by Daniel Lyons
So Spielberg says that there is this huge war raging in Israel and Lebanon right now, but of course the American media isn’t covering it at all. They’d rather report on Britney Spears putting her baby in the microwave. But it’s totally serious, and totally bad. Spielberg has an idea for a DreamWorks-Pixar joint venture, an animated movie about two boys, one Israeli and the other Palestinian. Sort of Schindler’s List meets Aladdin but using that funky humanoid animation from Polar Express. Elton John will write the songs.
“Okay,” I say, “but will there be any talking fish? Talking cars? Some superheroes?”
Spielberg gets kind of sniffy and says, “I’m talking about serious cinema verite type animation.”
I tell him he shouldn’t start busting out the Latin words just because he knows I didn’t go to college. He says, “It’s French,” and I’m like, “Whoa there, wait a minute, you’re gonna make an animated movie in French? Are you kidding? Does Elton John even speak French? I mean, Hello? Is this really Steven Spielberg on the phone? Is this the guy who made E.T. and Poltergeist? Are you turning into Francis Ford Crapola or something? Because if that’s the case, why not pull a Mel Gibson and do the whole movie in ancient Aramaic, or Maori, or that click-click language from Africa. Or Palestinian.”
Thing about Spielberg is, he’s a very cool guy and very brilliant and everything, but he tends to cop a huge ’tude with anyone who doesn’t agree with his vision one hundred percent and do whatever he says.
“Steven,” I say, “maybe I didn’t go to film school, but trust me, I know what sells, right? I invented the friggin iPod, okay? Have you heard of it? So here’s my idea. Instead of two boys we make it a boy and a girl, and we bump the age up a bit, like make them teenagers, so we can get a love story going, and we draw the girl really inappropriately hot, like in Pocahontas, and we put her in tight outfits or whatever, so we widen our audience and get some eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old males in the theater, not just kids. We cross-promote by having the characters wear iPods and we get a tie-in with McDonald’s to make falafels with a movie theme wrapper.”
Spielberg says nothing. He’s cranking away on this treadmill. Finally he makes this big theatrical sigh and says, “Maybe we can talk later or something.”
“Whatever,” I tell him. “You’re the one who called me, remember? So, like, good luck with your cartoon movie in Latin or whatever.”
As if that’s not bad enough, a few minutes later I get a call from Sir Richard Branson. The guy is crazy as a loon, I swear to God, and I never would have picked up my phone except I saw it was a call from England and I thought it might be Paul McCartney wanting to talk about getting the Beatles music onto iTunes. Instead I hear old Branson barking and I’m thinking,
Jesus Christ, first Spielberg, now this. Is there a full moon or something?
“I’m up in my balloon!” he shouts, and I’m thinking, Of course you are, you friggin twat, where else would you be? For the life of me I will never understand what it is about rich guys and balloons.
“I’m on my satellite phone!” he screams. “I’m wearing a space suit and a helmet. We’re at fifteen thousand feet, flying over northern Mongolia. Gorgeous. Can you hear me? Look, I’ve had this massive brainstorm. Can you hear me?”
I tell him I can’t. He plows ahead anyway.
“Mate,” he says, “here’s my pitch and I’ll get right to it. We’re going to create a new section on Virgin Atlantic, right behind Upper Class, and call it iPod Class. The whole section is redone in that glossy white color like an iPod. The walls, the seat backs, the seat cushions, the carpet, the bathrooms, everything in bloody shiny white, like you’re sitting smack inside an iPod. We throw in some fake champagne and cheap sushi and bang up the fare price by thirty percent over Coach, or Lower Class as we’re now calling it. You’re separated from everyone else by tinted plexiglass walls, so the punters in back can see you, and you just sit there looking cool and going, ‘Yeah, how jealous are you lot, you’d love to be in here in iPod Class, wouldn’t you, as if. Ha!’
