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In 1976, Steve Jobs cofounded Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs’ guidance, the company pioneered a series of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.

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Steve Jobs was an American inventor, designer, and entrepreneur who was the cofounder, chief executive, and chairman of Apple Inc. Born in 1955 to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption, Jobs was smart but directionless, dropping out of college and experimenting with different pursuits before cofounding Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Jobs left the company in 1985, launching Pixar Animation Studios, then returned to Apple more than a decade later. The tech giant’s revolutionary products, which include the iPhone, iPad, and iPod, have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Jobs died in 2011 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

FULL NAME: Steven Paul Jobs BORN: February 24, 1955 DIED: October 5, 2011 BIRTHPLACE: San Francisco, California SPOUSE: Laurene Powell (1991-2011) CHILDREN: Lisa, Reed, Erin, and Eve ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Pisces

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption. As an infant, Jobs was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant, and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist.

Jobs’ biological father, Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor. His biological mother, Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Jobs was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.

Jobs lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California, within the area that would later become known as Silicon Valley. He was curious from childhood, sometimes to his detriment. According to the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Jobs was taken to the emergency room twice as a toddler—once after sticking a pin into an electrical socket and burning his hand, and another time because he had ingested poison. His mother Clara had taught him to read by the time he started kindergarten.

As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

Although Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined.

While attending Homestead High School, Jobs joined the Explorer’s Club at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he saw a computer for the first time. He even picked up a summer job with HP after calling company cofounder Bill Hewlett to ask for parts for a frequency counter he was building. It was at HP that a teenaged Jobs met he met his future partner and cofounder of Apple Computer Steve Wozniak , who was attending the University of California, Berkeley.

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he withdrew from college after six months and spent the next year and a half dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later, he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs’ family garage. Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his beloved scientific calculator to fund their entrepreneurial venture. Through Apple, the men are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive, and accessible to everyday consumers.

Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and—with Jobs in charge of marketing—Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple’s second model, the Apple II, the company’s sales increased exponentially to $139 million.

In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its first day of trading. However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.

Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple in 1983. The next year, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM’s PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.

Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company’s executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he cofounded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and left Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs personally invested $12 million to begin a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT Inc. The company introduced its first computer in 1988, with Jobs hoping it would appeal to universities and researchers. But with a base price of $6,500, the machine was far out of the range of most potential buyers.

The company’s operating system NeXTSTEP fared better, with programmers using it to develop video games like Quake and Doom . Tim Berners-Lee, who created the first web browser, used an NeXT computer. However, the company struggled to appeal to mainstream America, and Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429 million.

In 1986, Jobs purchased an animation company from George Lucas , which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar’s potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money in the company.

The studio went on to produce wildly popular movies such as Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), and Up (2009) . Pixar merged with Disney in 2006, which made Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney. As of June 2022, Pixar films had collectively grossed $14.7 billion at the global box office.

In 1997, Jobs returned to his post as Apple’s CEO. Just as Jobs instigated Apple’s success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s.

With a new management team, altered stock options, and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. Jobs’ ingenious products like the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.

In the ensuing years, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod, and iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology. Almost immediately after Apple released a new product, competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies. To mark its expanded product offerings, the company officially rebranded as Apple Inc. in 2007.

Apple’s quarterly reports improved significantly that year: Stocks were worth $199.99 a share—a record-breaking number at that time—and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion profit, an $18 billion surplus in the bank, and zero debt.

In 2008, fueled by iTunes and iPod sales, Apple became the second-biggest music retailer in America behind Walmart. Apple has also been ranked No. 1 on Fortune ’s list of America’s Most Admired Companies, as well as No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Apple has released dozens of versions of the iPhone since its 2007 debut. In February 2023, an unwrapped first generation phone sold at auction for more than $63,000.

According to Forbes , Jobs’ net worth peaked at $8.3 billion shortly before he died in 2011. Celebrity Net Worth estimates it was as high as $10.2 billion.

Apple hit a market capitalization of $3 trillion in January 2022, meaning Jobs’ initial stake in the company from 1980 would have been worth about $330 billion—enough to comfortably make him the richest person in the world over Tesla founder Elon Musk had he been alive. But according to the New York Post , Jobs sold off all but one of his Apple shares when he left the company in 1985.

Most of Jobs’ net worth came from a roughly 8 percent share in Disney he acquired when he sold Pixar in 2006. Based on Disney’s 2022 value, that share—which he passed onto his wife—is worth $22 billion.

Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto with their three children: Reed (born September 22, 1991), Erin (born August 19, 1995), and Eve (born July 9, 1998).

Jobs also fathered a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan on May 17, 1978, when he was 23. He denied paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile. In her memoir Small Fry , Lisa wrote DNA tests revealed that she and Jobs were a match in 1980, and he was required to begin making paternity payments to her financially struggling mother. Jobs didn’t initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 years old. When she was a teenager, Lisa came to live with her father. In 2011, Jobs said , “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.”

In 2003, Jobs discovered that he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pesco-vegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options.

For nine months, Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple’s board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stock if word got out that the CEO was ill. But in the end, Jobs’ confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure.

In 2004, Jobs had successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, Jobs disclosed little about his health in subsequent years.

Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs’ weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. Days later, he went on a six-month leave of absence.

In an email message to employees, Jobs said his “health-related issues are more complex” than he thought, then named Tim Cook , Apple’s then–chief operating officer, as “responsible for Apple’s day-today operations.”

After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event on September 9, 2009. He continued to serve as master of ceremonies, which included the unveiling of the iPad, throughout much of 2010.

In January 2011, Jobs announced he was going on medical leave. In August, he resigned as CEO of Apple, handing the reins to Cook.

Jobs died at age 56 in his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. His official cause of death was listed as respiratory arrest related to his years-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

The New York Times reported that in his final weeks, Jobs had become so weak that he struggled to walk up the stairs in his home. Still, he was able to say goodbye to some of his longtime colleagues, including Disney CEO Bob Iger; speak with his biographer; and offer advice to Apple executives about the unveiling of the iPhone 4S.

In a eulogy for Jobs , sister Mona Simpson wrote that just before dying, Jobs looked for a long time at his sister, Patty, then his wife and children, then past them, and said his last words: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

Jobs’ closest family and friends remembered him at a small gathering, then on October 16, a funeral for Jobs was held on the campus of Stanford University. Notable attendees included Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates ; singer Joan Baez , who once dated Jobs; former Vice President Al Gore ; actor Tim Allen; and News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch .

Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. Upon the release of the 2015 film Steve Jobs , fans traveled to the cemetery to find the site. Because the cemetery is not allowed to disclose the grave’s location, many left messages for Jobs in a memorial book instead.

