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

Machines of the Year
As 1982 drew to a close, Jobs came to believe that he was going to be 
Time
’s Man of the Year. He 
arrived at Texaco Towers one day with the magazine’s San Francisco bureau chief, Michael 
Moritz, and encouraged colleagues to give Moritz interviews. But Jobs did not end up on the 
cover. Instead the magazine chose “the Computer” as the topic for the year-end issue and called it 
“the Machine of the Year.”
Accompanying the main story was a profile of Jobs, which was based on the reporting done by 
Moritz and written by Jay Cocks, an editor who usually handled rock music for the magazine. 
“With his smooth sales pitch and a blind faith that would have been the envy of the early Christian 
martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more than anyone, who kicked open the door and let the personal 
computer move in,” the story proclaimed. It was a richly reported piece, but also harsh at times—
so harsh that Moritz (after he wrote a book about Apple and went on to be a partner in the venture 
firm Sequoia Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated it by complaining that his reporting had been 
“siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with gossipy benzene by an editor in New York whose regular 
task was to chronicle the wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article quoted Bud Tribble 
on Jobs’s “reality distortion field” and noted that he “would occasionally burst into tears at 
meetings.” Perhaps the best quote came from Jef Raskin. Jobs, he declared, “would have made an 
excellent King of France.”
To Jobs’s dismay, the magazine made public the existence of the daughter he had forsaken, 
Lisa Brennan. He knew that Kottke had been the one to tell the magazine about Lisa, and he 
berated him in the Mac group work space in front of a half dozen people. “When the 
Time
reporter 
asked me if Steve had a daughter named Lisa, I said ‘Of course,’” Kottke recalled. “Friends don’t 
let friends deny that they’re the father of a child. I’m not going to let my friend be a jerk and deny 
paternity. He was really angry and felt violated and told me in front of everyone that I had 
betrayed him.”
But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was not, after all, chosen as the Man of the Year. As 
he later told me:
Time
decided they were going to make me Man of the Year, and I was twenty-seven, so I actually cared 
about stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool. They sent out Mike Moritz to write a story. We’re the 
same age, and I had been very successful, and I could tell he was jealous and there was an edge to him. 
He wrote this terrible hatchet job. So the editors in New York get this story and say, “We can’t make 
this guy Man of the Year.” That really hurt. But it was a good lesson. It taught me to never get too 
excited about things like that, since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me the magazine, and I 
remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this 
computer sculpture thing. I thought, “Huh?” And then I read the article, and it was so awful that I 
actually cried.
In fact there’s no reason to believe that Moritz was jealous or that he intended his reporting to 
be unfair. Nor was Jobs ever slated to be Man of the Year, despite what he thought. That year the 
top editors (I was then a junior editor there) decided early on to go with the computer rather than a 
person, and they commissioned, months in advance, a piece of art from the famous sculptor 
George Segal to be a gatefold cover image. Ray Cave was then the magazine’s editor. 
“We never considered Jobs,” he said. “You couldn’t personify the computer, so that was the 
first time we decided to go with an inanimate object. We never searched around for a face to be 
put on the cover.”

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Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983—a full year before the Mac was ready—and Jobs paid 
his $5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of the Lisa team, Jobs went to New York 
to do publicity for it in his role as Apple’s chairman and poster boy.
He had learned from his public relations consultant Regis McKenna how to dole out exclusive 
interviews in a dramatic manner. Reporters from anointed publications were ushered in 
sequentially for their hour with him in his Carlyle Hotel suite, where a Lisa computer was set on a 
table and surrounded by cut flowers. The publicity plan called for Jobs to focus on the Lisa and 
not mention the Macintosh, because speculation about it could undermine the Lisa. But Jobs 
couldn’t help himself. In most of the stories based on his interviews that day—in