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

President Obama
On a trip to Washington in the early fall of 2010, Powell had met with some of her friends at the 
White House who told her that President Obama was going to Silicon Valley that October. She 
suggested that he might want to meet with her husband. Obama’s aides liked the idea; it fit into his 

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new emphasis on competitiveness. In addition, John Doerr, the venture capitalist who had become 
one of Jobs’s close friends, had told a meeting of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory 
Board about Jobs’s views on why the United States was losing its edge. He too suggested that 
Obama should meet with Jobs. So a half hour was put on the president’s schedule for a session at 
the Westin San Francisco Airport.
There was one problem: When Powell told her husband, he said he didn’t want to do it. He was 
annoyed that she had arranged it behind his back. “I’m not going to get slotted in for a token 
meeting so that he can check off that he met with a CEO,” he told her. She insisted that Obama 
was “really psyched to meet with you.” Jobs replied that if that were the case, then Obama should 
call and personally ask for the meeting. The standoff went on for five days. She called in Reed, 
who was at Stanford, to come home for dinner and try to persuade his father. Jobs finally relented.
The meeting actually lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. “You’re headed for 
a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration 
needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in 
China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of 
regulations and unnecessary costs.
Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and 
crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope 
for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial 
assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they 
were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the 
year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a 
board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and 
interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.
Jobs offered to put together a group of six or seven CEOs who could really explain the 
innovation challenges facing America, and the president accepted. So Jobs made a list of people 
for a Washington meeting to be held in December. Unfortunately, after Valerie Jarrett and other 
presidential aides had added names, the list had expanded to more than twenty, with GE’s Jeffrey 
Immelt in the lead. Jobs sent Jarrett an email saying it was a bloated list and he had no intention of 
coming. In fact his health problems had flared anew by then, so he would not have been able to go 
in any case, as Doerr privately explained to the president.
In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama in 
Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in 
Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric 
Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John Chambers, Oracle’s 
Larry Ellison, Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Jobs’s attention to the 
details of the dinner extended to the food. Doerr sent him the proposed menu, and he responded 
that some of the dishes proposed by the caterer—shrimp, cod, lentil salad—were far too fancy 
“and not who you are, John.” He particularly objected to the dessert that was planned, a cream pie 
tricked out with chocolate truffles, but the White House advance staff overruled him by telling the 
caterer that the president liked cream pie. Because Jobs had lost so much weight that he was easily 
chilled, Doerr kept the house so warm that Zuckerberg found himself sweating profusely.
Jobs, sitting next to the president, kicked off the dinner by saying, “Regardless of our political 
persuasions, I want you to know that we’re here to do whatever you ask to help our country.” 
Despite that, the dinner initially became a litany of suggestions of what the president could do for 
the businesses there. Chambers, for example, pushed a proposal for a repatriation tax holiday that 
would allow major corporations to avoid tax payments on overseas profits if they brought them 
back to the United States for investment during a certain period. The president was annoyed, and 
so was Zuckerberg, who turned to Valerie Jarrett, sitting to his right, and whispered, “We should 
be talking about what’s important to the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for 
him?”
Doerr was able to refocus the discussion by calling on everyone to suggest a list of action items. 
When Jobs’s turn came, he stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any 
foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the United States should be given a visa to 
stay in the country. Obama said that could be done only in the context of the “Dream Act,” which 

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would allow illegal aliens who arrived as minors and finished high school to become legal 
residents—something that the Republicans had blocked. Jobs found this an annoying example of 
how politics can lead to paralysis. “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us 
reasons why things can’t get done,” he recalled. “It infuriates me.”
Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 
factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-
site to support those workers. “You can’t find that many in America to hire,” he said. These 
factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic 
engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could 
train them. “If you could educate these engineers,” he said, “we could move more manufacturing 
plants here.” The argument made a strong impression on the president. Two or three times over 
the next month he told his aides, “We’ve got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing 
engineers that Jobs told us about.”
Jobs was pleased that Obama followed up, and they talked by telephone a few times after the 
meeting. He offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. (He had made the 
same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t 
totally deferential.) “I think political advertising is terrible. I’d love to get Lee Clow out of 
retirement, and we can come up with great commercials for him,” Jobs told me a few weeks after 
the dinner. Jobs had been fighting pain all week, but the talk of politics energized him. “Every 
once in a while, a real ad pro gets involved, the way Hal Riney did with ‘It’s morning in America’ 
for Reagan’s reelection in 1984. So that’s what I’d like to do for Obama.”