Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

by Daniel Lyons

  Also here under protest is Lars Aki, our head of design, who is wearing a wet suit and little rubber booties to remind everyone that he’s supposed to be kite-boarding right now. He’s sitting in an Eames chair with his leather-bound sketch pad, looking out the window at the trees bending in the wind and no doubt thinking how awesome the chop is up on the bay today and getting more and more bummed out.

  Will MacKenzie, who’s on the board because he’s my pal, jumps in and says he agrees with me that we shouldn’t let this options business become too big a distraction to our product development. Some other guy who’s on the board and whose name I can never remember—he’s about ninety years old, and runs a clothing company, or a chain of clothing stores, something like that—says he agrees with Will MacKenzie.

  Al Gore, who’s joining by videoconference using our incredible iChat AV software, pipes up and says in his stupid drawl, “Say, if you folks don’t mind, I’d like to talk a little bit about what Apple can do regarding this climate change crisis that we’re facing.”

  “Request denied,” Tom says.

  “What’s that?” Gore says. “I’m sorry, I missed that.”

  Tom mutes the computer with Gore’s face on it and turns his attention to Zack Johnson, the only member of the board who hasn’t spoken yet. Zack was our CFO when this accounting stuff took place. He left last year to run a hedge fund, but I kept him on our board because he always does whatever I tell him.

  “Zack,” Tom says, “I expect you’ll get involved here, and work with Paul Doezen and help him find any information that’s needed. And Sonya, I’d like you to make sure that Charlie and his team get all the support they need.”

  That’s when Sonya drops the bombshell. “Actually,” she says, standing up, “since the company has gone against my recommendation and decided to retain outside counsel, I’m going to resign. Effective immediately.”

  She slides a letter across the table. Tom looks at the letter.

  “You can’t quit in the middle of an SEC investigation,” he says.

  Sonya doesn’t bother to respond. She looks at Sampson and says, “If you need anything from me you can call my lawyer.”

  “You’ve hired a fucking lawyer?” Tom says. He looks like smoke is going to start pouring out of his ears. “Where do you think you’re going? Sit back down, lady. Did you hear me?”

  Sonya walks out. After that the meeting breaks up. I’m halfway out the door, hoping to catch the end of the Ultimate game, when Tom grabs my arm, tight enough that it hurts, and says, “Hold on. I need to talk to you.”

  “Kid,” he says, in a low voice, “it’s just you and me here now, okay? So I need you to tell me the truth. People get greedy. It happens. It’s human nature. These guys, Charlie Sampson and his guys, they’re good. If there’s a problem, they’re going to find it. So tell me. Are they going to find something?”

  We’re in the conference room, alone, with the door shut. He’s leaning close to me. I can smell his Old Spice, which makes me queasy.

  “This company,” I say, “operates under the highest standards of integrity and honesty and transparency. These have been our principles from day one.”

  “Jesus. It’s worse than I thought. Fuck.” He slugs down the end of his coffee. “Kid, you do understand what it means when your general counsel quits and hires her own lawyer, right?”

  I inform Tom that earlier in the week I instructed Sonya to fire herself, so it could be that she was just following my orders.

  He makes this sound that’s halfway between a groan and a sigh. He tells me he’s done some asking around and discovered that the guys who are really running this investigation are way above Doyle; it’s all coming out of Washington. “This goes right to the top,” he says. “These people want your head on a platter.”

  I ask him what people he’s talking about. He says he’ll answer my question with a couple of questions of his own, which are: (a) which political party do I make a big deal of supporting every four years during the presidential elections? and (b) which political party actually won the last two elections?

  Fair enough. The fascists in Washington hate me because I’m a super liberal lefty Democrat. It drives them nuts because, unlike the big oil companies, out here in Silicon Valley guys like me manage to make a lot of money without resorting to being evil and exploiting people.

  “The problem,” Tom says, “is that you gave them an opening. You see? These guys hate you, and you gave them something to attack you with. It’s like when Clinton got the blowjobs.”

  “I didn’t get any friggin blowjobs. Jesus. I wish.”

  “I’m speaking metaphorically,” he says.

