by Daniel Lyons
On the career front, I’m doubly blessed. In addition to running a computer company, I also run a movie studio. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called Disney. Yeah. That Disney. Before Disney I ran a movie company called Pixar. We made a few movies that some people have heard of, like Toy Story and Finding Nemo. I bought Pixar for ten million dollars and sold it to Disney for seven and a half billion. Not a bad return.
Which leads me to my next point. The money issue. For a while I developed a complex about it. But fortunately I’m also a very spiritual person, having devoted many years to the study of Zen Buddhism, and this spirituality has really helped me deal with the guilt. My big breakthrough came on the day when my net worth hit the billion-dollar mark. It’s a big deal; ask anyone who’s been there. It freaks you out. Because at that point there’s no more denying that you’re just a regular person. You’re not. You’re a billionaire.
It’s like being in one of those movies where the hero realizes he’s got telekinetic powers and it’s just too bad if he doesn’t want them, he’s got them. I remember standing in front of a mirror in my office at Apple, naked, looking at myself. Which is something I do. I check out my body. Once a month I take a photo, and I save them in a digital album that I created in less than a minute using our iPhoto software. Anyway. I’m standing there in front of the mirror on the day that I became a billionaire and I’m going, Steve is a billionaire. Steve is a billionaire. A billionaire. Just saying it over and over, listening to the sound of that word.
The thing about becoming a billionaire is that first you’re elated; then you’re freaked out; and then you start feeling guilty. But here is where my Zen training helped me. I sat down and meditated and forced myself to not think about my wealth. I was sitting there moaning my syllable, and then I opened my eyes and came out of my trance and I said, out loud, in this really booming voice, to this imaginary critic guy that I imagined was standing there criticizing me for having so much money, I shouted right at him, as loud as I could: “Frig you, ass-munch, because I’m smarter than you, I’m better than you, I’m changing the world, and I deserve this.”
It was this amazing moment of total humility and self-negation. Two days later I woke up and invented the concept for the iPod. True story.
The way I see it, I can’t really take credit for being so rich. But it’s also not my fault, either. It just is what it is. It’s beyond my control. Here’s another way to look at it. The other day I was listening to a piece of music. It was a symphony by Mozart, written when he was nine years old. I thought to myself, How the hell does this happen? How does someone like Mozart come to exist? Fair enough, a musical genius spins up out of the gene pool. That probably happens pretty regularly. But in this case the genius happens to land in Salzburg, Austria, in the eighteenth century—the most fertile musical environment that has ever existed. And his father is a music teacher. Boom. Lightning strikes.
Same for me. I was born in San Francisco, in 1955, to a pair of graduate students who put me up for adoption. I landed with a modest couple in a sleepy town called Mountain View, California—which, as luck would have it, was situated right in the heart of what was about to become Silicon Valley. Maybe this was totally random, just natural selection at work. But I wonder if there isn’t also some kind of invisible hand of fate moving in our lives. Because imagine that I’d been born in a different century, or in a different place. Imagine I’d been born in some remote village in China. Or imagine that my birth parents didn’t put me up for adoption. Imagine my mother kept me, and I grew up in Berkeley with a pair of doofball intellectual parents, and instead of taking a summer job at Hewlett-Packard and meeting Steve Wozniak, I spent my teenage years hanging out in coffee shops reading Sartre and Camus and writing lame-ass poetry.
The point is, my adoption was necessary. It needed to happen. It’s like Moses being left in the bullrushes. If that doesn’t happen—if Moses stays home with his Jewish mother, and doesn’t grow up with Pharaoh’s family—well, the Jews don’t get out of Egypt, so there’s no Ten Commandments, and no Passover, which means no Easter. All of history is changed. Same with me. Without the fluke of my adoption, there’s no Apple Computer, no Macintosh, no iMac, no iPod, no iTunes.
I realize how I sound. I sound like a dick. Self-centered. Obnoxious. I’m told all the time that I seem like a narcissistic egomaniac. You know what I say? I say, “Look, wouldn’t you be an egomaniac if you woke up one day and found out you were me? You know you would.”
Of course the bad part of being such a mega-rich mega-famous mega-creative genius is that there are always some jerks looking to take a shot at you.
In my case those jerks include the United States government, and despite everything I’ve done for the world—or maybe because of it—they are determined to put me out of business.
Monday morning I arrive at the Jobs Pod, where Ja’Red, my assistant, is looking distressed.
“Dude,” he says, “can you make them leave? Like, they’re totally polluting the karma.”
“Who is?”
“Uh, them?” he says, pulling a face and pointing down the hall.
He means Sampson and his lawyers. They’ve set up camp in the David Crosby conference room. We have five conference rooms in the executive suite—Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young and Dylan—and we had to give them one. I was like, “No way are they using the Dylan room, because Dylan is sacred to me. Put them in Crosby.” For one thing, I can’t stand David Crosby. More important, the Crosby room is the farthest away from the Jobs Pod.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Totally, man, because it’s fucked up, you know? I mean they’re like wearing suits and coming down here asking me where’s the men’s room and do they have to dial nine to get an outside line and I’m like, ‘Dude, whatever’ you know?”
