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

The Honeymoon
Sculley arrived in California just in time for the May 1983 Apple management retreat at Pajaro 
Dunes. Even though he had left all but one of his dark suits back in Greenwich, he was still having 
trouble adjusting to the casual atmosphere. In the front of the meeting room, Jobs sat on the floor 
in the lotus position absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet. Sculley tried to impose 
an agenda; he wanted to discuss how to differentiate their products—the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, 
and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize the company around product lines or markets or 
functions. But the discussion descended into a free-for-all of random ideas, complaints, and 
debates.
At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for producing an unsuccessful product. “Well,” 
someone shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why don’t you wait until you get a 
product out before you start being critical?” Sculley was astonished. At Pepsi no one would have 
challenged the chairman like that. “Yet here, everyone began pig-piling on Steve.” It reminded 
him of an old joke he had heard from one of the Apple ad salesmen: “What’s the difference 
between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”
In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake began to rumble the room. “Head for the 
beach,” someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to the water. Then someone else shouted 
that the previous earthquake had produced a tidal wave, so they all turned and ran the other way. 
“The indecision, the contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster, only foreshadowed what 
was to come,” Sculley later wrote.
One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and his wife, Leezy, over for breakfast. He was 
then living in a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in Los Gatos with his girlfriend, Barbara 
Jasinski, a smart and reserved beauty who worked for Regis McKenna. Leezy had brought a pan 
and made vegetarian omelets. (Jobs had edged away from his strict vegan diet for the time being.) 
“I’m sorry I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.” It 
was one of his enduring quirks: His exacting standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan 
streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he wasn’t passionate about. He had a 
Tiffany lamp, an antique dining table, and a laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam 
cushions on the floor rather than sofas and chairs. Sculley smiled and mistakenly thought that it 
was similar to his own “frantic and Spartan life in a cluttered New York City apartment” early in 
his own career.
Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to 
accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. “We all have 
a short period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculleys as they sat around the table that morning. 
“We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of 

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us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish 
a lot of these things while I’m young.”
Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day in the early 
months of their relationship. “Steve and I became soul mates, near constant companions,” 
Sculley said. “We tended to speak in half sentences and phrases.” Jobs flattered Sculley. When he 
dropped by to hash something out, he would say something like “You’re the only one who will 
understand.” They would tell each other repeatedly, indeed so often that it should have been 
worrying, how happy they were to be with each other and working in tandem. And at every 
opportunity Sculley would find similarities with Jobs and point them out:
We could complete each other’s sentences because we were on the same wavelength. Steve would rouse 
me from sleep at 2 a.m. with a phone call to chat about an idea that suddenly crossed his mind. “Hi! It’s 
me,” he’d harmlessly say to the dazed listener, totally unaware of the time. I curiously had done the 
same in my Pepsi days. Steve would rip apart a presentation he had to give the next morning, throwing 
out slides and text. So had I as I struggled to turn public speaking into an important management tool 
during my early days at Pepsi. As a young executive, I was always impatient to get things done and 
often felt I could do them better myself. So did Steve. Sometimes I felt as if I was watching Steve 
playing me in a movie. The similarities were uncanny, and they were behind the amazing symbiosis we 
developed.
This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for disaster. Jobs began to sense it early on. “We had 
different ways of looking at the world, different views on people, different values,” Jobs recalled. 
“I began to realize this a few months after he arrived. He didn’t learn things very quickly, and the 
people he wanted to promote were usually bozos.”
Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley by encouraging his belief that they were so 
alike. And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous of him he became. Canny 
observers in the Mac group, such as Joanna Hoffman, soon realized what was happening and 
knew that it would make the inevitable breakup more explosive. “Steve made Sculley feel like he 
was exceptional,” she said. “Sculley had never felt that. Sculley became infatuated, because Steve 
projected on him a whole bunch of attributes that he didn’t really have. When it became clear that 
Sculley didn’t match all of these projections, Steve’s distortion of reality had created an explosive 
situation.”
The ardor eventually began to cool on Sculley’s side as well. Part of his weakness in trying to 
manage a dysfunctional company was his desire to please other people, one of many traits that he 
did not share with Jobs. He was a polite person; this caused him to recoil at Jobs’s rudeness to 
their fellow workers. “We would go to the Mac building at eleven at night,” he recalled, “and they 
would bring him code to show. In some cases he wouldn’t even look at it. He would just take it 
and throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can you turn it down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they 
can do better.’” Sculley tried to coach him. “You’ve got to learn to hold things back,” he told him 
at one point. Jobs would agree, but it was not in his nature to filter his feelings through a gauze.
Sculley began to believe that Jobs’s mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were 
rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity. There were 
big mood swings; sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times he was depressed. At times he 
would launch into brutal tirades without warning, and Sculley would have to calm him down. 
“Twenty minutes later, I would get another call and be told to come over because Steve is losing it 
again,” he said.
Their first substantive disagreement was over how to price the Macintosh. It had been 
conceived as a $1,000 machine, but Jobs’s design changes had pushed up the cost so that the plan 
was to sell it at $1,995. However, when Jobs and Sculley began making plans for a huge launch 
and marketing push, Sculley decided that they needed to charge $500 more. To him, the marketing 
costs were like any other production cost and needed to be factored into the price. Jobs resisted, 
furiously. “It will destroy everything we stand for,” he said. “I want to make this a revolution, not 
an effort to squeeze out profits.” Sculley said it was a simple choice: He could have the $1,995 
price or he could have the marketing budget for a big launch, but not both.
“You’re not going to like this,” Jobs told Hertzfeld and the other engineers, “but Sculley is 
insisting that we charge $2,495 for the Mac instead of $1,995.” Indeed the engineers were 

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horrified. Hertzfeld pointed out that they were designing the Mac for people like themselves, and 
overpricing it would be a “betrayal” of what they stood for. 
So Jobs promised them, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let him get away with it!” But in the 
end, Sculley prevailed. Even twenty-five years later Jobs seethed when recalling the decision: “It’s 
the main reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the market.” The 
decision made him feel that he was losing control of his product and company, and this was as 
dangerous as making a tiger feel cornered.

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