Before his death, Jobs granted author and journalist Walter Isaacson permission to write his official biography. Jobs sat for more than 40 interviews with the Isaacson, who also talked to more than 100 of Jobs’ family, friends, and colleagues. Initially scheduled for a November 2011 release date, Steve Jobs hit shelves on October 24, just 19 days after Jobs died.

Jobs’ life has been the subject of two major films. The first, released in 2013, was simply titled Jobs and starred Ashton Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak told The Verge in 2013 he was approached about working on the film but couldn’t because, “I read a script as far as I could stomach it and felt it was crap.” Although he praised the casting, he told Gizmodo he felt his and Jobs’ personalities were inaccurately portrayed.

Instead, Wozniak worked with Sony Pictures on the second film, Steve Jobs , that was adapted from Isaacson’s biography and released in 2015. It starred Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Seth Rogen as Wozniak. Fassbender was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and co-star Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Apple and NeXT marketing executive Joanna Hoffman.

In 2015, filmmaker Alex Gibney examined Jobs’ life and legacy in the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine .

• Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world? [Jobs inviting an executive to join Apple]
• It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.
• In my perspective... science and computer science is a liberal art. It’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life.
• It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.
• There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love—‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been’—and we’ve always tried to do that at Apple.
• You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
• I think humans are basically tool builders, and the computer is the most remarkable tool we’ve ever built.
• You just make the best product you can, and you don’t put it out until you feel it’s right.
• With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.
• Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
• I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates .
• If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
• Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful—that’s what matters to me.
• I like to believe there’s an afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn’t just disappear when you die, but somehow, it endures. But maybe it’s just like an on/off switch and click—and you’re gone. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.

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Books December 22, 2019

The steve jobs biography is a monster that won’t stop spawning.

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Eight years after publication, Walter Isaacson’s “iBio” Steve Jobs remains massively influential. Danyl Mclauchlan examines how the deeply flawed genius the book revealed continues to manifest. 

I t’s the end of the decade, and my social media aggregators are filled with lists of the best, most influential books of the last 10 years. For most writers and critics the best books and the most influential books seems to be the same thing, and I always look at these lists and wonder: “Are there books out there making the world a worse place, inadvertently or not?”

Whenever I finish a book I take a photo of the front cover. Then I put the image in a folder, and at the end of the year I print them all out. But I’m only allowed to print out covers of books that I’ve read to the end. This ritual is designed to combat my chronic habit of starting a book then getting distracted by another book and never finishing anything. 

It’s also a rudimentary reading diary, and scrolling through these folders at the end of the decade I see that most books I finish fall into a couple of categories. There’s a high proportion that I enjoyed but never thought about again (mostly contemporary literary fiction). There are books I’m obsessed with and keep rereading (mostly popular science writing, science fiction, essays, and memoirs: all of these genres are enjoying a prolonged golden age). 

And then there’s the books I didn’t fall in love with, but which lots of other people did, and so turned out to be a lot more influential than the books I liked. Like Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s biography of “the greatest CEO of all time”. This was published back in 2011, shortly after Jobs’ death. I read it in 2016 and I enjoyed it but didn’t love it. 

But I find myself thinking about it more and more. Partly because Steve Jobs is a very popular book. I see people reading it on the bus; usually the bus to university; usually a guy who is obviously studying engineering or compsci, maybe design. It’s still on the stands at airport bookstores: when I travel I usually spot a couple copies on the plane, being read by Accenture or PWC types. And when I visited Xero a few years ago I saw at least three different copies scattered around workspaces. In less than a decade, Steve Jobs has established itself as a central text in the tech nerd literary canon, up there with the Foundation books; 1979’s Godel, Escher, Bach; and Genius , the James Gleick biography of physicist Richard Feynman.   

But the appeal is wider than that. Goodreads curates lists of books across different categories and ranks them according to user ratings. In “popular technology” Steve Jobs is first on the list with over 850,000 ratings. The second entry – The Shallows , by Nicolas Carr – has just over 20,000. Steve Jobs is the most popular biography, the most popular business biography, one of the most popular entries in the “books I want to read” category. It’s huge. 

And Steve Jobs shows up in interesting places. Like Bad Blood , the 2018 book on the Theranos scandal by John Carreyrou, the reporter who broke the story. Theranos was a fraudulent multi-billion biotech company based in Silicon Valley, and the founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was briefly the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, but is now bankrupt and awaiting trial on multiple charges of criminal conspiracy. Holmes was obsessed with Jobs, and with Isaacson’s book. She dressed like Jobs. She listened to his favourite music (Dylan, the Beatles). She drank the same kale smoothies. She treated her staff with the same brutal, withering contempt. She hired former Apple staff in an attempt to appropriate her guru’s aura, and she tried to imitate Jobs’ famous “reality distortion field”, in which teams of brilliant experts told Jobs something couldn’t be done, and he’d declare they were wrong, and would (sometimes) be proved right. The staff at Theranos, Carreyrou writes, “were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’ career she was impersonating”.

A lot of modern tech CEOs worship at the altar of Jobs. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey describes him as “a mentor from afar”; Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel has a portrait of Jobs in his office; Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick – forced out by his board after a rolling series of scandals revealing that the company’s internal culture was toxic beyond belief – wore the black turtleneck and, after he was fired, announced that he was “Steve Jobsing it”, meaning he’d return to take over his old company once it self-destructed in his absence. 

Jobs is also worshipped by people like Adam Neumann, the former CEO of WeWork, a cult-like property management start-up that wasn’t a tech company in any conceivable way, but managed to convince their investors that it was, thus inflating WeWork’s valuation by several orders of magnitude (at its height the company was valued at $47 billion USD, even though it was losing billions a year and had no IP, virtually no assets, and a business model indistinguishable from its profitable, established competitors). Just like Steve Jobs, Neumann announced that his company’s goal was to “elevate the world’s consciousness”. Although Neumann dabbled in Kabbalah rather than Zen, reportedly basing his company’s first bond offering on auspicious numerological combinations then adding on a couple more million. And from this Vanity Fair take on Neumann’s catastrophic leadership style and failed IPO: 

After sitting with Neumann in his office, outfitted with a Peloton bike, infrared sauna, and cold water plunge, Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson told Fast Company that Neumann reminded him of the Apple cofounder. Neumann later told colleagues that Isaacson might write his biography. (Isaacson never considered writing such a book.)

Isaacson’s Jobs biography does four things very convincingly: he shows us that Steve Jobs was (a) a genius, (b) a hateful and poisonous human being, (c) prone to making stupid mistakes that no person of even average intelligence would ever make, and (d) a very eclectic, unique personality, at least until half the tech industry started imitating him. 