  Tom says that when you know you’re in the public eye you’ve got to be a total friggin Boy Scout. This applies not only to blowjobs but to compensation and accounting. He says it’s one thing to be a really highly paid executive, and another to be the kind of creep who cooks the books in order to get a little bit more than he’s supposed to.

  “There’s an old expression where I grew up,” he says. “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Ever heard that?”

  “Dude, I grew up in California, okay? Not on some friggin pig farm.”

  He makes that groaning sound again, and heads for the door.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he says.

  On the bright side, I arrive in time to catch the end of the Ultimate game, and we totally beat the snot out of some chiptards from AMD.

  People often ask me how I feel about drugs. My stance on this is a little bit controversial. I like drugs. I think they’re good. Fair enough, not heroin. And not cocaine or crack or crystal meth. But soft drugs, like marijuana and hashish, and the psychedelics, like LSD and peyote, I think are really beneficial both on an individual level and a cultural level. Frankly, I think marijuana is what got us out of Vietnam. In my own life, drugs have played a huge role not only in helping me relax and unwind and have a good time, but also in being able to open up my creativity and see things in a new way. Without marijuana, I can almost guarantee you, there would have been no Apple Computer. Certainly there would have been no Macintosh.

  As I see it the problem began with Nancy Reagan and her “Just Say No” campaign. Yes, it was stupid. But it worked. They’ve succeeded in scaring an entire generation away from drugs. You should see the kids who come through Apple for interviews. Ask them if they’ve ever done acid and they give you this look like you just asked them how many times they’ve been abducted by aliens. This shunning of drugs has produced a generation of conformists. Look at all these new companies in the Bay Area, all these supposed “tech” companies. God knows what they do, but it’s all some variation on the same theme and they all have names like Zizzl and Drizzl and Dazzl, so you can’t tell them apart. Can’t these kids think of anything original? Apparently not. My theory is it’s because they’ve never used psychedelics.

  Thank you, Nancy Reagan. Thank you, Christian Right zealots. You’ve ruined an entire generation. These kids grew up with parents who were terrified to let them go outside and play without being supervised. Then they got to school and got hit with the AIDS education stuff, and I know it’s important to teach kids to fuck safely, but come on. Let’s be honest. They’re really using this to scare kids about sex itself. And it’s worked wonders. It’s very effective. These kids are terrified—of drugs, of sex, of each other.

  Kids, I’m sorry, but the truth is, a few evenings spent sleeping with strangers and tripping your brains out on peyote or some really clean blotter acid would be the best thing that could ever happen to you. Forget trying to get a job at Google or trying to raise venture funding for some startup. Go down to the Mission and score some weed. Buy yourself a bong, and fire it up. Then go think of an idea for a company.

  Which is all a long way of saying that the first thing I do when I get home from the Ultimate Frisbee game is go upstairs to my office, put on some Leonard Cohen and fire up a bowl of some fine reddish buds. It’s mellow stuff, se
venties-style weed, not this whacked out paranoia-inducing hydroponic stuff that they grow today, this stuff that makes you want to crawl under your bed and hide. I have my weed grown specially for me by a guy up in Oregon who knows how to keep the THC content low. Really, really nice stuff.

  I’m just feeling a glow when the phone rings and it’s Larry Ellison telling me to turn on the TV, which in my case is an incredibly huge super-high-resolution plasma display which won’t hit the market for another two years.

  There on CNN is Jeff Hernandez, a friend of ours, being perp-walked out of his house in Woodside by federal agents. The whole thing is being filmed from a helicopter. I can’t believe it.

  Jeff is the CEO of Braid Networks. He has a wife and four kids. He goes to church.

  The dick from Fox says Jeff is being charged with twelve counts of fraud.

  “They’re rounding up some others too,” Larry says. “His CFO, his general counsel, couple of board members. All this over some paperwork. Couple of accounting mistakes. Buddy, this is worse than I realized. This is some bad shit, brother.”

  After we hang up I turn off the TV and go out to the backyard. I try to do some T’ai Chi, but my legs are shaking so badly that I can’t hold a position.

