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

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
ROUND THREE
The Twilight Struggle
Family Ties
Jobs had an aching desire to make it to his son’s graduation from high school in June 2010. 
“When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I 
really wanted to see Reed graduate, and that got me through 2009,” he said. As a senior, Reed 
looked eerily like his father at eighteen, with a knowing and slightly rebellious smile, intense eyes, 
and a shock of dark hair. But from his mother he had inherited a sweetness and painfully sensitive 
empathy that his father lacked. He was demonstrably affectionate and eager to please. Whenever 
his father was sitting sullenly at the kitchen table and staring at the floor, which happened often 
when he was ailing, the only thing sure to cause his eyes to brighten was Reed walking in.
Reed adored his father. Soon after I started working on this book, he dropped in to where I was 
staying and, as his father often did, suggested we take a walk. He told me, with an intensely 
earnest look, that his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a 
love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making.
After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, Reed began spending his summers working in a 
Stanford oncology lab doing DNA sequencing to find genetic markers for colon cancer. In one 
experiment, he traced how mutations go through families. “One of the very few silver linings 
about me getting sick is that Reed’s gotten to spend a lot of time studying with some very good 
doctors,” Jobs said. “His enthusiasm for it is exactly how I felt about computers when I was his 
age. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology 
and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”
Reed used his cancer study as the basis for the senior report he presented to his class at Crystal 
Springs Uplands School. As he described how he used centrifuges and dyes to sequence the DNA 
of tumors, his father sat in the audience beaming, along with the rest of his family. “I fantasize 
about Reed getting a house here in Palo Alto with his family and riding his bike to work as a 
doctor at Stanford,” Jobs said afterward.
Reed had grown up fast in 2009, when it looked as if his father was going to die. He took care 
of his younger sisters while his parents were in Memphis, and he developed a protective 
paternalism. But when his father’s health stabilized in the spring of 2010, he regained his playful, 
teasing personality. One day during dinner he was discussing with his family where to take his 
girlfriend for dinner. His father suggested Il Fornaio, an elegant standard in Palo Alto, but Reed 
said he had been unable to get reservations. “Do you want me to try?” his father asked. Reed 
resisted; he wanted to handle it himself. Erin, the somewhat shy middle child, suggested that she 
could outfit a tepee in their garden and she and Eve, the younger sister, would serve them a 
romantic meal there. Reed stood up and hugged her. He would take her up on that some other 
time, he promised.
One Saturday Reed was one of the four contestants on his school’s Quiz Kids team competing 
on a local TV station. The family—minus Eve, who was in a horse show—came to cheer him on. 
As the television crew bumbled around getting ready, his father tried to keep his impatience in 
check and remain inconspicuous among the parents sitting in the rows of folding chairs. But he 
was clearly recognizable in his trademark jeans and black turtleneck, and one woman pulled up a 
chair right next to him and started to take his picture. Without looking at her, he stood up and 
moved to the other end of the row. When Reed came on the set, his nameplate identified him as 
“Reed Powell.” The host asked the students what they wanted to be when they grew up. “A cancer 
researcher,” Reed answered.

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Jobs drove his two-seat Mercedes SL55, taking Reed, while his wife followed in her own car 
with Erin. On the way home, she asked Erin why she thought her father refused to have a license 
plate on his car. “To be a rebel,” she answered. I later put the question to Jobs. “Because people 
follow me sometimes, and if I have a license plate, they can track down where I live,” he replied. 
“But that’s kind of getting obsolete now with Google Maps. So I guess, really, it’s just because I 
don’t.”
During Reed’s graduation ceremony, his father sent me an email from his iPhone that simply 
exulted, “Today is one of my happiest days. Reed is graduating from High School. Right now. 
And, against all odds, I am here.” That night there was a party at their house with close friends and 
family. Reed danced with every member of his family, including his father. Later Jobs took his 
son out to the barnlike storage shed to offer him one of his two bicycles, which he wouldn’t be 
riding again. Reed joked that the Italian one looked a bit too gay, so Jobs told him to take the solid 
eight-speed next to it. When Reed said he would be indebted, Jobs answered, “You don’t need to 
be indebted, because you have my DNA.” A few days later