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

Exit, Pursued by a Bear
Jobs had refused to quash Larry Ellison’s takeover talk, and he had secretly sold his shares and 
been misleading about it. So Amelio finally became convinced that Jobs was gunning for him. “I 
finally absorbed the fact that I had been too willing and too eager to believe he was on my team,” 
Amelio recalled. “Steve’s plans to manipulate my termination were charging forward.”
Jobs was indeed bad-mouthing Amelio at every opportunity. He couldn’t help himself. But 
there was a more important factor in turning the board against Amelio. Fred Anderson, the chief 
financial officer, saw it as his fiduciary duty to keep Ed Woolard and the board informed of 
Apple’s dire situation. “Fred was the guy telling me that cash was draining, people were leaving, 
and more key players were thinking of it,” said Woolard. “He made it clear the ship was going to 
hit the sand soon, and even he was thinking of leaving.” That added to the worries Woolard 
already had from watching Amelio bumble the shareholders meeting.
At an executive session of the board in June, with Amelio out of the room, Woolard described 
to current directors how he calculated their odds. “If we stay with Gil as CEO, I think there’s only 
a 10% chance we will avoid bankruptcy,” he said. “If we fire him and convince Steve to come 
take over, we have a 60% chance of surviving. If we fire Gil, don’t get Steve back, and have to 
search for a new CEO, then we have a 40% chance of surviving.” The board gave him authority to 
ask Jobs to return.
Woolard and his wife flew to London, where they were planning to watch the Wimbledon 
tennis matches. He saw some of the tennis during the day, but spent his evenings in his suite at the 
Inn on the Park calling people back in America, where it was daytime. By the end of his stay, his 
telephone bill was $2,000.
First, he called Jobs. The board was going to fire Amelio, he said, and it wanted Jobs to come 
back as CEO. Jobs had been aggressive in deriding Amelio and pushing his own ideas about 
where to take Apple. But suddenly, when offered the cup, he became coy. “I will help,” he replied.
“As CEO?” Woolard asked.
Jobs said no. Woolard pushed hard for him to become at least the acting CEO. Again Jobs 
demurred. “I will be an advisor,” he said. “Unpaid.” He also agreed to become a board member—
that was something he had yearned for—but declined to be the board chairman. “That’s all I can 
give now,” he said. After rumors began circulating, he emailed a memo to Pixar employees 
assuring them that he was not abandoning them. “I got a call from Apple’s board of directors three 
weeks ago asking me to return to Apple as their CEO,” he wrote. “I declined. They then asked me 

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to become chairman, and I again declined. So don’t worry—the crazy rumors are just that. I have 
no plans to leave Pixar. You’re stuck with me.”
Why did Jobs not seize the reins? Why was he reluctant to grab the job that for two decades he 
had seemed to desire? When I asked him, he said:
We’d just taken Pixar public, and I was happy being CEO there. I never knew of anyone who served as 
CEO of two public companies, even temporarily, and I wasn’t even sure it was legal. I didn’t know what 
I wanted to do. I was enjoying spending more time with my family. I was torn. I knew Apple was a 
mess, so I wondered: Do I want to give up this nice lifestyle that I have? What are all the Pixar 
shareholders going to think? I talked to people I respected. I finally called Andy Grove at about eight 
one Saturday morning—too early. I gave him the pros and the cons, and in the middle he stopped me 
and said, “Steve, I don’t give a shit about Apple.” I was stunned. It was then I realized that I 
do
give a 
shit about Apple—I started it and it is a good thing to have in the world. That was when I decided to go 
back on a temporary basis to help them hire a CEO.
The claim that he was enjoying spending more time with his family was not convincing. He was 
never destined to win a Father of the Year trophy, even when he had spare time on his hands. He 
was getting better at paying heed to his children, especially Reed, but his primary focus was on his 
work. He was frequently aloof from his two younger daughters, estranged again from Lisa, and 
often prickly as a husband.
So what was the real reason for his hesitancy in taking over at Apple? For all of his willfulness 
and insatiable desire to control things, Jobs was indecisive and reticent when he felt unsure about 
something. He craved perfection, and he was not always good at figuring out how to settle for 
something less. He did not like to wrestle with complexity or make accommodations. This was 
true in products, design, and furnishings for the house. It was also true when it came to personal 
commitments. If he knew for sure a course of action was right, he was unstoppable. But if he had 
doubts, he sometimes withdrew, preferring not to think about things that did not perfectly suit him. 
As happened when Amelio had asked him what role he wanted to play, Jobs would go silent and 
ignore situations that made him uncomfortable.
