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

The Well-Tempered Clavier
. Bach, he 
declared, was his favorite classical composer. He was particularly fond of listening to the contrasts 
between the two versions of the “Goldberg Variations” that Glenn Gould recorded, the first in 
1955 as a twenty-two-year-old little-known pianist and the second in 1981, a year before he died. 
“They’re like night and day,” Jobs said after playing them sequentially one afternoon. “The first is 
an exuberant, young, brilliant piece, played so fast it’s a revelation. The later one is so much more 
spare and stark. You sense a very deep soul who’s been through a lot in life. It’s deeper and 
wiser.” Jobs was on his third medical leave that afternoon when he played both versions, and I 
asked which he liked better. “Gould liked the later version much better,” he said. “I used to like 
the earlier, exuberant one. But now I can see where he was coming from.”
He then jumped from the sublime to the sixties: Donovan’s “Catch the Wind.” When he noticed 
me look askance, he protested, “Donovan did some really good stuff, really.” He punched up 
“Mellow Yellow,” and then admitted that perhaps it was not the best example. “It sounded better 
when we were young.”
I asked what music from our childhood actually held up well these days. He scrolled down the 
list on his iPad and called up the Grateful Dead’s 1969 song “Uncle John’s Band.” He nodded 
along with the lyrics: “When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door.” For a 
moment we were back at that tumultuous time when the mellowness of the sixties was ending in 
discord. “Whoa, oh, what I want to know is, are you kind?”
Then he turned to Joni Mitchell. “She had a kid she put up for adoption,” he said. “This song is 
about her little girl.” He tapped on “Little Green,” and we listened to the mournful melody and 
lyrics that describe the feelings of a mother who gives up a child. “So you sign all the papers in 
the family name / You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed.” I asked whether he still 
often thought about being put up for adoption. “No, not much,” he said. “Not too often.”
These days, he said, he thought more about getting older than about his birth. That led him to 
play Joni Mitchell’s greatest song, “Both Sides Now,” with its lyrics about being older and wiser: 
“I’ve looked at life from both sides now, / From win and lose, and still somehow, / It’s life’s 

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illusions I recall, / I really don’t know life at all.” As Glenn Gould had done with Bach’s 
“Goldberg Variations,” Mitchell had recorded “Both Sides Now” many years apart, first in 1969 
and then in an excruciatingly haunting slow version in 2000. He played the latter. “It’s interesting 
how people age,” he noted.
Some people, he added, don’t age well even when they are young. I asked who he had in mind. 
“John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, and I’m just afraid he’s blowing it 
big time,” Jobs replied. Jobs liked Mayer and occasionally had him over for dinner in Palo Alto. 
When he was twenty-seven, Mayer appeared at the January 2004 Macworld, where Jobs 
introduced GarageBand, and he became a fixture at the event most years. Jobs punched up Mayer’
s hit “Gravity.” The lyrics are about a guy filled with love who inexplicably dreams of ways to 
throw it away: “Gravity is working against me, / And gravity wants to bring me down.” Jobs 
shook his head and commented, “I think he’s a really good kid underneath, but he’s just been out 
of control.”
At the end of the listening session, I asked him a well-worn question: the Beatles or the Stones? 
“If the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set of master tapes, I would grab the Beatles,” 
he answered. “The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have 
replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles.” As he was ruminating about 
how fortunate we were to have all of them when we were growing up, his son, then eighteen, 
came in the room. “Reed doesn’t understand,” Jobs lamented. Or perhaps he did. He was wearing 
a Joan Baez T-shirt, with the words “Forever Young” on it.