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

Chinatown
, 
The Bourne Ultimatum
, and 
Toy Story 3
. More revealingly, there was just one 
book that he had downloaded: 
The Autobiography of a Yogi
, the guide to meditation and 
spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever 
since.
Midway through the morning he decided he wanted to eat something. He was still too weak to 
drive, so I drove him to a café in a shopping mall. It was closed, but the owner was used to Jobs 
knocking on the door at off-hours, and he happily let us in. “He’s taken on a mission to try to 
fatten me up,” Jobs joked. His doctors had pushed him to eat eggs as a source of high-quality 
protein, and he ordered an omelet. “Living with a disease like this, and all the pain, constantly 
reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to your brain if you’re not 
careful,” he said. “You don’t make plans more than a year out, and that’s bad. You need to force 
yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.”
An example of this magical thinking was his plan to build a luxurious yacht. Before his liver 
transplant, he and his family used to rent a boat for vacations, traveling to Mexico, the South 
Pacific, or the Mediterranean. On many of these cruises, Jobs got bored or began to hate the 
design of the boat, so they would cut the trip short and fly to Kona Village. But sometimes the 
cruise worked well. “The best vacation I’ve ever been on was when we went down the coast of 
Italy, then to Athens—which is a pit, but the Parthenon is mind-blowing—and then to Ephesus in 
Turkey, where they have these ancient public lavatories in marble with a place in the middle for 
musicians to serenade.” When they got to Istanbul, he hired a history professor to give his family a 
tour. At the end they went to a Turkish bath, where the professor’s lecture gave Jobs an insight 
about the globalization of youth:
I had a real revelation. We were all in robes, and they made some Turkish coffee for us. The professor 
explained how the coffee was made very different from anywhere else, and I realized, “So fucking 
what?” Which kids even in Turkey give a shit about Turkish coffee? All day I had looked at young 
people in Istanbul. They were all drinking what every other kid in the world drinks, and they were 
wearing clothes that look like they were bought at the Gap, and they are all using cell phones. They 
were like kids everywhere else. It hit me that, for young people, this whole world is the same now. 
When we’re making products, there is no such thing as a Turkish phone, or a music player that young 
people in Turkey would want that’s different from one young people elsewhere would want. We’re just 
one world now.
After the joy of that cruise, Jobs had amused himself by beginning to design, and then 
repeatedly redesigning, a boat he said he wanted to build someday. When he got sick again in 
2009, he almost canceled the project. “I didn’t think I would be alive when it got done,” he 
recalled. “But that made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to do, and 
maybe I have a shot at being alive when it’s done. If I stop work on the boat and then I make it 
alive for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I’ve kept going.”

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After our omelets at the café, we went back to his house and he showed me all of the models 
and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and minimalist. The teak 
decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements. As at an Apple store, the cabin 
windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have 
walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high. He had gotten the chief engineer of the 
Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural support.
By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders Feadship, but Jobs 
was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a 
half-built boat,” he said. “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m 
about to die.”
He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later, and he 
admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, 
because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have 
an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart 
and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked 
about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also 
reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with 
me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.”
Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. But in 
this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in 
Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, 
the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite 
where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for another 
weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s 
yours.’”
He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made on thick 
paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found the note that he 
had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud:
We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept 
me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good 
times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been 
through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—
with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and 
wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.
By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted 
that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see 
that I was young once.”
iCloud
In 2001 Jobs had a vision: Your personal computer would serve as a “digital hub” for a variety of 
lifestyle devices, such as music players, video recorders, phones, and tablets. This played to 
Apple’s strength of creating end-to-end products that were simple to use. The company was thus 
transformed from a high-end niche computer company to the most valuable technology company 
in the world.
By 2008 Jobs had developed a vision for the next wave of the digital era. In the future, he 
believed, your desktop computer would no longer serve as the hub for your content. Instead the 
hub would move to “the cloud.” In other words, your content would be stored on remote servers 
managed by a company you trusted, and it would be available for you to use on any device, 
anywhere. It would take him three years to get it right.
He began with a false step. In the summer of 2008 he launched a product called MobileMe, an 
expensive ($99 per year) subscription service that allowed you to store your address book, 
documents, pictures, videos, email, and calendar remotely in the cloud and to sync them with any 

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device. In theory, you could go to your iPhone or any computer and access all aspects of your 
digital life. There was, however, a big problem: The service, to use Jobs’s terminology, sucked. It 
was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and other data got lost randomly in the ether. 
“Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be Reliable,” was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s 
review in the