Isaacson doesn’t really tie these things together. He’s mildly censorious of the fact that Jobs is such a monster (for example, on his deathbed he told his estranged daughter that she smelled like a toilet). The sustained awfulness of his personality detracted from his accomplishments, his biographer feels. 

And the eclecticism is just part of the package. We forget how weird Jobs was because most of his behaviour – meditation, bare feet, bizarre fasts and extreme diets, taking LSD, press releases and product launches filled with mystical pronouncements about changing the world and saving the universe – are now standard tech culture affectations. But they were all unprecedentedly weird things for a business executive to do back when Jobs first did them, and they were a big part of him being fired by his own company in the mid-1980s. It feels like there’s a stronger link than Isaacson admits between Jobs being brilliant and visionary, Jobs making dumb decisions even though everyone begged him not to (NeXT computers, the iPhone 4 antennae, countless other product failures, trying to cure his operable cancer with juice fasts), Jobs being generally very weird, and Jobs behaving in ways that were unacceptable to most other humans. 

Steve Jobs is very tolerant of the chaotic and disruptive nature of modern tech culture, but the most interesting apologia for tech contrarianism is Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Silicon Valley philosopher-king, sinister billionaire and honorary New Zealand citizen, Peter Thiel.   

Thiel’s ideas are influenced by the conservative thinker René Girard, who argued that humans are a “memetic” species: most of our thoughts, beliefs, values and desires come from simply imitating one another’s behaviour, especially that of high ranking/high status members of our society or in-group. Girard was a literary philosopher but his disciples like to point to the recent neuroscience literature on mirror neurons – brain cells found in primate species that facilitate learning by firing when we mirror the behaviour of another animal – to validate his model. 

The way memetic imitation plays out in a capitalist society, according to Thiel, is that most aspiring entrepreneurs copy people or businesses that already exist. But if you can do this then so can anyone else, and you’ll find yourself trapped in a zero sum state of competition: a race to the bottom on price or profit, cognate to the self-defeating vision of capitalism you find in Marx. Thiel thinks an obsession with competition and “disruption” is one of the main things that’s wrong with contemporary business culture ( real capitalism, he declares, is the opposite of competition). All you accomplish by imitating existing success is increasing the availability of that product from one to n. What you need to do is build something that no one else is producing and establish a monopoly on it, i.e. to take a product “from zero to one”. 

By monopoly Thiel means a new, previously unimagined product or service that’s so superior no one can realistically compete against you. Most successful companies accomplish this via a mixture of proprietary technology, scale and network effects. If you want to compete against Google you have to build a better search engine, a better planet-sized IT infrastructure, and a better advertising platform. If you want to compete against Amazon you have to build a global network of AI optimised and roboticised warehouses and be able to compete against Jeff Bezos on price as he undersells you for years until you go bankrupt. To compete against Facebook you need to offer people a social network that has more of their friends on it than Facebook does. Try to be at least 10 times better than any viable competitor, Thiel helpfully suggests. 

Or you can use marketing to convince customers that your product is unique. Thiel’s example of this is Steve Jobs. Jobs invented new products, but he also understood branding in a really deep, contrarian way. He was the first titan of capitalism to commodify the anticonsumerist counterculture ethos of the 1960s and use it to sell luxury brand consumer products. Nobody else thought of that. And incredibly this still works. Apple is the world’s first trillion dollar company, but many of its most loyal customers still believe that to buy its products – even queuing up for them overnight – is to signify themselves as free thinking radicals. 

Thiel believes that the best contrarian ideas emerge from start-ups, by which he means small, innovative, entrepreneurial organisations. The Royal Society. The US’ ‘Founding Fathers’. Fairchild Semiconductor. It’s hard to do anything in big bureaucratic organisations and even harder to get anything done by yourself. This aligns with a point that Isaacson makes in his less popular, non-Steve-Jobs related history of digital technology, The Innovators . Most of the breakthroughs in the digital revolution emerged from small collaborative teams or partnerships, usually involving a contrarian visionary who finds someone to put their impossible dreams into practice, a tradition he traces all the way back to Lovelace and Babbage. Turing in Hut 8. Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. 

Forming collaborative partnerships is exactly what Steve Jobs did for the productive components of his career. But as a career path, being a contrarian visionary who grows up in Silicon Valley and is childhood friends with Wozniak at the dawn of the digital age is difficult to emulate. Which goes a long way towards explaining why contemporary tech executives read the Jobs biography then dress up in black turtlenecks, drink kale smoothies, babble about mysticism and scream at their staff. Those Steve-Jobs-like qualities are all really easy to imitate. And, true to Thiel’s memetic theory of human nature, there are venture capitalists handing out billions of dollars to these people because they’re being contrarian and unconventional in a way that is now deeply conventional and orthodox.   

The world is full of people who think they’re radicals or contrarians or critical thinkers because they can regurgitate online conspiracy theories or ideologies they were indoctrinated with at university. But being an actual freethinker is rare. Thiel boils it down to one simple formula: you have to believe that there are secrets in the world that have not yet been discovered – and that you are a person who can unearth them and “bring them to market”. But he describes the proportion of people and companies that succeed at this as following a power law distribution: almost all of them fail – the key is that they fail fast – while the tiny proportion that succeed then enjoy monopolistic power over the new, uncontested sphere of the global economy that they’ve conjured up. “A great company,” Thiel writes, “is a conspiracy to change the world.” If they succeed, they become the Facebooks, Googles, Apples and Amazons; the Zuckerbergs, Musks, Thiels, Bezos and Jobs. They rule, serene and primal, while the rest of us scurry about thinking conventional thoughts and memetically cooperating with or competing against one another because that’s what everyone else does.   

J obs’ iconic “Think Different” campaign, launched in 1997, turned Bob Dylan, Picasso, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Albert Einstein into brand ambassadors for Apple Corporation and celebrated “the crazy ones”:   

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Thiel makes a convincing argument that in a technological global marketplace, the people best placed to beat the efficient market hypothesis and change the world are less like Einstein or Gandhi and a lot more like Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel: i.e. brilliant contrarians who are also ruthless capitalists with contempt for conventional values and institutions, and who specialise in maximising their wealth and power while avoiding any responsibility or accountability. (One of Jobs’ most profitable innovations at Apple was the company’s labyrinthine tax structure, artfully designed to ensure that the most valuable corporation in the world paid as little tax as possible. Yet another Jobs invention that the rest of tech vigorously imitates.) Thiel celebrates the empowerment of contrarian tech visionaries because he’s one of them; he thinks the process needs to be accelerated. Despite the superficial appearances of change we live in an age of technological stagnation, he warns. We’re not building the future fast enough. 