  Okay, so I’m scared. I know what you’re thinking, but no, it’s not the butt rape. Not because I’m a huge fan of being butt-raped. But the butt rape, I am pretty sure, takes place mostly in your more hardcore Oz-type penitentiaries where you get the truly criminal gang-type people. Not to be biased against any certain ethnic or socioeconomic groups, because I am a very serious Buddhist and not at all a racist or a bigot of any kind, and as you know if you’ve seen our ads we are all about using people of color to sell products, so it’s not at all that I think white people are better or anything. But let’s face it, if you put a bunch of rich white businessmen on some minimum security prison farm, they’re not going to butt-rape each other. They’ll wait till they get out and do it to each other metaphorically, like they always have.

  What really scares me is being tossed out of my company. This happened to me once before, back in the eighties. Apple hit a rough patch, and they blamed all the problems on me. Getting fired nearly killed me. I literally thought I was going to die.

  My shrink says it’s because I’m an orphan. He says that being rejected by my birth mother inflicted damage on my soul.

  “It carved this pit into you,” he says, “this giant hole that you can never fill, no matter how much you accomplish. You need to prove to your birth mother that she made a mistake when she gave you away. So you work and you work and you work. You never stop. But no matter what you achieve, it’s never enough to fill that hole. And yet you can’t stop, either. Because if you do, you die. That’s how it feels. You’ll cease to exist. You’ll be nothing. Nobody. You’ll be that little boy, hiding under the bed, the day you learned you were adopted and you wished you could become invisible. If you lose your job, your birth mother wins, and you lose. She was right, and you were wrong. She was right to give you away.”

  It seems to me that for two hundred and fifty bucks an hour the guy could go a little easier on me. But anyway, he’s right. That’s how it feels. Like I’ll die. It terrifies me.

  Yes, I survived the last time Apple threw me out. But this time, I’m not so sure. I’m fifty-one years old. I’ve had cancer. I’m not as tough as I used to be.

  And even the last time nearly killed me. I was thirty years old and living by myself in a mansion in Woodside with no furniture, just a huge stereo system and pillows on the floor. For months I did nothing. I’d take acid for days on end. The record was fourteen days, and believe me, that was a life-changing episode. But mostly it was this Keebler-Kahn type period in my life, with the eight stages of mourning, like anger, denial, anger again, then more anger, then rage, vindictiveness, more anger, and then revenge.

  That’s when the healing could really begin, once I’d set out to get revenge on these butt-munchers who’d tossed me out. I hired away Apple’s best engineers and started a company called NeXT whose goal was to create the most amazing computer in the world. We did it. But there was one problem: The machines cost ten thousand bucks each. Nevertheless, when Apple started tanking without me, and the board of directors came begging for me to return, I brought with me the software from those NeXT machines. That software became the foundation of our new Macintosh computers. It saved Apple.

  Since then I’ve bestowed upon the world other glorious devices and programs that restore a sense of childlike wonder to people’s lives. I invented the iPod, in all its incarnations, and the iTunes music store. I’ve created a hi-fi music system and a device for playing movies on your TV. Soon I will deliver the finest telephone ever created.

  What happens to the world if the Jobsmeister is suddenly taken out of the game? Let me give you a hint: Microsoft. Yeah. It’s scary.

  At midnight the phone rings and it’s Larry again and I can tell by his voice that he’s even more baked than I am. He says six executives from Braid were picked up, plus two venture-fund guys who sit on the board—Barry Lunger from Greylock and Peter Michelson from Menlo.

  “Those two I can see,” Larry says. “Pair of first-rate shitbags.”

  He pauses to do a bong hit. He’s got this incredible collection of bongs. He buys them on eBay. One is from the sixties and supposedly was used by Jerry Garcia.

  “So I was thinking,” Larry says, “of a way to take your mind off things.” He starts snickering like an idiot, the way he does when he’s stoned. “You ready? Are you? Okay. Two words: Rat Patrol.”

  I sigh. “Oh, man, come on. I’m working.”

  Which is a lie. I’m actually reading Siddhartha for the thousandth time. But whatever.

  “Steve, seriously. It’ll be awesome.”

  Rat Patrol is what Larry calls it when we drive his Hummer up to the city and cruise the Tenderloin in the middle of the night, wearing balaclavas and commando outfits and firing Super Soakers at transvestite hookers. You get points for how many you hit, with bonuses for letting them get as close as possible to the Hummer before you leap through the roof and open fire. We’ve done it a few times and I’ll admit, it’s pretty fun, especially when the trannies get all pissed off and start shouting and swearing. Larry aims for the face, and tries to blow their wigs off.

