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

Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Jobs’s close friend Mike Slade was there, along with 
colleagues from Apple and Pixar, including Lasseter, Cook, Schiller, Clow, Rubinstein, and 
Tevanian.
Cook had done a good job running the company during Jobs’s absence. He kept Apple’s 
temperamental actors performing well, and he avoided stepping into the limelight. Jobs liked 
strong personalities, up to a point, but he had never truly empowered a deputy or shared the stage. 
It was hard to be his understudy. You were damned if you shone, and damned if you didn’t. Cook 
had managed to navigate those shoals. He was calm and decisive when in command, but he didn’t 
seek any notice or acclaim for himself. “Some people resent the fact that Steve gets credit for 
everything, but I’ve never given a rat’s ass about that,” said Cook. “Frankly speaking, I’d prefer 
my name never be in the paper.”
When Jobs returned from his medical leave, Cook resumed his role as the person who kept the 
moving parts at Apple tightly meshed and remained unfazed by Jobs’s tantrums. “What I learned 
about Steve was that people mistook some of his comments as ranting or negativism, but it was 
really just the way he showed passion. So that’s how I processed it, and I never took issues 
personally.” In many ways he was Jobs’s mirror image: unflappable, steady in his moods, and (as 
the thesaurus in the NeXT would have noted) saturnine rather than mercurial. “I’m a good 
negotiator, but he’s probably better than me because he’s a cool customer,” Jobs later said. After 
adding a bit more praise, he quietly added a reservation, one that was serious but rarely spoken: 
“But Tim’s not a product person, per se.”
In the fall of 2005, after returning from his medical leave, Jobs tapped Cook to become Apple’s 
chief operating officer. They were flying together to Japan. Jobs didn’t really 
ask
Cook; he simply 
turned to him and said, “I’ve decided to make you COO.”
Around that time, Jobs’s old friends Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian, the hardware and 
software lieutenants who had been recruited during the 1997 restoration, decided to leave. In 
Tevanian’s case, he had made a lot of money and was ready to quit working. “Avie is a brilliant 
guy and a nice guy, much more grounded than Ruby and doesn’t carry the big ego,” said Jobs. “It 
was a huge loss for us when Avie left. He’s a one-of-a-kind person—a genius.”
Rubinstein’s case was a little more contentious. He was upset by Cook’s ascendency and 
frazzled after working for nine years under Jobs. Their shouting matches became more frequent. 
There was also a substantive issue: Rubinstein was repeatedly clashing with Jony Ive, who used to 
work for him and now reported directly to Jobs. Ive was always pushing the envelope with designs 
that dazzled but were difficult to engineer. It was Rubinstein’s job to get the hardware built in a 
practical way, so he often balked. He was by nature cautious. “In the end, Ruby’s from HP,” said 
Jobs. “And he never delved deep, he wasn’t aggressive.”
There was, for example, the case of the screws that held the handles on the Power Mac G4. Ive 
decided that they should have a certain polish and shape. But Rubinstein thought that would be 
“astronomically” costly and delay the project for weeks, so he vetoed the idea. His job was to 
deliver products, which meant making trade-offs. Ive viewed that approach as inimical to 
innovation, so he would go both above him to Jobs and also around him to the midlevel engineers. 
“Ruby would say, ‘You can’t do this, it will delay,’ and I would say, ‘I think we can,’” Ive 
recalled. “And I would know, because I had worked behind his back with the product teams.” In 
this and other cases, Jobs came down on Ive’s side.
At times Ive and Rubinstein got into arguments that almost led to blows. Finally Ive told Jobs, 
“It’s him or me.” Jobs chose Ive. By that point Rubinstein was ready to leave. He and his wife had 
bought property in Mexico, and he wanted time off to build a home there. He eventually went to 
work for Palm, which was trying to match Apple’s iPhone. Jobs was so furious that Palm was 
hiring some of his former employees that he complained to Bono, who was a cofounder of a 

