Steve Jobs

When he got home that evening, Jobs showed off the drawings at dinner, and Reed joked that the aerial view reminded him of male genitalia. His father dismissed the comment as reflecting the mind-set of a teenager. But the next day he mentioned the comment to the architects. “Unfortunately, once I’ve told you that, you’re never going to be able to erase that image from your mind,” he said. By the next time I visited, the shape had been changed to a simple circle.

The new design meant that there would not be a straight piece of glass in the building. All would be curved and seamlessly joined. Jobs had long been fascinated with glass, and his experience demanding huge custom panes for Apple’s retail stores made him confident that it would be possible to make massive curved pieces in quantity. The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome. One of his lingering memories was of the orchards that had once dominated the area, so he hired a senior arborist from Stanford and decreed that 80% of the property would be landscaped in a natural manner, with six thousand trees. “I asked him to make sure to include a new set of apricot orchards,” Jobs recalled. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley.”

By June 2011 the plans for the four-story, three-million-square-foot building, which would hold more than twelve thousand employees, were ready to unveil. He decided to do so in a quiet and unpublicized appearance before the Cupertino City Council on the day after he had announced iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Even though he had little energy, he had a full schedule that day. Ron Johnson, who had developed Apple’s stores and run them for more than a decade, had decided to accept an offer to be the CEO of J.C. Penney, and he came by Jobs’s house in the morning to discuss his departure. Then Jobs and I went into Palo Alto to a small yogurt and oatmeal café called Fraiche, where he talked animatedly about possible future Apple products. Later that day he was driven to Santa Clara for the quarterly meeting that Apple had with top Intel executives, where they discussed the possibility of using Intel chips in future mobile devices. That night U2 was playing at the Oakland Coliseum, and Jobs had considered going. Instead he decided to use that evening to show his plans to the Cupertino Council.

Arriving without an entourage or any fanfare, and looking relaxed in the same black sweater he had worn for his developers conference speech, he stood on a podium with clicker in hand and spent twenty minutes showing slides of the design to council members. When a rendering of the sleek, futuristic, perfectly circular building appeared on the screen, he paused and smiled. “It’s like a spaceship has landed,” he said. A few moments later he added, “I think we have a shot at building the best office building in the world.”

The following Friday, Jobs sent an email to a colleague from the distant past, Ann Bowers, the widow of Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce. She had been Apple’s human resources director and den mother in the early 1980s, in charge of reprimanding Jobs after his tantrums and tending to the wounds of his coworkers. Jobs asked if she would come see him the next day. Bowers happened to be in New York, but she came by his house that Sunday when she returned. By then he was sick again, in pain and without much energy, but he was eager to show her the renderings of the new headquarters. “You should be proud of Apple,” he said. “You should be proud of what we built.”

Then he looked at her and asked, intently, a question that almost floored her: “Tell me, what was I like when I was young?”

Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very difficult,” she replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The journey is the reward.’ That turned out to be true.”

“Yes,” Jobs answered. “I did learn some things along the way.” Then, a few minutes later, he repeated it, as if to reassure Bowers and himself. “I did learn some things. I really did.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

ROUND THREE

The Twilight Struggle

Family Ties

Jobs had an aching desire to make it to his son’s graduation from high school in June 2010. “When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I really wanted to see Reed graduate, and that got me through 2009,” he said. As a senior, Reed looked eerily like his father at eighteen, with a knowing and slightly rebellious smile, intense eyes, and a shock of dark hair. But from his mother he had inherited a sweetness and painfully sensitive empathy that his father lacked. He was demonstrably affectionate and eager to please. Whenever his father was sitting sullenly at the kitchen table and staring at the floor, which happened often when he was ailing, the only thing sure to cause his eyes to brighten was Reed walking in.

Reed adored his father. Soon after I started working on this book, he dropped in to where I was staying and, as his father often did, suggested we take a walk. He told me, with an intensely earnest look, that his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making.

After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, Reed began spending his summers working in a Stanford oncology lab doing DNA sequencing to find genetic markers for colon cancer. In one experiment, he traced how mutations go through families. “One of the very few silver linings about me getting sick is that Reed’s gotten to spend a lot of time studying with some very good doctors,” Jobs said. “His enthusiasm for it is exactly how I felt about computers when I was his age. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”

Reed used his cancer study as the basis for the senior report he presented to his class at Crystal Springs Uplands School. As he described how he used centrifuges and dyes to sequence the DNA of tumors, his father sat in the audience beaming, along with the rest of his family. “I fantasize about Reed getting a house here in Palo Alto with his family and riding his bike to work as a doctor at Stanford,” Jobs said afterward.

Reed had grown up fast in 2009, when it looked as if his father was going to die. He took care of his younger sisters while his parents were in Memphis, and he developed a protective paternalism. But when his father’s health stabilized in the spring of 2010, he regained his playful, teasing personality. One day during dinner he was discussing with his family where to take his girlfriend for dinner. His father suggested Il Fornaio, an elegant standard in Palo Alto, but Reed said he had been unable to get reservations. “Do you want me to try?” his father asked. Reed resisted; he wanted to handle it himself. Erin, the somewhat shy middle child, suggested that she could outfit a tepee in their garden and she and Eve, the younger sister, would serve them a romantic meal there. Reed stood up and hugged her. He would take her up on that some other time, he promised.