“The message is, Look at me, I’m young, I’m cool, I’m obnoxious and nouveau riche and arriviste, I’m tech savvy, I’m a dotcommer, I own lots of cell phones and PDAs and gadgets, I live in Silicon Valley and I wear loafers without socks, I’m better than you, and when I fly . . . wait for it . . . I fly iPod Class. The chavs and the Irish’ll go nuts for it. We’ll get David Beckham and his wife to do the adverts.”
“Richard, I don’t get it. What’s the iPod connection?”
“Hrm, well, uh, yah, whatever, who knows, but it’s marketing innit? It’s marketing. Like there’s an Upper Class and now there’s an iPod Class. It’s all white, like an iPod. Geddit?”
The truth is I hate Branson because he made such a big deal about his stupid Virgin online music store and he was all Mr. Smack Talk about how he was gonna kick the crap out of iTunes, and now he’s pretending he’s my big “mate.” Maybe the altitude is messing up his head and he figures I don’t remember what a cockbreath he was on the music store.
So I push back and say I don’t see the synergy and I don’t want to dilute the brand, which I know is going to piss him off, because, as you might have noticed, old Branson has a teensy little ego problem.
Sure enough he gets all snippy and says in this fake plummy accent, “I’m sorry, did you say dilute the brand? My God I think I’m going to choke on a piece of foie gras. Dilute the brand? That’d be quite a feat, mate, diluting your brand. I mean I’ve been to your stores, Steve. The bloody Tivoli iPal? It’s an FM radio! Only it’s painted white and has a plug for an MP3 player. I don’t hear you bitching about that, Steve.”
By then he’s practically screaming. I don’t know if it’s all an act or if he really is a complete psycho. I tell him, “Branson, my bro, cool out, do some yoga, smoke a doob, cut a fart in your space suit or whatever, but sure, go for it, set the controls for the center of the sun. Have the lawyers work it out and give old Steve a slice of the action. God bless you, you crazy goat-bearded bleached-hair balloon-flying freak.”
“Bloody right!” he says. “Mate, you won’t regret this! You can break the bottle of champagne on the first plane and take the maiden voyage, right alongside the Beckhams, my word as a gentleman.”
I tell him thanks anyway, but I don’t fly commercial, because it gives me hives and I’m allergic to non-vegans, but good luck. Then I call Paul Doezen and tell him, I don’t care what you have to do, I don’t care if you have to rent a MIG and fly up over northern Mongolia and shoot down his friggin balloon, but do not let this deal happen.
“Roger that,” Paul says. “Oh, and by the way? We’re rolling up the sales numbers for the quarter.”
“And?”
“You’re gonna be happy.”
“Peace out,” I tell him.
By now it’s past seven and I’m looking out the window at the sun going down into the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I’d really like to drive out to Half Moon Bay and do some positive visualization exercises on the beach. Instead Ross Ziehm drags me down the hall to a conference call with some ding-dongs from Greenpeace who’ve got a hair across their butts because we use poisonous chemicals in our products.
“Folks,” I say, “I don’t think you understand. We’re not making organic cereal here. We’re not a vegetable company. We make computers and computer monitors. They have disk drives in them. And chips. Not much I can do about that. To make computers you need chemicals. And plastic. And glass. I can’t make an iPod out of hemp. I can’t rewrite the laws of gravity here.”
The main guy, whose name is Pierre, starts hinting or suggesting or somehow talking in that roundabout European way about Apple making a bigger commitment to the cause of the environment. I know what this means. It’s a shakedown. We give them more money so they can buy more boats to hassle tuna fishermen, and they’ll stop bashing us in the press.
“How much?” I say.
“I’m sorry?”
“How much i
s it going to cost me to get you to leave me alone?”
He starts hemming and hawing and saying he thinks maybe there’s been some misunderstanding, that’s not what this call was about, blah blah blah.
“Pierre,” I say, “I’m tired. It’s late here. I’ve had a rough day. I don’t want to fuck around. Just give me a number.”
He asks me to hold for a moment. Then he comes back on. “Ten million?” he says.