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private equity group, led by the former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, that had bought a controlling 
stake in Palm. Bono sent Jobs a note back saying, “You should chill out about this. This is like the 
Beatles ringing up because Herman and the Hermits have taken one of their road crew.” Jobs later 
admitted that he had overreacted. “The fact that they completely failed salves that wound,” he 
said.
Jobs was able to build a new management team that was less contentious and a bit more 
subdued. Its main players, in addition to Cook and Ive, were Scott Forstall running iPhone 
software, Phil Schiller in charge of marketing, Bob Mansfield doing Mac hardware, Eddy Cue 
handling Internet services, and Peter Oppenheimer as the chief financial officer. Even though there 
was a surface sameness to his top team—all were middle-aged white males—there was a range of 
styles. Ive was emotional and expressive; Cook was as cool as steel. They all knew they were 
expected to be deferential to Jobs while also pushing back on his ideas and being willing to 
argue—a tricky balance to maintain, but each did it well. “I realized very early that if you didn’t 
voice your opinion, he would mow you down,” said Cook. “He takes contrary positions to create 
more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don’t feel comfortable 
disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”
The key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team gathering, 
which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was always on the future: What 
should each product do next? What new things should be developed? Jobs used the meeting to 
enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. This served to centralize control, which made the 
company seem as tightly integrated as a good Apple product, and prevented the struggles between 
divisions that plagued decentralized companies.
Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland’s farm, his job had been to 
prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at 
Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing 
considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two 
or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around 
him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few 
people are really good at that.”
In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-
house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of 
Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had 
made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. 
Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision 
making would be embedded in the culture.
In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he was 
sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him, “Memento mori”: Remember 
you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in perspective, instill some 
humility. Jobs’s memento mori had been delivered by his doctors, but it did not instill humility. 
Instead he roared back after his recovery with even more passion. The illness reminded him that 
he had nothing to lose, so he should forge ahead full speed. “He came back on a mission,” said 
Cook. “Even though he was now running a large company, he kept making bold moves that I don’
t think anybody else would have done.”
For a while there was some evidence, or at least hope, that he had tempered his personal style, 
that facing cancer and turning fifty had caused him to be a bit less brutish when he was upset. 
“Right after he came back from his operation, he didn’t do the humiliation bit as much,” Tevanian 
recalled. “If he was displeased, he might scream and get hopping mad and use expletives, but he 
wouldn’t do it in a way that would totally destroy the person he was talking to. It was just his way 
to get the person to do a better job.” Tevanian reflected for a moment as he said this, then added a 
caveat: “Unless he thought someone was really bad and had to go, which happened every once in 
a while.”
Eventually, however, the rough edges returned. Because most of his colleagues were used to it 
by then and had learned to cope, what upset them most was when his ire turned on strangers. 
“Once we went to a Whole Foods market to get a smoothie,” Ive recalled. “And this older woman 

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was making it, and he really got on her about how she was doing it. Then later, he sympathized. 
‘She’s an older woman and doesn’t want to be doing this job.’ He didn’t connect the two. He was 
being a purist in both cases.”
On a trip to London with Jobs, Ive had the thankless task of choosing the hotel. He picked the 
Hempel, a tranquil five-star boutique hotel with a sophisticated minimalism that he thought Jobs 
would love. But as soon as they checked in, he braced himself, and sure enough his phone rang a 
minute later. “I hate my room,” Jobs declared. “It’s a piece of shit, let’s go.” So Ive gathered his 
luggage and went to the front desk, where Jobs bluntly told the shocked clerk what he thought. Ive 
realized that most people, himself among them, tend not to be direct when they feel something is 
shoddy because they want to be liked, “which is actually a vain trait.” That was an overly kind 
explanation. In any case, it was not a trait Jobs had.
Because Ive was so instinctively nice, he puzzled over why Jobs, whom he deeply liked, 
behaved as he did. One evening, in a San Francisco bar, he leaned forward with an earnest 
intensity and tried to analyze it:
He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that makes his antisocial behavior, his rudeness, 
so unconscionable. I can understand why people who are thick-skinned and unfeeling can be rude, but 
not sensitive people. I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, “But I don’t stay mad.” 
He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn’t stay with him at 
all. But there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve 
catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal 
rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows 
exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.
Every now and then a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to settle down. Lee 
Clow was a master. “Steve, can I talk to you?” he would quietly say when Jobs had belittled 
someone publicly. He would go into Jobs’s office and explain how hard everyone was working. 
“When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating,” he said in one such session. 
Jobs would apologize and say he understood. But then he would lapse again. “It’s simply who I 
am,” he would say.
One thing that did mellow was his attitude toward Bill Gates. Microsoft had kept its end of the 
bargain it made in 1997, when it agreed to continue developing great software for the Macintosh. 
Also, it was becoming less relevant as a competitor, having failed thus far to replicate Apple’s 
digital hub strategy. Gates and Jobs had very different approaches to products and innovation, but 
their rivalry had produced in each a surprising self-awareness.
For their All Things Digital conference in May 2007, the