Ja’Red is barefoot, wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and cargo shorts. He’s been my assistant for four months, which I believe is a new record. The main reason he’s working out is that he totally worships me. He’s been obsessed with Apple all his life. He’s read all of the books about me. He even went to Reed College and then dropped out and lived on a commune and went to India, just like I did. The weirdest thing is that he looks like me. Or, rather, like a twenty-five-year-old version of me. He wears his hair cropped short, like mine, and has the same Arafat half-beard, though his isn’t gray. He even wears little round glasses like mine, and sometimes he’ll sport jeans and black mock turtlenecks and sneakers. The only difference is he’s about an inch shorter than I am.
I met him through his girlfriend. She’s twenty years old and works behind the smoothie counter at a health food store in Palo Alto and wears a bike helmet indoors, while she works. One day she was kind of flirting with me and then she invited me to come see her dance troupe perform in San Francisco. The show was called a “fable in dance” and it combined Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood but was set in Iraq, and featured a giant George Bush papier-mache doll performing unnatural acts with a giant Dick Cheney papier-mache doll, set to the music of the White Stripes. The dancing consisted of twelve spastics in bike shorts leaping around as if they had Saint Vitus’ dance and shouting about no blood for oil. I hung around for the whole show. I guess I thought I’d get lucky with Bike Helmet Girl. I was smitten. What can I say? It happens to old men. Yes, I was the only one in the audience over thirty years old. Yes, I felt like the dude in Death in Venice. I just kept telling myself, at least she’s not a boy.
Afterward, Bike Helmet Girl introduced me to Ja’Red. She hadn’t said anything about having a boyfriend, but whatever. Turns out he’s an extreme Apple fanboy. When I shook his hand, he cried. The next day he showed up at Apple headquarters, barefoot, and said we could either hire him or call the police. Fair enough, I knew what he was up to, because this is how I got my job at Atari back in the seventies. As it happens I had just fired my previous assistant because he wanted to know, when I asked for a chai latte at exactly one hundred and s
ixty-five degrees, if I meant Fahrenheit or Celsius. Idiot.
So I hired Ja’Red on the spot, right there in the lobby, and made him my personal assistant, with the official title of “Apprentice Wizard at Large.” I went with him to the HR department and waited while they did his retina scan, drew his blood for DNA typing, and gave him an ID badge.
Ja’Red said he was so psyched to work here that we wouldn’t even have to pay him; in fact he would pay us. But when I asked the HR woman how much we should charge him she said we couldn’t do that because it could be considered indentured servitude, which apparently has been outlawed by the fascist Republicans who run this country. In the end we settled on a salary of twelve thousand dollars a year and free food in the Apple cafeterias.
You should have seen him when I took him for his first tour through the headquarters building. He was like, “Duuude. Duuude. I’m, like, in the temple. Oh my God. Duuude. I feel like I should be kneeling down or something.” I have to admit, it is a pretty impressive place. The most striking thing to outsiders is the silence. I think of the headquarters building as a sacred place, a center of contemplation. Lots of natural materials, like heavy wooden beams and rock walls; and sharp angles, clean lines, cantilevered balconies extending out over huge open spaces. I drew my design ideas from Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania. Only instead of building around an existing stream and waterfall I had to create a stream and a waterfall. The biggest challenge was to create the impression that the boulders and stream had been there all along, and that the building had been set up around them.
The rest of the campus isn’t like this, of course. Those are the buildings where people who aren’t me work. They’re just like regular office buildings. The engineering labs are the worst. They’re absolute pigsties. Pizza boxes everywhere, trash cans overflowing. But that’s how the engineers like it.
We spent some time riding around the campus on Segways— I bought a thousand of them when they first came out—and going from one building to another, playing with the retina scanners and voice activated greeters. You should have seen Ja’Red crack up the first time the greeter said, “Good morning, Ja’Red.” I showed him through our cafeterias, which serve gourmet ethnic food—Japanese, Thai, Indian, Mexican, three kinds of regional Chinese—all cooked by authentic chefs brought in from those countries.
Like everyone who visits us, he was knocked out by the eighty-foot by twenty-foot multi-touch screens that we have installed throughout the campus. People use them as message boards, or just to write down great ideas for wild new products or design concepts. Some people just draw pictures. Whatever. The idea is to let people express their creativity in a public space. And because it’s a touch screen we can capture everything that’s put on the screen and feed these ideas into a database and sift them and study them using brainiac algorithms.
Finally I brought him upstairs and showed him the executive suite. We started in the conference room. I showed him how the shade of white that I chose for the walls is exactly the right color to set against the particular shade of blue that we get in the sky in northern California. I explained the principles that had informed my design of the room, and how much time I spent working out the size of the windows and the size of the space between the windows so that the ratio would be perfect. I told him how the board had complained and called me selfish when the building went up and the workmen were off by an inch and a half and I insisted that we knock down one side of the building and build it again so that the window-to-wall ratio would work out perfectly.