It feels pretty fast though. Thiel invested in Facebook in 2004; Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007. At the end of 2019 there are billions of smartphones, billions of Facebook users, ubiquitous new high speed wireless networks so that we can always be connected, all of the time. And we’re still discovering the fishhooks hidden inside these new products: that contrary to all the connectivity rhetoric they’re also isolating, antisocial technologies; that they’re designed to surveil, commodify and modify our behaviour. If you think you’re too smart to be influenced by modern advertising, Thiel warns his readers, you’re being fooled twice.   

More Reading

Steve Jobs died in October of 2011. Steve Jobs was published three weeks later. The important literary books of that year are almost entirely forgotten but people are still reading the Jobs biography. It allows for multiple interpretations: some readers conclude that if you imitate his extravagant personality – describe your business in spiritual terms; always park in mobility-parking spots; lie about almost everything; treat everyone around you with contempt – you’ll flourish in the tech industry. And some of those people (Holmes, Neumann, Kalanick) are correct at least for a while.   

But there’s a deeper reading. An esoteric reading, as Thiel might say: that the deeper premise at the heart of Jobs’ life is true. If you really think differently you can use technology to change the world. You can bet against the conventions and assumptions and core values of your own society, and if you win you can build the future and no one can stop you. It’s an idea that sounded a lot better at the start of the decade than it does at the end of it. Because the deeper we get into the future designed and controlled by contrarian geniuses – who resist any accountability for their power because, like Jobs, they’re locked into a perception of themselves as anti-establishment radicals – the bleaker and more frightening it seems to the rest of us. 

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (Knopf, $25) is available from Unity Books.

The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books , recently named 2020 International Book Store of the Year, London Book Fair, and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books Wellington or Unity Books Auckland online stores today. 

Book of Steve Jobs' speeches, interviews coming 11 years after the Apple founder's death

Steve Jobs may no longer be with us but his legacy certainly is.

And Tuesday, the public will gain further access to the tech icon's inner workings.

More than a decade after the Apple founder's death, The Steve Jobs Archive is set to publish "Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs In His Own Words," a curated digital collection of Jobs' speeches, correspondence and interviews. 

Jobs died in 2011 after a bout with pancreatic cancer. The tech icon was 56.

The idea is that the book will "inspire readers to make their own 'wonderful somethings' that move the world forward," the Archive said in a statement on its website.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

"In the pages of this book, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all," the Archive said.

According to the Washington Post , the book exists on the spectrum between a scrapbook and a memoir. It includes some of the images that have never been seen by the public before.

The book includes an introduction from Jobs' wife Laurene Powell Jobs. It was edited by Leslie Berlin.

The idea, Powell Jobs told the Washington Post, was to allow readers to hear from Jobs himself. “He has been written about, but this is actually his writing and his work,” Powell Jobs said. “So there’s no intermediary.”

The digital book will be free to the public and was created by former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive's LoveFrom for the Archive. A version will also be available as an ebook on Apple Books. The exact time the book will be released Tuesday has not yet been announced.

His daughter Lisa's memoir: What we learned about Steve Jobs

The Steve Jobs Archive launched last September , created by Jobs' family and friends. According to the Archive, it "is the authoritative home for Steve’s story and a resource to help new generations make their own mark." 

The website includes clippings of internal meetings at Apple, commencement speeches, emails and more.

In addition to the forthcoming digital book, the Archive teases upcoming programs, fellowships and digital exhibits to carry Steve's "sense of possibility" into the future.

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Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson – review

P erhaps the funniest passage in Walter Isaacson's monumental book about Steve Jobs comes three quarters of the way through. It is 2009 and Jobs is recovering from a liver transplant and pneumonia. At one point the pulmonologist tries to put a mask over his face when he is deeply sedated. Jobs rips it off and mumbles that he hates the design and refuses to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he orders them to bring five different options for the mask so that he can pick a design he likes. Even in the depths of his hallucinations, Jobs was a control-freak and a rude sod to boot. Imagine what he was like in the pink of health. As it happens, you don't need to: every discoverable fact about how Jobs, ahem, coaxed excellence from his co-workers is here.

As Isaacson makes clear, Jobs wasn't a visionary or even a particularly talented electronic engineer. But he was a businessman of astonishing flair and focus, a marketing genius, and – when he was getting it right, which wasn't always – had an intuitive sense of what the customer would want before the customer had any idea. He was obsessed with the products, rather than with the money: happily, as he discovered, if you get the products right, the money will come.

Isaacson's book is studded with moments that make you go "wow". There's the Apple flotation, which made the 25-year-old Jobs $256m in the days when that was a lot of money. There's his turnaround of the company after he returned as CEO in 1997: in the previous fiscal year the company lost $1.04bn, but he returned it to profit in his first quarter. There's the launch of the iTunes store : expected to sell a million songs in six months, it sold a million songs in six days.

When Jobs died , iShrines popped up all over the place, personal tributes filled Facebook and his quotable wisdom – management-consultant banalities, for the most part – was passed from inbox to inbox. This biography – commissioned by Jobs and informed by hours and hours of interviews with him – is designed to serve the cult. That's by no means to say that it's a snow-job: Isaacson is all over Jobs's personal shortcomings and occasional business bungles, and Jobs sought no copy approval (though, typically, he got worked up over the cover design).

But its sheer bulk bespeaks a sort of reverence, and it's clear from the way it's put together that there's not much Jobs did that Isaacson doesn't regard as vital to the historical record. We get a whole chapter on one cheesy ad ("Think Different"). We get half a page on how Jobs went about choosing a washing machine – itself lifted from an interview Jobs, bizarrely, gave on the subject to Wired . Want to know the patent number for the box an iPod Nano comes in? It's right there on page 347. Similarly, the empty vocabulary of corporate PR sometimes seeps into Isaacson's prose, as exemplified by the recurrence of the word "passion". There's a lot of passion in this book. Steve's "passion for perfection", "passion for industrial design", "passion for awesome products" and so on. If I'd been reading this on an iPad, the temptation to search-and-replace "passion" to "turnip" or "erection" would have been overwhelming.

Isaacson writes dutiful, lumbering American news-mag journalese and suffers – as did Jobs himself – from a lack of sense of proportion. Chapter headings evoke Icarus and Prometheus. The one on the Apple II is subtitled "Dawn of a New Age", the one on Jobs's return to Apple is called "The Second Coming", and when writing about the origins of Apple's graphical user interface ( Jobs pinched the idea from Xerox ), Isaacson writes with splendid bathos: "There falls a [sic] shadow, as TS Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation."

But get past all that pomp and there's much to enjoy. Did you know that the Apple Macintosh was nearly called the Apple Bicycle? Or that so obsessed was Jobs with designing swanky-looking factories (white walls, brightly coloured machines) that he kept breaking the machines by painting them – for example bright blue?