This attitude arose partly out of his tendency to see the world in binary terms. A person was 
either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit. But he could be stymied by things 
that were more complex, shaded, or nuanced: getting married, buying the right sofa, 
committing to run a company. In addition, he didn’t want to be set up for failure. “I think Steve 
wanted to assess whether Apple could be saved,” Fred Anderson said.
Woolard and the board decided to go ahead and fire Amelio, even though Jobs was not yet 
forthcoming about how active a role he would play as an advisor. Amelio was about to go on a 
picnic with his wife, children, and grandchildren when the call came from Woolard in London. 
“We need you to step down,” Woolard said simply. Amelio replied that it was not a good time to 
discuss this, but Woolard felt he had to persist. “We are going to announce that we’re replacing 
you.”
Amelio resisted. “Remember, Ed, I told the board it was going to take three years to get this 
company back on its feet again,” he said. “I’m not even halfway through.”
“The board is at the place where we don’t want to discuss it further,” Woolard replied. Amelio 
asked who knew about the decision, and Woolard told him the truth: the rest of the board plus 
Jobs. “Steve was one of the people we talked to about this,” Woolard said. “His view is that you’
re a really nice guy, but you don’t know much about the computer industry.”
“Why in the world would you involve Steve in a decision like this?” Amelio replied, getting 
angry. “Steve is not even a member of the board of directors, so what the hell is he doing in any of 
this conversation?” But Woolard didn’t back down, and Amelio hung up to carry on with the 
family picnic before telling his wife.
At times Jobs displayed a strange mixture of prickliness and neediness. He usually didn’t care 
one iota what people thought of him; he could cut people off and never care to speak to them 
again. Yet sometimes he also felt a compulsion to explain himself. So that evening Amelio 
received, to his surprise, a phone call from Jobs. “Gee, Gil, I just wanted you to know, I talked to 
Ed today about this thing and I really feel bad about it,” he said. “I want you to know that I had 
absolutely nothing to do with this turn of events, it was a decision the board made, but they had 

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asked me for advice and counsel.” He told Amelio he respected him for having “the highest 
integrity of anyone I’ve ever met,” and went on to give some unsolicited advice. “Take six months 
off,” Jobs told him. “When I got thrown out of Apple, I immediately went back to work, and I 
regretted it.” He offered to be a sounding board if Amelio ever wanted more advice.
Amelio was stunned but managed to mumble a few words of thanks. He turned to his wife and 
recounted what Jobs said. “In ways, I still like the man, but I don’t believe him,” he told her.
“I was totally taken in by Steve,” she said, “and I really feel like an idiot.”
“Join the crowd,” her husband replied.
Steve Wozniak, who was himself now an informal advisor to the company, was thrilled that 
Jobs was coming back. (He forgave easily.) “It was just what we needed,” he said, “because 
whatever you think of Steve, he knows how to get the magic back.” Nor did Jobs’s triumph over 
Amelio surprise him. As he told 
Wired
shortly after it happened, “Gil Amelio meets Steve Jobs, 
game over.”
That Monday Apple’s top employees were summoned to the auditorium. Amelio came in 
looking calm and relaxed. “Well, I’m sad to report that it’s time for me to move on,” he said. Fred 
Anderson, who had agreed to be interim CEO, spoke next, and he made it clear that he would be 
taking his cues from Jobs. Then, exactly twelve years since he had lost power in a July 4 weekend 
struggle, Jobs walked back onstage at Apple.
It immediately became clear that, whether or not he wanted to admit it publicly (or even to 
himself), Jobs was going to take control and not be a mere advisor. As soon as he came onstage 
that day—wearing shorts, sneakers, and a black turtleneck—he got to work reinvigorating his 
beloved institution. “Okay, tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he said. There were some 
murmurings, but Jobs cut them off. “It’s the products!” he answered. “So what’s wrong with the 
products?” Again there were a few attempts at an answer, until Jobs broke in to hand down the 
correct answer. “The products 
suck
!” he shouted. “There’s no sex in them anymore!”
Woolard was able to coax Jobs to agree that his role as an advisor would be a very active one. 
Jobs approved a statement saying that he had “agreed to step up my involvement with Apple for 
up to 90 days, 
helping them until they hire a new CEO.” The clever formulation that Woolard used in his 
statement was that Jobs was coming back “as an advisor leading the team.”
Jobs took a small office next to the boardroom on the executive floor, conspicuously eschewing 
Amelio’s big corner office. He got involved in all aspects of the business: product design, where 
to cut, supplier negotiations, and advertising agency review. He believed that he had to stop the 
hemorrhaging of top Apple employees, and to do so he wanted to reprice their stock options. 