“I couldn’t focus. The balance was off. In the end I was right, and everyone agreed. But like everything else around here, it was a battle. You’ll see. It’s how the world is. Everyone’s ready to compromise. Take my advice. Don’t listen to other people. Don’t ever settle for ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent.”
Next stop was the meditation room, where we sat on mats and listened to Ravi Shankar, whom Ja’Red had never heard of. Finally I showed him my office. He was trembling when we walked in. I let him sit in my leather chair, which was custom-made for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. I showed him my private bathroom—I’m unable to go to the bathroom in places used by other people, even at home; it’s one of my quirks—and the meeting room and kitchen, which, like the bathroom, I cannot share with anyone. I showed him my workspace, which consists of four thirty-inch Cinema displays set side by side, powered by an eight-core MacPro connected by Gigabit Ethernet to a stack of dedicated Xserve quad-processor blade servers and a ten-terabyte Xserve RAID array.
“Duuude,” he said, “I just want to sit here and soak it in.” Then he began to cry. Again.
“Seriously, dude,” he says, handing me my messages and a cup of green tea. “Do something, okay? I mean the rest of us have to work here, and we’re trying to focus or whatever and these douchebags in suits are just running around giving orders and whatever.”
“Okay. Where’s Mayzie?”
Mayzie is Ja’Red’s assistant. I don’t know much about her except that she seems to be about his age and I think he met her through his mountain biking club. She has lots of tattoos and piercings, including a bolt in her bottom lip, which makes it impossible for me to look directly at her. Piercings in general are a huge problem for me, but the facial ones really freak me out.
“Yeah, she’s coming in late because, um, like they had to take their dog to the vet for a checkup, and her boyfriend was going to do it, but he like hurt his foot or something in this drum circle last night and so he can’t drive or something because they have a stick shift car and it’s his left foot, and, um . . .”
He’s still explaining when I close the door to the Jobs Pod. I sit down at my main desk, which is made from a single two-inch board hand hewn from the heartwood of a Giant Sequoia and which never, ever, has had anything placed on it. No computer, no phone, no papers, no cups, no pens. All that stuff goes on another desk off at the side of the room. The main desk is only for thinking and praying. I begin every workday with a few minutes of quiet reflection. I’ll contemplate a Zen koan, or chant the Heart Sutra, for example.
But Ja’Red is right. There’s a disturbance in the force. I do some breathing exercises and try to get clear, but it’s no use. The lawyers are messing us up.
I go down the hall to see them. They’ve turned the Crosby into their own little war room, with a coffee machine and a tray of unhealthy pastries and a gaggle of paralegals and other assistants from Sampson’s law firm who are whizzing around with carts full of folders. Sampson’s lawyers are sitting around the conference table, slurping coffee and snooping through folders and booting up their Windows PCs. On that point, I’m sorry, but this is utter provocation. That little stupid sound they make when they boot up. And they are always rebooting. Dammit! How can anyone work in this building when this poison is wafting through our hallways? Are they trying to make me crazy?
Nevertheless, for sport, I smile and say hello and introduce myself to all of them. I tell them how welcome they are. I ask if they need anything, like maybe some real computers, ha ha, and then I shift into Messiah mode and go to the whiteboard and start telling them about some new products, drawing lots of scientific looking lines and arrows and acronyms.
Meanwhile I’m using all sorts of neuro-linguistic programming trigger words, and within seconds I can see that one of Sampson’s team members, a lawyer named Chip, has gone under. His eyes have rolled back up into his head, and the tip of his tongue is sticking out of his mouth. In five minutes I’ll have the whole room hypnotized. They’ll forget all about these options. I’ll have them skipping out of the building and shrieking because they imagine the guy in the UPS truck is Britney Spears jumping out of a limo.
But Charlie Sampson is on to me straight away, and he knows exactly how to break the trance. He claps his hands down on the table. His boy snaps awake. “Steve,” Sampson says, “great seeing you. Thanks for visiting.”
It’s Monday, so the rest of the morn
ing is devoted to Pilates and yoga, then a working lunch (miso soup, apple slices) with Lars Aki, our industrial designer. Lars has a Danish mother and a Japanese father, and he grew up in England. He’s thirty-five years old and looks like a male model. He’s totally lean and ripped, but not muscle-bound. He’s also one hundred percent gay, and spends huge amounts of time cruising bath houses and leather bars, picking up trashy dudes and getting arrested for smoking crystal meth. Our PR people are constantly trying to cover up some mess he’s created. We all wish he’d settle down and find a nice guy and maybe adopt some Chinese kids or something. But what can we do? He’s universally recognized as the world’s most talented industrial designer.
We’re meeting to discuss his proposal to reduce the length of the next iPod by half a millimeter. I think losing half a millimeter throws off the balance of the design, and suggest a quarter of a millimeter instead. As usual, Lars is blown away by the way I take his idea and improve on it.
“You know,” he says, “I may have been first in my class at the Royal Academy, but I am always amazed by how much better you are at design than I am. Amazing.”