As well as being a sort-of-genius, Jobs was a truly weird man. As a young man, he was once put on the night-shift so co-workers wouldn't have to endure his BO. (Jobs was convinced his vegan diet meant he didn't need to wear deodorant or shower more than once a week.) He was perpetually shedding his shoes, and sometimes, to relieve stress, soaked his feet in the toilet. His on-off veganism was allied to cranky theories about health. When he rebuked the chairman of Lotus Software for spreading butter on his toast ("Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?"), the man responded: "I'll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your personality."

That personality. An ex-girlfriend – and one, it should be said, who was very fond of him – told Isaacson that she thought Jobs suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. Jobs's personal life is sketchily covered, but what details there are don't charm. When he got an on/off girlfriend pregnant in his early 20s, he cut her off and aggressively denied paternity – though he later, uncharacteristically, admitted regretting his behaviour and sought to build a relationship with his daughter. (Jobs himself was adopted, and seems to have had what Americans call "issues around abandonment".)

He cheated his friends out of money. He cut old colleagues out of stock options. He fired people with peremptoriness. He bullied waiters, insulted business contacts and humiliated interviewees for jobs. He lied his pants off whenever it suited him – "reality distortion field" is Isaacson's preferred phrase. Like many bullies, he was also a cry-baby. Whenever he was thwarted – not being made "Man of the Year" by Time magazine when he was 27, for instance – he burst into tears.

As for critiquing the work of others, Jobs's analytical style was forthright: "too gay" (rabbit icon on desktop); "a shithead who sucks" (colleague Jef Raskin); "fucking dickless assholes" (his suppliers); "a dick" (the head of Sony music); "brain-dead" (mobile phones not made by Apple).

Nowadays we are taught that being nice is the way to get on. Steve Jobs is a fine counter-example. In 2008, when Fortune magazine was on the point of running a damaging article about him, Jobs summoned their managing editor to Cupertino to demand he spike the piece: "He leaned into Serwer's face and asked, 'So, you've uncovered the fact that I'm an asshole. Why is that news?'"

Sam Leith's You Talkin' to Me? is published by Profile Books.

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Books of The Times

Making the iBio for Apple’s Genius

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By Janet Maslin

• Oct. 21, 2011

After Steve Jobs anointed Walter Isaacson as his authorized biographer in 2009, he took Mr. Isaacson to see the Mountain View, Calif., house in which he had lived as a boy. He pointed out its “clean design” and “awesome little features.” He praised the developer, Joseph Eichler, who built more than 11,000 homes in California subdivisions, for making an affordable product on a mass-market scale. And he showed Mr. Isaacson the stockade fence built 50 years earlier by his father, Paul Jobs.

“He loved doing things right,” Mr. Jobs said. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

Mr. Jobs, the brilliant and protean creator whose inventions so utterly transformed the allure of technology, turned those childhood lessons into an all-purpose theory of intelligent design. He gave Mr. Isaacson a chance to play by the same rules. His story calls for a book that is clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio. Mr. Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” does its solid best to hit that target.

As a biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin , Mr. Isaacson knows how to explicate and celebrate genius: revered, long-dead genius. But he wrote “Steve Jobs” as its subject was mortally ill, and that is a more painful and delicate challenge. (He had access to members of the Jobs family at a difficult time.) Mr. Jobs promised not to look over Mr. Isaacson’s shoulder, and not to meddle with anything but the book’s cover. (Boy, does it look great.) And he expressed approval that the book would not be entirely flattering. But his legacy was at stake. And there were awkward questions to be asked. At the end of the volume, Mr. Jobs answers the question “What drove me?” by discussing himself in the past tense.

Mr. Isaacson treats “Steve Jobs” as the biography of record, which means that it is a strange book to read so soon after its subject’s death. Some of it is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint. Mr. Jobs’s first job was at Atari, and it involved the game Pong. (“If you’re under 30, ask your parents,” Mr. Isaacson writes.) Some, like an account of the release of the iPad 2, is so recent that it is hard to appreciate yet, even if Mr. Isaacson says the device comes to life “like the face of a tickled baby.” 

And some is definitely intended for future generations. “Indeed,” Mr. Isaacson writes, “its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of delightful activities.” One that he mentions, which will be as quaint as Pong some day, features the use of a slingshot to launch angry birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses.

So “Steve Jobs,” an account of its subject’s 56 years (he died on Oct. 5), must reach across time in more ways than one. And it does, in a well-ordered, if not streamlined, fashion. It begins with a portrait of the young Mr. Jobs, rebellious toward the parents who raised him and scornful of the ones who gave him up for adoption. (“They were my sperm and egg bank,” he says.)

Although Mr. Isaacson is not analytical about his subject’s volatile personality (the word “obnoxious” figures in the book frequently), he raises the question of whether feelings of abandonment in childhood made him fanatically controlling and manipulative as an adult. Fortunately, that glib question stays unanswered.

Mr. Jobs, who founded Apple with Stephen Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, began his career as a seemingly contradictory blend of hippie truth seeker and tech-savvy hothead.

“His Zen awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind or interpersonal mellowness,” Mr. Isaacson says. “He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed,” he also writes. But Mr. Jobs valued simplicity, utility and beauty in ways that would shape his creative imagination. And the book maintains that those goals would not have been achievable in the great parade of Apple creations without that mean streak.

Mr. Isaacson takes his readers back to the time when laptops, desktops and windows were metaphors, not everyday realities. His book ticks off how each of the Apple innovations that we now take for granted first occurred to Mr. Jobs or his creative team. “Steve Jobs” means to be the authoritative book about those achievements, and it also follows Mr. Jobs into the wilderness (and to NeXT and Pixar) after his first stint at Apple, which ended in 1985.

With an avid interest in corporate intrigue, it skewers Mr. Jobs’s rivals, like John Sculley, who was recruited in 1983 to be Apple’s chief executive and fell for Mr. Jobs’s deceptive show of friendship. “They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display,” Mr. Isaacson writes.

Of course the book also tracks Mr. Jobs’s long and combative rivalry with Bill Gates. The section devoted to Mr. Jobs’s illness, which suggests that his cancer might have been more treatable had he not resisted early surgery, describes the relative tenderness of their last meeting.

“Steve Jobs” greatly admires its subject. But its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering. Here is an encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it deserves.

Mr. Jobs’s virtual reinvention of the music business with iTunes and the iPod, for instance, is made to seem all the more miraculous (“He’s got a turn-key solution,” the music executive Jimmy Iovine said.) Mr. Isaacson’s long view basically puts Mr. Jobs up there with Franklin and Einstein, even if a tiny MP3 player is not quite the theory of relativity. The book emphasizes how deceptively effortless Mr. Jobs’s ideas now seem because of their extreme intuitiveness and foresight. When Mr. Jobs, who personally persuaded musician after musician to accept the iTunes model, approached Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Marsalis was rightly more impressed with Mr. Jobs than with the device he was being shown.