  We learned this game from Arnold. He and Charlie Sheen invented it in Los Angeles with a couple of other guys. They call it Commando. But we started calling it Rat Patrol because we were hanging out the back of Larry’s Hummer like the machine gunner in the old Rat Patrol TV show.

  How we heard about it is that one time Arnold was up in the Valley visiting T.J. Rodgers and the two of them took us along. Arnold uses paint guns instead of water cannons, which frankly I think is a little bit cruel, because those paint balls really sting when they hit you. The water cannons seem kinder.

  Anyway, Arnold says we’ve got carte blanche on this stuff, and even if we get arrested, he guarantees us a get-out-of-jail-free card. Which I must say is exactly the kind of classy move you’d expect from Arnold. As Larry likes to say: Yes, he’s Republican, but not a real Republican.

  “So are you in or are you in?” Larry says.

  I just sigh.

  “Babe,” he says, “I’m starting to worry about you.”

  Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by this weird, inexplicable urge to cry. Maybe it’s the pot. It makes me weepy sometimes. By the time we hang up there are tears in my eyes. I get up and look at myself in the mirror. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I keep mirrors everywhere. I’m looking at myself and thinking, Jobso, dude, what the hell is wrong with you? Remember who you are, okay, dude? Get a friggin grip.

  I go to the kitchen and call Breezeann, our house manager, at her boyfriend’s house and wake her up and have her come over

  and make me a mango smoothie. Even that doesn’t cheer me up. And that is scary. Because if a mango smoothie can’t cheer me up, I’m definitely in bad s
hape.

  On Sunday night I once again have my most frequent recurring dream—the one in which I’m receiving the Nobel Prize. But this time the dream has a twist. After they give me the prize I find myself out in the street, wearing a loincloth, carrying a cross. People are yelling at me, spitting at me. Then I’m up on the cross, and beside me is Bill Gates, who’s also being crucified. “You I can see,” I say. “But why me?” Gates laughs and says, “You’re being crucified because you stole all your best ideas from me.”

  I wake screaming. It’s dawn.

  This is my life. You can’t believe the stress. It’s tough to run any company, but it’s an order of magnitude more difficult when you’re in a field driven by creativity. My business is all about what’s next. We get one product out the door, we need to have five more in the pipeline. And every product is a battle. I used to think the work would get easier as I got older. But if anything the work gets harder. Same goes for all of your creative types. Look at Picasso, or Hemingway. Somebody once asked one of them whether he found it easier to paint or write novels as he got older, since he’d already done so many paintings or novels. I can’t remember which one it was, but anyway the answer was no, it was always a struggle. Then Hemingway ended up putting a gun in his mouth, and Picasso died in a bullfight, I think, which is so cool it should be illegal.

  Every day I come to work and try to create something magical, and instead I spend all my time putting out fires and fighting this shitstorm of emergencies and distractions, with a million people trying to get in to see me, or hounding me on the phone, and a zillion emails piling up in my inbox. Greenpeace is hounding me because our computers don’t turn themselves into compost when you’re done with them. Some European Commission is pissed because iTunes and the iPod are designed to work smoothly together. Microsoft, the scourge of the planet, has been chasing me for thirty years, copying everything I do.

  On the other hand, I have to admit, in many ways my life is pretty amazing. Thanks to years of exercise and careful attention to dieting, in my early fifties I remain in fantastic physical condition. I am also a talented hypnotist, able to work with individuals in a one-on-one setting or with large groups—like the people who attend Apple press conferences and Macworld shows. The hypnotic power is so powerful that sometimes I have to consciously work on dialing it down. For example, when I walk into the Starbucks on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, the girls who work there start flirting with me, and I can tell that they know who I am and they’re all nervous, like they’re meeting Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise or something. Then their eyes start getting glassy and I know that if I snapped my fingers they would do me right there behind the coffee machine. Or maybe in the restroom, which might be more comfortable and afford us some privacy. Not that I would do that, because I wouldn’t. But it’s very cool to know that I could.