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

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Simpsons
, he named Homer’s mother after his wife.) Jobs insisted that they 
all arrive by chartered bus; he wanted to control all aspects of the event.
The ceremony was in the solarium, with the snow coming down hard and Glacier Point just 
visible in the distance. It was conducted by Jobs’s longtime S
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Zen teacher, Kobun Chino, who 
shook a stick, struck a gong, lit incense, and chanted in a mumbling manner that most guests 
found incomprehensible. “I thought he was drunk,” said Tevanian. He wasn’t. The wedding cake 
was in the shape of Half Dome, the granite crest at the end of Yosemite Valley, but since it was 
strictly vegan—devoid of eggs, milk, or any refined products—more than a few of the guests 
found it inedible. Afterward they all went hiking, and Powell’s three strapping brothers launched a 
snowball fight, with lots of tackling and roughhousing. “You see, Mona,” Jobs said to his sister, 
“Laurene is descended from Joe Namath and we’re descended from John Muir.”
A Family Home

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Powell shared her husband’s interest in natural foods. While at business school, she had worked 
part time at Odwalla, the juice company, where she helped develop the first marketing plan. After 
marrying Jobs, she felt that it was important to have a career, having learned from her childhood 
the need to be self-sufficient. So she started her own company, Terravera, that made ready-to-eat 
organic meals and delivered them to stores throughout northern California.
Instead of living in the isolated and rather spooky unfurnished Woodside mansion, the couple 
moved into a charming and unpretentious house on a corner in a family-friendly neighborhood in 
old Palo Alto. It was a privileged realm—neighbors would eventually include the visionary 
venture capitalist John Doerr, Google’s founder Larry Page, and Facebook’s founder Mark 
Zuckerberg, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Joanna Hoffman—but the homes were not 
ostentatious, and there were no high hedges or long drives shielding them from view. Instead, 
houses were nestled on lots next to each other along flat, quiet streets flanked by wide sidewalks. 
“We wanted to live in a neighborhood where kids could walk to see friends,” Jobs later said.
The house was not the minimalist and modernist style Jobs would have designed if he had built 
a home from scratch. Nor was it a large or distinctive mansion that would make people stop and 
take notice as they drove down his street in Palo Alto. It was built in the 1930s by a local designer 
named Carr Jones, who specialized in carefully crafted homes in the “storybook style” of English 
or French country cottages.
The two-story house was made of red brick, with exposed wood beams and a shingle roof with 
curved lines; it evoked a rambling Cotswold cottage, or perhaps a home where a well-to-do Hobbit 
might have lived. The one Californian touch was a mission-style courtyard framed by the wings of 
the house. The two-story vaulted-ceiling living room was informal, with a floor of tile and terra-
cotta. At one end was a large triangular window leading up to the peak of the ceiling; it had 
stained glass when Jobs bought it, as if it were a chapel, but he replaced it with clear glass. The 
other renovation he and Powell made was to expand the kitchen to include a wood-burning pizza 
oven and room for a long wooden table that would become the family’s primary gathering place. 
It was supposed to be a four-month renovation, but it took sixteen months because Jobs kept 
redoing the design. They also bought the small house behind them and razed it to make a 
backyard, which Powell turned into a beautiful natural garden filled with a profusion of seasonal 
flowers along with vegetables and herbs.
Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old material, including used bricks and 
wood from telephone poles, to provide a simple and sturdy structure. The beams in the kitchen had 
been used to make the molds for the concrete foundations of the Golden Gate 
Bridge, which was under construction when the house was built. “He was a careful craftsman 
who was self-taught,” Jobs said as he pointed out each of the details. “He cared more about being 
inventive than about making money, and he never got rich. He never left California. His ideas 
came from reading books in the library and