Mr. Jobs’s love of music plays a big role in “Steve Jobs,” like his extreme obsession with Bob Dylan. (Like Mr. Dylan, he had a romance with Joan Baez. Her version of Mr. Dylan’s “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” was on Mr. Jobs’s own iPod.) So does his extraordinary way of perceiving ordinary things, like well-made knives and kitchen appliances. That he admired the Cuisinart food processor he saw at Macy’s may sound trivial, but his subsequent idea that a molded plastic covering might work well on a computer does not. Years from now, the research trip to a jelly bean factory to study potential colors for the iMac case will not seem as silly as it might now.

Skeptic after skeptic made the mistake of underrating Steve Jobs, and Mr. Isaacson records the howlers who misjudged an unrivaled career. “Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” Business Week wrote in a 2001 headline. “The iPod will likely become a niche product,” a Harvard Business School professor said. “High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product,” Mr. Sculley said in 1987.

Mr. Jobs got the last laugh every time. “Steve Jobs” makes it all the sadder that his last laugh is over.

By Walter Isaacson

Illustrated. 630 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.

The Books of The Times review on Saturday, about “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson, described Angry Birds, a popular iPhone game, incorrectly. Slingshots are used to launch birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses, not to shoot down the birds.

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Steve Jobs Biography Examines How Rule-Breaker Tied ‘Artistry to Engineering’

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/isaacson-jobs-broke-the-rules-but-linked-artistry-to-engineering

Author Walter Isaacson, longtime journalist and author, tells the story of Apple co-founder and inventor Steve Jobs in a new biography titled “Steve Jobs.” Jeffrey Brown and Isaacson discuss the life and work of the technology giant.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

JEFFREY BROWN:

When Steve Jobs died earlier this month of pancreatic cancer, he was lionized as one of the era's greatest innovators, a man of enormous influence who co-founded Apple in his 20s, and whose products and designs revolutionized personal computing, cell phones, the music business, film animation, tablet computing, digital publishing and more.

The story of the man himself is now told in a new biography titled simply "Steve Jobs." Its author is Walter Isaacson, longtime journalist and author of previous biographies on Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, and joins me now.

Welcome to you.

WALTER ISAACSON, "Steve Jobs": Good to be here again.

You write at the end — I'm going to start at the end of the book, because it's kind of interesting to go to what — the thing you say near the end.

WALTER ISAACSON:

Most people never get there.

You say: "Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius."

Now, what does that mean?

That means that he could connect creativity to problems. He wasn't just an analytic thinker.

He told me that when he came back from India, where he went as a dropout from college to seek enlightenment, he learned the power of intuition. And I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different. And so that intuition, where you can make these creative, imaginative leaps. That was his particular strength, was tying that artistry to engineering.

When you go back to the story to see where all this came from, he was adopted, right? And there's — a number of people tell you about how that somehow shaped his character, the sense of abandonment. He, though, said to you — he insisted, no. He felt special.

He said no.

Yes, he said his parents, the people that adopted him, his real parents, said, you were chosen, you were special. And he looked at himself that way. But he also looked upon his life as a journey and that journey was always to find himself, seek enlightenment, understand how he fit in.

And I think he felt he didn't fit in, in the normal way because he was put in a place where he wasn't born, and he felt, OK, I have to sort of be part of that journey. He always loved to use the maxim that Buddhist phrase of the journey is the reward.

And I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably.

But he studied Zen, but didn't have a Zen calm, right?

He sought, but he — and he had this feeling of being special, but it had a negative side, too. I don't have to play by the rules. I can get around people. And he was mean to people.

Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car. But he also does it in other ways, which is to say, no, we're going to do the impossible. And he makes people do that.

Yes, the arc of the narrative of the book is a guy who can be pretty rough and mean on people, but, by the end, by the end of his career, he has proven that they can do the impossible, and he has gathered probably the most loyal team of eight players of any business in America.

Now, what explains that?

Well, he was inspiring.

He's inspiring.

And you describe a certain — there's a charisma.

Not only a charisma, but if you are tough on people and you say brutal honesty is the price of admission to this room, and then you push them through your magical thinking to do things they thought were impossible, that creates a team loyalty.

And I think if you just look at, oh, he used to occasionally snap at people, I — that — this is the narrative of the book.

We talk so much about the enormous success and impact. But maybe take us to a moment that — where that wasn't apparent, right? There was failure, when he was pushed out of his own company and things didn't look very good for him.

That's certainly part of the narrative, which is he creates an insanely great machine, as he calls it, the Macintosh.

It's not — it doesn't do all that well by 1985 in the marketplace. And his personality and that of the much smoother John Sculley, who is a very polite, gentle soul, clash, and in the end, he gets ousted from the company he creates. It's almost like a Shakespearian drama.

But the real failure and success comes in the period people don't know much about, when he's running NeXT Computers, and he's indulging all of his artistic instincts. He wants the angle to be exactly 90 degrees, even though it's harder to mold a machine like that. He wants it to be a perfect cube. He wants it to have the greatest logo. So he indulges every artistic instinct, and he hasn't yet learned, how do you tie art to sort of engineering and common sense so that he can make a product that can work in the marketplace?

So it's kind of a glorious market failure.

Well, use — that word failure, was there a moment where he sensed he might fail, where he feared failure?

I think that he was upset because he was running Pixar and NeXT, and both were hemorrhaging money.

Now, what he ends up doing is creating a great operating system at NeXT that Apple then has to buy, because once he has left Apple, the people running the firm after a while can't even create a new operating system. So they end up having to buy NeXT for the UNIX-based kernel of the operating system, and they get Steve back.

Likewise, Pixar, it's computers were a little bit overdeveloped, the rendering computers that make 3-D graphics, but there was a guy there who was making beautiful animated shorts to show how the machines worked. Steve loved that artistry, and eventually Pixar becomes an animated digital movie company.

Famous for this sense, the commitment, a maniacal sense of design, right?

Oh, absolutely.

And yet what you describe here — and it's even — you sort of see it on the cover here — this sense of almost designing himself, I mean, studying his own stare, for example.

Did you come to think of him that way?

Yes. He loved to be the maestro at product presentations. He invented many, many things, but one of the things he invented was this amazing unveiling of products, where the heavens part and the lights shine down and the choir sings hallelujah, and suddenly there's an iPod in his pocket or a Macintosh speaking on stage.

And that was part of his showmanship. But the showmanship was able to connect products to us emotionally, just as the design of the product was. So I think it was all part and parcel of his success.

