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

Toy Story 3
opened. Jobs had nurtured 
this Pixar trilogy from the beginning, and the final installment was about the emotions 
surrounding the departure of Andy for college. “I wish I could always be with you,” Andy’s 
mother says. “You always will be,” he replies.
Jobs’s relationship with his two younger daughters was somewhat more distant. He paid less 
attention to Erin, who was quiet, introspective, and seemed not to know exactly how to handle 
him, especially when he was emitting wounding barbs. She was a poised and attractive young 
woman, with a personal sensitivity more mature than her father’s. She thought that she might want 
to be an architect, perhaps because of her father’s interest in the field, and she had a good sense of 
design. But when her father was showing Reed the drawings for the new Apple campus, she sat on 
the other side of the kitchen, and it seemed not to occur to him to call her over as well. Her big 
hope that spring of 2010 was that her father would take her to the Oscars. She loved the movies. 
Even more, she wanted to fly with her father on his private plane and walk up the red carpet with 
him. Powell was quite willing to forgo the trip and tried to talk her husband into taking Erin. But 
he dismissed the idea.
At one point as I was finishing this book, Powell told me that Erin wanted to give me an 
interview. It’s not something that I would have requested, since she was then just turning sixteen, 
but I agreed. The point Erin emphasized was that she understood why her father was not always 
attentive, and she accepted that. “He does his best to be both a father and the CEO of Apple, and 
he juggles those pretty well,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know 
the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s really cool, so I’m fine. I don’t really need 
more attention.”
Jobs had promised to take each of his children on a trip of their choice when they became 
teenagers. Reed chose to go to Kyoto, knowing how much his father was entranced by the Zen 
calm of that beautiful city. Not surprisingly, when Erin turned thirteen, in 2008, she chose Kyoto 
as well. Her father’s illness caused him to cancel the trip, so he promised to take her in 2010, 
when he was better. But that June he decided he didn’t want to go. Erin was crestfallen but didn’t 
protest. Instead her mother took her to France with family friends, and they rescheduled the Kyoto 
trip for July.
Powell worried that her husband would again cancel, so she was thrilled when the whole family 
took off in early July for Kona Village, Hawaii, which was the first leg of the trip. But in Hawaii 
Jobs developed a bad toothache, which he ignored, as if he could will the cavity away. The tooth 
collapsed and had to be fixed. Then the iPhone 4 antenna crisis hit, and he decided to rush back to 
Cupertino, taking Reed with him. Powell and Erin stayed in Hawaii, hoping that Jobs would return 
and continue with the plans to take them to Kyoto.
To their relief, and mild surprise, Jobs actually did return to Hawaii after his press conference 
to pick them up and take them to Japan. “It’s a miracle,” Powell told a friend. While Reed took 
care of Eve back in Palo Alto, Erin and her parents stayed at the Tawaraya Ryokan, an inn of 
sublime simplicity that Jobs loved. “It was fantastic,” Erin recalled.
Twenty years earlier Jobs had taken Erin’s half-sister, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, to Japan when she 
was about the same age. Among her strongest memories was sharing with him delightful meals 
and watching him, usually such a picky eater, savor unagi sushi and other delicacies. Seeing him 

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take joy in eating made Lisa feel relaxed with him for the first time. Erin recalled a similar 
experience: “Dad knew where he wanted to go to lunch every day. He told me he knew an 
incredible soba shop, and he took me there, and it was so good that it’s been hard to ever eat soba 
again because nothing comes close.” They also found a tiny neighborhood sushi restaurant, and 
Jobs tagged it on his iPhone as “best sushi I’ve ever had.” Erin agreed.
They also visited Kyoto’s famous Zen Buddhist temples; the one Erin loved most was Saih
ō
-ji, 
known as the “moss temple” because of its Golden Pond surrounded by gardens featuring more 
than a hundred varieties of moss. “Erin was really really happy, which was deeply gratifying and 
helped improve her relationship with her father,” Powell recalled. “She deserved that.”
Their younger daughter, Eve, was quite a different story. She was spunky, self-assured, and in 
no way intimidated by her father. Her passion was horseback riding, and she became determined 
to make it to the Olympics. When a coach told her how much work it would require, she replied, 
“Tell me exactly what I need to do. I will do it.” He did, and she began diligently following the 
program.
Eve was an expert at the difficult task of pinning her father down; she often called his assistant 
at work directly to make sure something got put on his calendar. She was also pretty good as a 
negotiator. One weekend in 2010, when the family was planning a trip, Erin wanted to delay the 
departure by half a day, but she was afraid to ask her father. Eve, then twelve, volunteered to take 
on the task, and at dinner she laid out the case to her father as if she were a lawyer before the 
Supreme Court. Jobs cut her off—“No, I don’t think I want to”—but it was clear that he was more 
amused than annoyed. Later that evening Eve sat down with her mother and deconstructed the 
various ways that she could have made her case better.
Jobs came to appreciate her spirit—and see a lot of himself in her. “She’s a pistol and has the 
strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s like payback.” He had a deep understanding 
of her personality, perhaps because it bore some resemblance to his. “Eve is more sensitive than a 
lot of people think,” he explained. “She’s so smart that she can roll over people a bit, so that 
means she can alienate people, and she finds herself alone. She’s in the process of learning how to 
be who she is, but tempers it around the edges so that she can have the friends that she needs.”
Jobs’s relationship with his wife was sometimes complicated but always loyal. Savvy and 
compassionate, Laurene Powell was a stabilizing influence and an example of his ability to 
compensate for some of his selfish impulses by surrounding himself with strong-willed and 
sensible people. She weighed in quietly on business issues, firmly on family concerns, and fiercely 
on medical matters. Early in their marriage, she cofounded and launched College Track, a national 
after-school program that helps disadvantaged kids graduate from high school and get into college. 
Since then she had become a leading force in the education reform movement. Jobs professed an 
admiration for his wife’s work: “What she’s done with College Track really impresses me.” But 
he tended to be generally dismissive of philanthropic endeavors and never visited her after-school 
centers.
In February 2010 Jobs celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday with just his family. The kitchen was 
decorated with streamers and balloons, and his kids gave him a red-velvet toy crown, which he 
wore. Now that he had recovered from a grueling year of health problems, Powell hoped that he 
would become more attentive to his family. But for the most part he resumed his focus on his 
work. “I think it was hard on the family, especially the girls,” she told me. “After two years of him 
being ill, he finally gets a little better, and they expected he would focus a bit on them, but he 
didn’t.” She wanted to make sure, she said, that both sides of his personality were reflected in this 
book and put into context. “Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not 
extraordinary in every realm,” she said. “He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting himself in 
other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind, the advancement of 
humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands.”