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

Doonesbury
comic strip made it 
seem, but Jobs hated it. He disdained the idea of having a stylus or pen for writing on a screen. 
“God gave us ten styluses,” he would say, waving his fingers. “Let’s not invent another.” In 
addition, he viewed Newton as John Sculley’s one major innovation, his pet project. That alone 
doomed it in Jobs’s eyes.
“You ought to kill Newton,” he told Amelio one day by phone.
It was a suggestion out of the blue, and Amelio pushed back. “What do you mean, kill it?” he 
said. “Steve, do you have any idea how expensive that would be?”
“Shut it down, write it off, get rid of it,” said Jobs. “It doesn’t matter what it costs. People will 
cheer you if you got rid of it.”
“I’ve looked into Newton and it’s going to be a moneymaker,” Amelio declared. “I don’t 
support getting rid of it.” By May, however, he announced plans to spin off the Newton division, 
the beginning of its yearlong stutter-step march to the grave.
Tevanian and Rubinstein would come by Jobs’s house to keep him informed, and soon much of 
Silicon Valley knew that Jobs was quietly wresting power from Amelio. It was not so much a 
Machiavellian power play as it was Jobs being Jobs. Wanting control was ingrained in his nature. 
Louise Kehoe, the 
Financial Times
reporter who had foreseen this when she questioned Jobs and 
Amelio at the December announcement, was the first with the story. “Mr. Jobs has become the 
power behind the throne,” she reported at the end of February. “He is said to be directing 
decisions on which parts of Apple’s operations should be cut. Mr. Jobs has urged a number of 
former Apple colleagues to return to the company, hinting strongly that he plans to take charge, 
they said. According to one of Mr. Jobs’ confidantes, he has decided that Mr. Amelio and his 
appointees are unlikely to succeed in reviving Apple, and he is intent upon replacing them to 
ensure the survival of ‘his company.’”
That month Amelio had to face the annual stockholders meeting and explain why the results for 
the final quarter of 1996 showed a 30% plummet in sales from the year before. Shareholders lined 
up at the microphones to vent their anger. Amelio was clueless about how poorly he handled the 
meeting. “The presentation was regarded as one 
of the best I had ever given,” he later wrote. But Ed Woolard, the former CEO of DuPont who 
was now the chair of the Apple board (Markkula had been demoted to vice chair), was appalled. 
“This is a disaster,” his wife whispered to him in the midst of the session. Woolard agreed. “Gil 
came dressed real cool, but he looked and sounded silly,” he recalled. “He couldn’t answer the 
questions, didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t inspire any confidence.”
Woolard picked up the phone and called Jobs, whom he’d never met. The pretext was to invite 
him to Delaware to speak to DuPont executives. Jobs declined, but as Woolard recalled, “the 
request was a ruse in order to talk to him about Gil.” He steered the phone call in that direction 
and asked Jobs point-blank what his impression of Amelio was. Woolard remembers Jobs being 
somewhat circumspect, saying that Amelio was not in the right job. Jobs recalled being more 
blunt:
I thought to myself, I either tell him the truth, that Gil is a bozo, or I lie by omission. He’s on the board 
of Apple, I have a duty to tell him what I think; on the other hand, if I tell him, he will tell Gil, in which 
case Gil will never listen to me again, and he’ll fuck the people I brought into Apple. All of this took 
place in my head in less than thirty seconds. I finally decided that I owed this guy the truth. I cared 
deeply about Apple. So I just let him have it. I said this guy is the worst CEO I’ve ever seen, I think if 
you needed a license to be a CEO he wouldn’t get one. When I hung up the phone, I thought, I probably 
just did a really stupid thing.

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That spring Larry Ellison saw Amelio at a party and introduced him to the technology journalist 
Gina Smith, who asked how Apple was doing. “You know, Gina, Apple is like a ship,” Amelio 
answered. “That ship is loaded with treasure, but there’s a hole in the ship. And my job is to get 
everyone to row in the same direction.” Smith looked perplexed and asked, “Yeah, but what about 
the hole?” From then on, Ellison and Jobs joked about the parable of the ship. “When Larry 
relayed this story to me, we were in this sushi place, and I literally fell off my chair laughing,” 
Jobs recalled. “He was just such a buffoon, and he took himself so seriously. He insisted that 
everyone call him Dr. Amelio. That’s always a warning sign.”
Brent Schlender, 
Fortune
’s well-sourced technology reporter, knew Jobs and was familiar with 
his thinking, and in March he came out with a story detailing the mess. “Apple Computer, Silicon 
Valley’s paragon of dysfunctional management and fumbled techno-dreams, is back in crisis 
mode, scrambling lugubriously in slow motion to deal with imploding sales, a floundering 
technology strategy, and a hemorrhaging brand name,” he wrote. “To the Machiavellian eye, it 
looks as if Jobs, despite the lure of Hollywood—lately he has been overseeing Pixar, maker of