Do you think there is a sense — I mean, after all, we're talking about products, right? Is there a sense of — a danger, in a sense, of over glorifying the man? I mean, I was thinking, you wrote a biography of Einstein.

Yes, right.

Theory of relativity.

Now, the iPod is not the theory of relativity.

Right. Right.

And Steve is a genius, but not in the same quantum orbit as Einstein.

And, yes, if we're so much making fetishes of our little iPods and iPhones, it's probably not the best thing.

But it's a lot better than making heroes out of people creating complex financial instruments that are causing the housing market to collapse or Greece to default. At least he's creating products that combined art and technology to make something that we really want and are useful. And having 1,000 songs in your pocket, that's not the worst thing in the world, you know? It's kind of nice.

What about your — I want to ask you about your experiences as a biographer in this case that we mentioned in Einstein.

You have written books about people — well, several of them, at least, were long dead. Here, you were working with a man who was in the process of dying before your eyes. Did that change how you worked, what you wrote?

Yes. Well, yes.

I actually — because I was caught up in his magical thinking and his optimism, I thought he was going to stay a step ahead of the cancer. I mean, he always had new drugs. Every time the cancer sort of mutated around a particular drug he was using, they would find a new targeted therapy.

And so, in our last long meeting together, he said: "I won't read the book right away because I know there will be parts I won't like, and I don't want to get mad at you, but I will read it in a year."

So, I was actually writing a book not only of somebody who was wrestling with possible death, but also somebody I thought might be reading the book a year from now. So it was emotionally draining, yes.

And, finally, the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, you mentioned that earlier, but that's one that grabbed me.

Edwin Land, when he was starting out, the guy who started Polaroid, said the place to stand is the intersection of the humanities and technology.

We tend to have a binary…

And we do in this day and age, which is why I like writing about Ben Franklin and Einstein, because these are people who combined a love of science and a love of the humanities. This is what you get in Steve Jobs as well.

And that sort of explains to me a whole lot of it, that part of his mind that was artistic and poetic and that part of his mind that was a businessman and an engineer. In many people, that doesn't come together, especially in a lot of great technologists. They don't have the feel for art, but Steve did.

All right. Walter Isaacson's new book is called "Steve Jobs."

Thanks so much.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

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Awards & Accolades

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by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2011

Jobs was an American original, and Isaacson's impeccably researched, vibrant biography—fully endorsed by his subject—does...

An unforgettable tale of a one-of-a-kind visionary.

With a unique ability to meld arts and technology and an uncanny understanding of consumers' desires, Apple founder Steve Jobs (1955–2011) played a major role in transforming not just computer technology, but a variety of industries. When Jobs died earlier this month, the outpouring of emotion from the general public was surprisingly intense. His creations, which he knew we wanted before we did, were more than mere tools; everything from the iPod to the MacBook Pro touched us on a gut level and became an integral part of our lives. This was why those of us who were hip to Steve Jobs the Inventor were so moved when he passed. However, those who had an in-depth knowledge of Steve Jobs the Businessman might not have taken such a nostalgic view of his life. According to acclaimed biographer and Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson ( American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and a Heroes of a Hurricane , 2009, etc.) in this consistently engaging, warts-and-all biography, Jobs was not necessarily the most pleasant boss. We learn about Jobs' predilection for humiliating his co-workers into their best performances; his habit of profanely dismissing an underling's idea, only to claim it as his own later; and his ability to manipulate a situation with an evangelical, fact-mangling technique that friends and foes alike referred to as his "reality distortion field." But we also learn how—through his alternative education, his pilgrimage to India, a heap of acid trips and a fateful meeting with engineering genius Steve Wozniak—Jobs became Jobs and Apple became Apple. Though the narrative could have used a tighter edit in a few places, Isaacson's portrait of this complex, often unlikable genius is, to quote Jobs, insanely great.

Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4516-4853-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | BUSINESS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Walter Isaacson

by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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Biography of Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers

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Apple Corporation

Disney pixar, expanding apple.

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955–October 5, 2011) is best remembered as the co-founder of Apple Computers . He teamed up with inventor  Steve Wozniak to create one of the first ready-made PCs. Besides his legacy with Apple, Jobs was also a smart businessman who became a multimillionaire before the age of 30. In 1984, he founded NeXT computers. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. and started Pixar Animation Studios.

Fast Facts: Steve Jobs

• Known For : Co-founding Apple Computer Company and playing a pioneering role in the development of personal computing
• Also Known As : Steven Paul Jobs
• Born : February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California
• Parents : Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble (biological parents); Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian (adoptive parents)
• Died : October 5, 2011 in Palo Alto, California
• Education : Reed College
• Awards and Honors : National Medal of Technology (with Steve Wozniak), Jefferson Award for Public Service, named the most powerful person in business by Fortune  magazine, Inducted into the California Hall of Fame, inducted as a Disney Legend
• Spouse : Laurene Powell
• Children : Lisa (by Chrisann Brennan), Reed, Erin, Eve
• Notable Quote : "Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form."

Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. The biological child of Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, he was later adopted by Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian. During his high school years, Jobs worked summers at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he first met and became partners with Steve Wozniak.

As an undergraduate, he studied physics, literature, and poetry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Formally, he only attended one semester there. However, he remained at Reed and crashed on friends' sofas and audited courses that included a calligraphy class, which he attributes as being the reason Apple computers had such elegant typefaces.

After leaving Oregon in 1974 to return to California, Jobs started working for Atari , an early pioneer in the manufacturing of personal computers. Jobs' close friend Wozniak was also working for Atari. The future founders of Apple teamed up to design games for Atari computers.

Jobs and Wozniak proved their skills as hackers by designing a telephone blue box. A blue box was an electronic device that simulated a telephone operator's dialing console and provided the user with free phone calls. Jobs spent plenty of time at Wozniak's Homebrew Computer Club, a haven for computer geeks and a source of invaluable information about the field of personal computers.

Out of Mom and Pop's Garage

By the late 1970s, Jobs and Wozniak had learned enough to try their hand at building personal computers. Using Jobs' family garage as a base of operation, the team produced 50 fully assembled computers that were sold to a local Mountain View electronics store called the Byte Shop. The sale encouraged the pair to start Apple Computer, Inc. on April 1, 1979.

The Apple Corporation was named after Jobs' favorite fruit. The Apple logo was a representation of the fruit with a bite taken out of it. The bite represented a play on words: bite and byte.

Jobs co-invented the  Apple I  and Apple II computers together with Wozniak, who was the main designer, and others. The Apple II is considered to be one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers. In 1984, Wozniak, Jobs, and others co-invented the  Apple Macintosh  computer, the first successful home computer with a mouse-driven graphical user interface. It was, however, based on (or, according to some sources, stolen from) the Xerox Alto, a concept machine built at the Xerox PARC research facility. According to the Computer History Museum, the Alto included:

A mouse. Removable data storage. Networking. A visual user interface. Easy-to-use graphics software. “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) printing, with printed documents matching what users saw on screen. E-mail. Alto for the first time combined these and other now-familiar elements in one small computer.