“Done.”
“Really?”
“I’ll have my people make the arrangements.”
“Mr. Jobs,” he says “I want to thank you so much for your commitment to this noble cause, and you know, we are going to be soon redoing the list of the world’s most greenest companies and I hope we will be seeing Apple moving well upward this year . . . ”
He’s still talking when I leave the room.
Great news. Our numbers roll in for the June quarter and they’re huge. We do a conference call with the Wall Street asshats and blow away everyone’s expectations. Better yet, according to Paul Doezen there’s a reason I can’t remember anything about the options. The reason is that I gave them all back, unexercised.
“The only thing I can find,” Paul says, “is that maybe somebody put the wrong date on some of these things. But I can’t see how that matters if you gave them back.”
We’re in the conference room, alone. He hands me a green folder which contains his report. The report consists of several pieces of paper which appear to contain columns of numbers and some words. More spreadsheets.
“Could you not have turned these into charts?” I ask. “Something visual? Something a normal person can understand?”
Paul just shrugs. He’s a numbers guy.
I pretend to glance at the reports. Paul says he’s not entirely certain that he’s found everything, because he wasn’t actually working at Apple when the backdating occurred—Zack Johnson was our CFO back then—but he’s gone through the records and tried to put the puzzle together.
He’s done this under my orders, entirely in secret. I don’t want Charlie Sampson knowing that I’m conducting my own investigation on the side. Plus I figure if Paul does come up with something bad I can fire him and destroy whatever records he’s found.
“So you’re telling me this whole thing is over a clerical error?”
“Sort of,” he says.
“So I’m off the hook.”
“That’s not actually what I said,” Paul says.
“Well that’s actually what I heard.”
Paul says there still could be some issues about disclosure, and mwah mwah mwah. I don’t know what it is about Paul, but sometimes when he gets going I just see that huge maw opening and closing and I’m aware that there is a sound coming out of him but it doesn’t seem like words at all.
“What about the short sellers,” I say.
He shrugs. “Still nothing. But if it’s any consolation, whoever’s short has got their balls in a vise today. Have you seen the stock? It’s going nuts.”
He’s right. The markets have closed but in after-hours trading our shares are surging. I turn on the TV and scan through the business channels. They’re all raving about us. Of course they all mention the options stuff, but it’s buried under the larger news, which is that our results blew everyone away.
Cramer, that lunatic, is pounding his desk and screaming at people to buy Apple.
“This stock is a must-own!” he says, his face so red it looks like his head is going to explode and splatter his brains all over the set.
“Steve Jobs should be elected president of the world!”
I’m so psyched that I drive down to the back of the parking lot and do some donuts in my Mercedes. There’s smoke everywhere. A bunch of Mexican groundskeepers stand there whooping and waving their arms. One of them screams, “Chinga tu puta madre, cabrón!” which I believe means, “Dude, you totally rock!”
And you know what? I do. I totally do.
The reverie doesn’t last long, however, because that evening, after flirting shamelessly with Ja’Red’s girlfriend at the smoothie store in downtown Palo Alto and reconfirming my suspicions that she does, in fact, want to have hot, nasty monkey sex with me, I go outside and walk around a corner onto University Avenue and there, standing outside the Garden Court Hotel, is Tom Bowditch. Standing with him is Jim Bell, our COO. Right behind them, talking on a cell phone, is Charlie Sampson.
I duck into an alcove. I’m no expert on Machiavellian plots, but I’m pretty sure that when your second-in-command is holding secret meetings with your largest shareholder, and the lawyer who’s investigating your company has come along for the ride, well, that isn’t good.
I know I should march over there and confront them. But I can’t. I just stand there, feeling dizzy. I lean against the doorway, half doubled over. I’m in front of a store called “Bodhi Tree— The Art of Gentle Living,” which sells Buddhist knick-knacks. A bunch of little Buddhas are staring up at me.
