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

Visitors
When his 2011 medical leave was announced, the situation seemed so dire that Lisa Brennan-Jobs 
got back in touch after more than a year and arranged to fly from New York the following week. 
Her relationship with her father had been built on layers of resentment. She was understandably 
scarred by having been pretty much abandoned by him for her first ten years. Making matters 
worse, she had inherited some of his prickliness and, he felt, some of her mother’s sense of 
grievance. “I told her many times that I wished I’d been a better dad when she was five, but now 
she should let things go rather than be angry the rest of her life,” he recalled just before Lisa 
arrived.
The visit went well. Jobs was beginning to feel a little better, and he was in a mood to mend 
fences and express his affection for those around him. At age thirty-two, Lisa was in a serious 
relationship for one of the first times in her life. Her boyfriend was a struggling young filmmaker 
from California, and Jobs went so far as to suggest she move back to Palo Alto if they got married. 
“Look, I don’t know how long I am for this world,” he told her. “The doctors can’t really tell me. 
If you want to see more of me, you’re going to have to move out here. Why don’t you consider 
it?” Even though Lisa did not move west, Jobs was pleased at how the reconciliation had worked 
out. “I hadn’t been sure I wanted her to visit, because I was sick and didn’t want other 
complications. But I’m very glad she came. It helped settle a lot of things in me.”
Jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to repair fences. Google’s cofounder 
Larry Page, who lived less than three blocks away, had just announced plans to retake the reins of 
the company from Eric Schmidt. He knew how to flatter Jobs: He asked if he could come by and 
get tips on how to be a good CEO. Jobs was still furious at Google. “My first thought was, ‘Fuck 
you,’” he recounted. “But then I thought about it and realized that everybody helped me when I 
was young, from Bill Hewlett to the guy down the block who worked for HP. So I called him back 
and said sure.” Page came over, sat in Jobs’s living room, and listened to his ideas on building 
great products and durable companies. Jobs recalled:

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We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team 
of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the 
company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. 
Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five 
products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning 
you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. I tried to be 
as helpful as I could. I will continue to do that with people like Mark Zuckerberg too. That’s how I’m 
going to spend part of the time I have left. I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great 
companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should 
do my best to repay.
The announcement of Jobs’s 2011 medical leave prompted others to make a pilgrimage to the 
house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton, for example, came by and talked about everything from the 
Middle East to American politics. But the most poignant visit was from the other tech prodigy 
born in 1955, the guy who, for more than three decades, had been Jobs’s rival and partner in 
defining the age of personal computers.
Bill Gates had never lost his fascination with Jobs. In the spring of 2011 I was at a dinner with 
him in Washington, where he had come to discuss his foundation’s global health endeavors. He 
expressed amazement at the success of the iPad and how Jobs, even while sick, was focusing on 
ways to improve it. “Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and 
Steve is still coming up with amazing new products,” he said wistfully. “Maybe I should have 
stayed in that game.” He smiled to make sure that I knew he was joking, or at least half joking.
Through their mutual friend Mike Slade, Gates made arrangements to visit Jobs in May. The 
day before it was supposed to happen, Jobs’s assistant called to say he wasn’t feeling well enough. 
But it was rescheduled, and early one afternoon Gates drove to Jobs’s house, walked through the 
back gate to the open kitchen door, and saw Eve studying at the table. “Is Steve around?” he 
asked. Eve pointed him to the living room.
They spent more than three hours together, just the two of them, reminiscing. “We were like the 
old guys in the industry looking back,” Jobs recalled. “He was happier than I’ve ever seen him, 
and I kept thinking how healthy he looked.” Gates was similarly struck by how Jobs, though 
scarily gaunt, had more energy than he expected. He was open about his health problems and, at 
least that day, feeling optimistic. His sequential regimens of targeted drug treatments, he told 
Gates, were like “jumping from one lily pad to another,” trying to stay a step ahead of the cancer.
Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools 
in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while 
using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so 
far, made surprisingly little impact on schools—far less than on other realms of society such as 
media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said, computers and mobile devices would 
have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback.
They also talked a lot about the joys of family, including how lucky they were to have good 
kids and be married to the right women. “We laughed about how fortunate it was that he met 
Laurene, and she’s kept him semi-sane, and I met Melinda, and she’s kept me semi-sane,” Gates 
recalled. “We also discussed how it’s challenging to be one of our children, and how do we 
mitigate that. It was pretty personal.” At one point Eve, who in the past had been in horse shows 
with Gates’s daughter Jennifer, wandered in from the kitchen, and Gates asked her what jumping 
routines she liked best.
As their hours together drew to a close, Gates complimented Jobs on “the incredible stuff” he 
had created and for being able to save Apple in the late 1990s from the bozos who were about to 
destroy it. He even made an interesting concession. Throughout their careers they had adhered to 
competing philosophies on one of the most fundamental of all digital issues: whether hardware 
and software should be tightly integrated or more open. “I used to believe that the open, horizontal 
model would prevail,” Gates told him. “But you proved that the integrated, vertical model could 
also be great.” Jobs responded with his own admission. “Your model worked too,” he said.
They were both right. Each model had worked in the realm of personal computers, where 
Macintosh coexisted with a variety of Windows machines, and that was likely to be true in the 
realm of mobile devices as well. But after recounting their discussion, Gates added a caveat: “The 

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integrated approach works well when Steve is at the helm. But it doesn’t mean it will win many 
rounds in the future.” Jobs similarly felt compelled to add a caveat about Gates after describing 
their meeting: “Of course, his fragmented model worked, but it didn’t make really great products. 
It produced crappy products. That was the problem. The big problem. At least over time.”