During the early 1980s, Jobs controlled the business side of the Apple Corporation. Steve Wozniak was in charge of the design side. However, a power struggle with the board of directors led to Jobs leaving Apple in 1985.

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, a high-end computer company. Ironically, Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and Jobs returned to his old company to serve once more as its CEO from 1997 until his retirement in 2011.

The NeXT was an impressive workstation computer that sold poorly. The world's first web browser was created on a NeXT, and the technology in NeXT software was transferred to the Macintosh and the iPhone .

In 1986, Jobs bought "The Graphics Group" from Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for $10 million. The company was later renamed Pixar. At first, Jobs intended for Pixar to become a high-end graphics hardware developer, but that goal was never met. Pixar moved on to do what it now does best, which is make animated films. Jobs negotiated a deal to allow Pixar and Disney to collaborate on a number of animated projects that included the film "Toy Story." In 2006, Disney bought Pixar from Jobs.

After Jobs returned to Apple as its CEO in 1997, Apple Computers had a renaissance in product development with the iMac, iPod , iPhone, iPad, and more.

Before his death, Jobs was listed as the inventor and/or co-inventor on 342 United States patents, with technologies ranging from computer and portable devices to user interfaces, speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards, and packages. His last patent was issued for the Mac OS X Dock user interface and was granted the day before his death.

Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, on October 5, 2011. He had been ill for a long time with pancreatic cancer, which he had treated using alternative techniques. His family reported that his final words were, "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

Steve Jobs was a true computer pioneer and entrepreneur whose impact is felt in almost every aspect of contemporary business, communication, and design. Jobs was absolutely dedicated to every detail of his products—according to some sources, he was obsessive—but the outcome can be seen in the sleek, user-friendly, future-facing designs of Apple products from the very start. It was Apple that placed the PC on every desk, provided digital tools for design and creativity, and pushed forward the ubiquitous smartphone which has, arguably, changed the ways in which humans think, create, and interact.

• Computer History Museum. " What Was The First PC? "
• Gladwell, Malcolm, and Malcolm Gladwell. “ The Real Genius of Steve Jobs .”  The New Yorker , 19 June 2017.
• Levy, Steven. “ Steve Jobs .”  Encyclopædia Britannica , 20 Feb. 2019.
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Key excerpts from Steve Jobs' biography

A new biography of late Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs hit book-shelves on Monday, offering arguably the most comprehensive, insightful look to date at the life and times of the revered technology visionary.

Below are excerpts from the tome, penned by Walter Isaacson, relating to Apple and Jobs' sometimes stormy, often difficult relationship with Silicon Valley, partners and rivals, and how Jobs communicated his key business beliefs.

JOBS' RESIGNATION AS CEO:

Jobs was wheeled into a board meeting on August 24, 2011, the day he handed Apple's reins to Tim Cook.

As Jobs' health deteriorated, he wrestled with the decision for weeks, discussing it with his wife, board member Bill Campbell, design chief Jonathan Ive and attorney George Riley.

When he finally made up his mind, arrangements were made to have him driven to 1 Infinite Loop and wheeled into the boardroom as secretly as possible.

"One of the things I wanted to do for Apple was to set an example of how do you transfer power right," Jobs told Isaacson. He added later that evening that his hope was to remain as active as his health allowed.

MAKING AN ENEMY OUT OF GOOGLE INC:

Isaacson's account of Jobs' blow-up over Google's entry into the smartphone market underscores the subsequent animosity he bore toward one-time Apple board member Eric Schmidt.

Jobs felt betrayed because Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had treated him very much as a mentor. In 2008, he got into a shouting match with the pair, as well as with Android chief Andy Rubin, at Google's headquarters.

Jobs had offered Google an icon or two on the iPhone's home page; but in January 2010, HTC released a phone with multi-touch and other iPhone-like features that prompted Jobs to sue.

"Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.' Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this," Jobs told Isaacson the week after the suit was filed.

"They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products -- Android, Google Docs -- are shit."

Schmidt met with Jobs for coffee days later, but Jobs remained enraged and nothing was resolved.

"We've got you red-handed," Jobs told Schmidt. "I'm not interested in settling. I don't want your money, If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android."

ON APPLE'S INTEGRATED APPROACH:

Jobs' infuriation stemmed partly from a fundamental conflict between Android's open-source approach and his own belief in a closed, carefully controlled ecosystem.

"We do these things not because we are control freaks," he said.

Addressing users' concerns, he said: "They are busy doing whatever it is they do best, and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices."

"Look at the results -- Android's a mess .... We do it not to make money. We do it because we want to make great products, not crap like Android."

FLASH TIRADE GOT PERSONAL

Jobs' well-known tirade against Adobe Systems Inc's Flash multimedia software may have had its roots in the 1980s. Apple had invested in Adobe in 1985 and they collaborated to popularize desktop publishing.

But in 1999, Jobs -- after returning to Apple -- had asked Adobe to make its video-editing software available for the new iMac but the company refused, focusing instead on Microsoft Windows. Soon after, founder John Warnock retired.

"I helped put Adobe on the map," Jobs told Isaacson. "The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left. He was the inventor, the person I related to. It's been a bunch of suits since then, and the company has turned out crap."

APPLE'S CONTROL OVER APPS, AND CENSORSHIP

Isaacson describes an exchange with Ryan Tate, editor of the tech gossip site Valleywag, that offers glimpses into Jobs' steadfast belief in carefully curating the types of applications available for downloading on the iPhone.

Tate emailed Jobs decrying Apple's heavy-handedness and asked: "If (Bob) Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company .... Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution'? Revolutions are about freedom."

According to Tate, Jobs replied after midnight: "Yep ... freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is."

When Tate mentioned pornography was just fine with him and his wife, Jobs got snarky. "You might care about porn when you have kids. ... By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others' work and belittle their motivations."

Tate told Isaacson he was impressed by Jobs' willingness to spar one-on-one with bloggers and customers.

ANTENNAGATE ... AND REED

"Antennagate" -- a faulty iPhone 4 antenna design that caused occasional dropped calls -- received a mountain of publicity, and Jobs came out publicly to acknowledge the mistake and announce a fix. But one little-known incident came to light in Isaacson's book.

Jobs, alerted to the possible defect while in Hawaii, first became defensive, then anguished in a conversation with director Art Levinson. Jobs brushed him off. But where Levinson failed, then-COO Tim Cook prevailed -- by quoting someone as saying Apple was becoming the new Microsoft.