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

Architectural Digest
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Jobs had never furnished his Woodside house beyond a few bare essentials: a chest of drawers 
and a mattress in his bedroom, a card table and some folding chairs in what would have been a 
dining room. He wanted around him only things that he could admire, and that made it hard 
simply to go out and buy a lot of furniture. Now that he was living in a normal neighborhood 
home with a wife and soon a child, he had to make some concessions to necessity. But it was hard. 
They got beds, dressers, and a music system for the living room, but items like sofas took longer. 
“We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” recalled Powell. “We spent a lot of time 
asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’” Buying appliances was also a philosophical 
task, not just an impulse purchase. A few years later, Jobs described to 
Wired
the process that 
went into getting a new washing machine:
It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much 
better—but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter 
as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t 
trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much 
softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we 
want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we 
care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about 

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our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We 
spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.
They ended up getting a Miele washer and dryer, made in Germany. “I got more thrill out of them 
than I have out of any piece of high tech in years,” Jobs said.
The one piece of art that Jobs bought for the vaulted-ceiling living room was an Ansel Adams 
print of the winter sunrise in the Sierra Nevada taken from Lone Pine, California. Adams had 
made the huge mural print for his daughter, who later sold it. At one point Jobs’s housekeeper 
wiped it with a wet cloth, and Jobs tracked down a person who had worked with Adams to come 
to the house, strip it down a layer, and restore it.
The house was so unassuming that Bill Gates was somewhat baffled when he visited with his 
wife. “Do 
all
of you live here?” asked Gates, who was then in the process of building a 66,000-
square-foot mansion near Seattle. Even when he had his second coming at Apple and was a world-
famous billionaire, Jobs had no security guards or live-in servants, and he even kept the back door 
unlocked during the day.
His only security problem came, sadly and strangely, from Burrell Smith, the mop-headed, 
cherubic Macintosh software engineer who had been Andy Hertzfeld’s sidekick. After leaving 
Apple, Smith descended into schizophrenia. He lived in a house down the street from Hertzfeld, 
and as his disorder progressed he began wandering the streets naked, at other times smashing the 
windows of cars and churches. He was put on strong medication, but it proved difficult to 
calibrate. At one point when his demons returned, he began going over to the Jobs house in the 
evenings, throwing rocks through the windows, leaving rambling letters, and once tossing a 
firecracker into the house. He was arrested, but the case was dropped when he went for more 
treatment. “Burrell was so funny and naïve, and then one April day he suddenly snapped,” Jobs 
recalled. “It was the weirdest, saddest thing.”
Jobs was sympathetic, and often asked Hertzfeld what more he could do to help. At one point 
Smith was thrown in jail and refused to identify himself. When Hertzfeld found out, three days 
later, he called Jobs and asked for assistance in getting him released. Jobs did help, but he 
surprised Hertzfeld with a question: “If something similar happened to me, would you take as 
good care of me as you do Burrell?”
Jobs kept his mansion in Woodside, about ten miles up into the mountains from Palo Alto. He 
wanted to tear down the fourteen-bedroom 1925 Spanish colonial revival, and he had plans drawn 
up 
to replace it with an extremely simple, Japanese-inspired modernist home one-third the size. 
But for more than twenty years he engaged in a slow-moving series of court battles with 
preservationists who wanted the crumbling original house to be saved. (In 2011 he finally got 
permission to raze the house, but by then he had no desire to build a second home.)
On occasion Jobs would use the semi-abandoned Woodside home, especially its swimming 
pool, for family parties. When Bill Clinton was president, he and Hillary Clinton stayed in the 
1950s ranch house on the property on their visits to their daughter, who was at Stanford. Since 
both the main house and ranch house were unfurnished, Powell would call furniture and art 
dealers when the Clintons were coming and pay them to furnish the houses temporarily. Once, 
shortly after the Monica Lewinsky flurry broke, Powell was making a final inspection of the 
furnishings and noticed that one of the paintings was missing. Worried, she asked the advance 
team and Secret Service what had happened. One of them pulled her aside and explained that it 
was a painting of a dress on a hanger, and given the issue of the blue dress in the Lewinsky matter 
they had decided to hide it. (During one of his late-night phone conversations with Jobs, Clinton 
asked how he should handle the Lewinsky issue. “I don’t know if you did it, but if so, you’ve got 
to tell the country,” Jobs told the president. There was silence on the other end of the line.)