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

CHAPTER NINE
GOING PUBLIC
A Man of Wealth and Fame
With Wozniak, 1981
Options
When Mike Markkula joined Jobs and Wozniak to turn their fledgling partnership into the Apple 
Computer Co. in January 1977, they valued it at $5,309. Less than four years later they decided it 
was time to take it public. It would become the most oversubscribed initial public offering since 
that of Ford Motors in 1956. By the end of December 1980, Apple would be valued at $1.79 
billion. Yes, 
billion
. In the process it would make three hundred people millionaires.
Daniel Kottke was not one of them. He had been Jobs’s soul mate in college, in India, at the All 
One Farm, and in the rental house they shared during the Chrisann Brennan crisis. He joined 
Apple when it was headquartered in Jobs’s garage, and he still worked there as an hourly 
employee. But he was not at a high enough level to be cut in on the stock options that were 
awarded before the IPO. “I totally trusted Steve, and I assumed he would take care of me like I’d 
taken care of him, so I didn’t push,” said Kottke. The official reason he wasn’t given stock options 
was that he was an hourly technician, not a salaried engineer, which was the cutoff level for 
options. Even so, he could have justifiably been given “founder’s stock,” but Jobs decided not to. 
“Steve is the opposite of loyal,” according to Andy Hertz-feld, an early Apple engineer who has 
nevertheless remained friends with him. “He’s anti-loyal. He has to abandon the people he is close 
to.”
Kottke decided to press his case with Jobs by hovering outside his office and catching him to 
make a plea. But at each encounter, Jobs brushed him off. “What was really so difficult for me is 
that Steve never told me I wasn’t eligible,” recalled Kottke. “He owed me that as a friend. When I 
would ask him about stock, he would tell me I had to talk to my manager.” Finally, almost six 
months after the IPO, Kottke worked up the courage to march into Jobs’s office and try to hash 
out the issue. But when he got in to see him, Jobs was so cold that Kottke froze. “I just got choked 
up and began to cry and just couldn’t talk to him,” Kottke recalled. “Our friendship was all gone. 
It was so sad.”

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Rod Holt, the engineer who had built the power supply, was getting a lot of options, and he 
tried to turn Jobs around. “We have to do something for your buddy Daniel,” he said, and he 
suggested they each give him some of their own options. “Whatever you give him, I will match 
it,” said Holt. Replied Jobs, “Okay. I will give him zero.”
Wozniak, not surprisingly, had the opposite attitude. Before the shares went public, he decided 
to sell, at a very low price, two thousand of his options to forty different midlevel employees. 
Most of his beneficiaries made enough to buy a home. Wozniak bought a dream home 
for himself and his new wife, but she soon divorced him and kept the house. He also later gave 
shares outright to employees he felt had been shortchanged, including Kottke, Fernandez, 
Wigginton, and Espinosa. Everyone loved Wozniak, all the more so after his generosity, but many 
also agreed with Jobs that he was “awfully naïve and childlike.” A few months later a United Way 
poster showing a destitute man went up on a company bulletin board. Someone scrawled on it 
“Woz in 1990.”
Jobs was not naïve. He had made sure his deal with Chrisann Brennan was signed before the 
IPO occurred.
Jobs was the public face of the IPO, and he helped choose the two investment banks handling 
it: the traditional Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley and the untraditional boutique firm Hambrecht 
& Quist in San Francisco. “Steve was very irreverent toward the guys from Morgan Stanley, 
which was a pretty uptight firm in those days,” recalled Bill Hambrecht. Morgan Stanley planned 
to price the offering at $18, even though it was obvious the shares would quickly shoot up. “Tell 
me what happens to this stock that we priced at eighteen?” Jobs asked the bankers. “Don’t you sell 
it to your good customers? If so, how can you charge me a 7% commission?” Hambrecht 
recognized that there was a basic unfairness in the system, and he later went on to formulate the 
idea of a reverse auction to price shares before an IPO.
Apple went public the morning of December 12, 1980. By then the bankers had priced the stock 
at $22 a share. It went to $29 the first day. Jobs had come into the Hambrecht & Quist office just 
in time to watch the opening trades. At age twenty-five, he was now worth $256 million.