One of the saleswomen from the store comes out and says, “Sir, can I help you? Are you okay? Sir? Do you need help? Should I call the police?”
Which in California is the way people say, “Yo, asshole, get the fuck out of our doorway or we’ll call the cops.”
Then she sees who I am and she gets all apologetic and says, “Oh, Steve Jobs! Namaste! Do you want to come in and have a glass of water?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just looking at the, um, at the window.”
I force a smile. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
Somehow I make it back to my car and get home, where sure enough there’s a message Tom Bowditch. We’re having an emergency board meeting, tomorrow morning, eight o’clock. I call him on his cell phone to find out what’s going on. It rings through to voice mail. I leave a message. He doesn’t call back.
“Irregularities” is the word Sampson uses, which sounds pretty harmless to me, but Sampson explains that in lawyer-land this is a code word meaning, “Things are seriously fucked up.”
We’re in the boardroom and everyone is looking gray and washed out and scared shitless. It’s the whole board of directors, with Al Gore once again joining via video link, plus Sampson and his team, and Paul Doezen, and Ross Ziehm. Even the old fartstain from the clothing store company is wide awake this time.
“What time period are we talking about?” the old guy says, which is what everyone else is wondering too, because if they were on the board when the “irregularities” took place, and if their signatures appear on the quarterly reports, then in the eyes of the law they’re culpable.
In other words: it’s save-your-own-ass time. The bad news is, from what Sampson has discovered so far, we’re going to have to restate earnings back to 2001. Which means everyone on the board has some exposure. The dollar amounts aren’t huge, but the SEC and the U.S. Attorney don’t care if you’re off by a penny or by a billion dollars.
“The fact is, there are problems,” Sampson says. His helpers sit there looking proud of themselves, like they think maybe we should give them a bonus for doing such a fantastic bang-up job. I’d like to take them out and have them shot.
The clothing store guy puts his head in his hands. He starts to groan. I know what he’s thinking, which is (a) why did I ever take this board seat, and (b) how much would it cost to have Steve Jobs killed, and (c) could we have it done in such a way that he’d die slowly and painfully?
The really bad news is that Sampson insists we have to announce this information to the public as soon as possible.
This is a huge problem. The timing could not be worse. Our biggest event of the year, the Worldwide Developers Conference, begins this weekend. We’ve spent months in rehearsals, working on presentations, getting products ready—and now all that work will be eclipsed by this stupid announcement.
“I really don’t see why we can’t push this back until after the conference,” I say. “It’s just going to distract everyone from what we’re trying to convey a
t the show.”
“There’s no way you can wait,” Sampson says. “You’d be withholding material information.”
“I’m not saying wait forever,” I say. “Just a week. Just let us have our conference, and then announce it.”
“No dice,” Tom Bowditch says. “Charlie’s right. You can’t hold stuff like this. That’s exactly the kind of thing the SEC would go nuts over.”
Tiny flecks of foam are piling up in the corner of Tom’s mouth. He’s giving me that crazy Rottweiler look, as if he’s waiting for the others to leave so he can sink his teeth into my throat and tear me to pieces.
“So we’re agreed?” Sampson says.
He’s looking at Tom. He does not even pretend to address me.
“I’m not agreed,” I say.
They ignore me.
“We’re all set,” Tom says.
The meeting breaks up. All of the board members hurry out of the room. None of them says good-bye to me. They won’t even look at me.
Ross Ziehm pulls me aside and asks me if I want to go over the wording of the press release. I can’t even speak. My heart is racing. I’m having this monster panic attack, this huge flashback to the eighties, and not the kind where you have a nightmare that you’re walking into a meeting wearing Hammer pants. The nightmare I’m reliving is the one where the board threw me out of my own company. This was how it began. They started ignoring me in meetings, not even bothering to ask my opinion.
I hurry down the hall to my office. Ja’Red starts to tell me something about my yoga instructor, and how I missed my lesson and she wants to know if I want her to keep waiting or should she go home—but I wave him off.