Apple stock had dropped so low that the options had become worthless. Jobs wanted to lower the 
exercise price, so they would be valuable again. At the time, that was legally permissible, but it 
was not considered good corporate practice. On his first Thursday back at Apple, Jobs called for a 
telephonic board meeting and outlined the problem. The directors balked. They asked for time to 
do a legal and financial study of what the change would mean. “It has to be done fast,” Jobs told 
them. “We’re losing good people.”
Even his supporter Ed Woolard, who headed the compensation committee, objected. “At 
DuPont we never did such a thing,” he said.
“You brought me here to fix this thing, and people are the key,” Jobs argued. When the board 
proposed a study that could take two months, Jobs exploded: “Are you nuts?!?” He paused for a 
long moment of silence, then continued. “Guys, if you don’t want to do this, I’m not coming back 
on Monday. Because I’ve got thousands of key decisions to make that are far more difficult than 
this, and if you can’t throw your support behind this kind of decision, I will fail. So if you can’t do 
this, I’m out of here, and you can blame it on me, you can say, ‘Steve wasn’t up for the job.’”
The next day, after consulting with the board, Woolard called Jobs back. “We’re going to 
approve this,” he said. “But some of the board members don’t like it. We feel like you’ve put a 
gun to our head.” The options for the top team (Jobs had none) were reset at $13.25, which was 
the price of the stock the day Amelio was ousted.
Instead of declaring victory and thanking the board, Jobs continued to seethe at having to 
answer to a board he didn’t respect. “Stop the train, this isn’t going to work,” he told Woolard. 
“This company is 

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in shambles, and I don’t have time to wet-nurse the board. So I need all of you to resign. Or 
else I’m going to resign and not come back on Monday.” The one person who could stay, he said, 
was Woolard.
Most members of the board were aghast. Jobs was still refusing to commit himself to coming 
back full-time or being anything more than an advisor, yet he felt he had the power to force them 
to leave. The hard truth, however, was that he did have that power over them. They could not 
afford for him to storm off in a fury, nor was the prospect of remaining an Apple board member 
very enticing by then. “After all they’d been through, most were glad to be let off,” Woolard 
recalled.
Once again the board acquiesced. It made only one request: Would he permit one other director 
to stay, in addition to Woolard? It would help the optics. Jobs assented. “They were an awful 
board, a terrible board,” he later said. “I agreed they could keep Ed Woolard and a guy named 
Gareth Chang, who turned out to be a zero. He wasn’t terrible, just a zero. Woolard, on the other 
hand, was one of the best board members I’ve ever seen. He was a prince, one of the most 
supportive and wise people I’ve ever met.”
Among those being asked to resign was Mike Markkula, who in 1976, as a young venture 
capitalist, had visited the Jobs garage, fallen in love with the nascent computer on the workbench, 
guaranteed a $250,000 line of credit, and become the third partner and one-third owner of the new 
company. Over the subsequent two decades, he was the one constant on the board, ushering in and 
out a variety of CEOs. He had supported Jobs at times but also clashed with him, most notably 
when he sided with Sculley in the showdowns of 1985. With Jobs returning, he knew that it was 
time for him to leave.
Jobs could be cutting and cold, especially toward people who crossed him, but he could also be 
sentimental about those who had been with him from the early days. Wozniak fell into that 
favored category, of course, even though they had drifted apart; so did Andy Hertzfeld and a few 
others from the Macintosh team. In the end, Mike Markkula did as well. “I felt deeply betrayed by 
him, but he was like a father and I always cared about him,” Jobs later recalled. So when the time 
came to ask him to resign from the Apple board, Jobs drove to Markkula’s chateau-like mansion 
in the Woodside hills to do it personally. 
As usual, he asked to take a walk, and they strolled the grounds to a redwood grove with a 
picnic table. “He told me he wanted a new board because he wanted to start fresh,” Markkula said. 
“He was worried that I might take it poorly, and he was relieved when I didn’t.”
They spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the future. Jobs’s 
ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for 
that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett
-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator 
company, then a computer company. “Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business,” 
Markkula said. “You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer 
products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.” Jobs didn’t say 
much, but he agreed.
The old board met in late July to ratify the transition. Woolard, who was as genteel as Jobs was 
prickly, was mildly taken aback when Jobs appeared dressed in jeans and sneakers, and he worried 
that Jobs might start berating the veteran board members for screwing up. But Jobs merely offered 
a pleasant “Hi, everyone.” They got down to the business of voting to accept the resignations, 
elect Jobs to the board, and empower Woolard and Jobs to find new board members.
Jobs’s first recruit was, not surprisingly, Larry Ellison. He said he would be pleased to join, but 
he hated attending meetings. Jobs said it would be fine if he came to only half of them. (After a 
while Ellison was coming to only a third of the meetings. Jobs took a picture of him that had 
appeared on the cover of