history of computers evolving. By the end he would be haggling over 
price.
“Intel had a reputation for being a tough partner, coming out of the days when it was run by 
Andy Grove and Craig Barrett,” Otellini said. “I wanted to show that Intel was a company you 
could work with.” So a crack team from Intel worked with Apple, and they were able to beat the 
conversion deadline by six months. Jobs invited Otellini to Apple’s Top 100 management retreat, 
where he donned one of the famous Intel lab coats that looked like a bunny suit and gave Jobs a 
big hug. At the public announcement in 2005, the usually reserved Otellini repeated the act. 
“Apple and Intel, together at last,” flashed on the big screen.
Bill Gates was amazed. Designing crazy-colored cases did not impress him, but a secret 
program to switch the CPU in a computer, completed seamlessly and on time, was a feat he truly 
admired. “If you’d said, ‘Okay, we’re going to change our microprocessor chip, and we’re not 
going to lose a beat,’ that sounds impossible,” he told me years later, when I asked him about 
Jobs’s accomplishments. “They basically did that.”
Options
Among Jobs’s quirks was his attitude toward money. When he returned to Apple in 1997, he 
portrayed himself as a person working for $1 a year, doing it for the benefit of the company rather 
than himself. Nevertheless he embraced the idea of option megagrants—granting huge bundles of 
options to buy Apple stock at a preset price—that were not subject to the usual good compensation 
practices of board committee reviews and performance criteria.
When he dropped the “interim” in his title and officially became CEO, he was offered (in 
addition to the airplane) a megagrant by Ed Woolard and the board at the beginning of 2000; 
defying the image he cultivated of not being interested in money, he had stunned Woolard by 
asking for even more options than the board had proposed. But soon after he got them, it turned 
out that it was for naught. Apple stock cratered in September 2000—due to disappointing sales of 
the Cube plus the bursting of the Internet bubble—which made the options worthless.
Making matters worse was a June 2001 cover story in 
Fortune
about overcompensated CEOs, 
“The Great CEO Pay Heist.” A mug of Jobs, smiling smugly, filled the cover. Even though his 
options were underwater at the time, the technical method of valuing them when granted (known 
as a Black-Scholes valuation) set their worth at $872 million. 
Fortune
proclaimed it “by far” the 
largest compensation package ever granted a CEO. It was the worst of all worlds: Jobs had almost 
no money that he could put in his pocket for his four years of hard and successful turnaround work 
at Apple, yet he had become the poster child of greedy CEOs, making him look hypocritical and 
undermining his self-image. He wrote a scathing letter to the editor, declaring that his options 
actually “are worth zero” and offering to sell them to 
Fortune
for half of the supposed $872 
million the magazine had reported.
In the meantime Jobs wanted the board to give him another big grant of options, since his old 
ones seemed worthless. He insisted, both to the board and probably to himself, that it was more 
about getting proper recognition than getting rich. “It wasn’t so much about the money,” he later 
said in a deposition in an SEC lawsuit over the options. “Everybody likes to be recognized by his 
peers. . . . I felt that the board wasn’t really doing the same with me.” He felt that the board should 
have come to him offering a new grant, without his having to suggest it. “I thought I was doing a 
pretty good job. It would have made me feel better at the time.”
His handpicked board in fact doted on him. So they decided to give him another huge grant in 
August 2001, when the stock price was just under $18. The problem was that he worried about his 
image, especially after the 
Fortune
article. He did not want to accept the new grant unless the 
board canceled his old options at the same time. But to do so would have adverse accounting 
implications, because it would be effectively repricing the old options. That would require taking a 

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charge against current earnings. The only way to avoid this “variable accounting” problem was to 
cancel his old options at least six months after his new options were granted. In addition, Jobs 
started haggling with the board over how quickly the new options would vest.
It was not until mid-December 2001 that Jobs finally agreed to take the new options and, 
braving the optics, wait six months before his old ones were canceled. But by then the stock price 
(adjusting for a split) had gone up $3, to about $21. If the strike price of the new options was set at 
that new level, each would have thus been $3 less valuable. So Apple’s legal counsel, Nancy 
Heinen, looked over the recent stock prices and helped to choose an October date, when the stock 
was $18.30. She also approved a set of minutes that purported to show that the board had 
approved the grant on that date. The backdating was potentially worth $20 million to Jobs.
Once again Jobs would end up suffering bad publicity without making a penny. Apple’s stock 
price kept dropping, and by March 2003 even the new options were so low that Jobs traded in all 
of them for an outright grant of $75 million worth of shares, which amounted to about $8.3 
million for each year he had worked since coming back in 1997 through the end of the vesting in 
2006.
None of this would have mattered much if the