by Daniel Lyons
I’ve never been able to take Disney board meetings seriously. First of all we sit around a conference table whose legs are carved to look like the Seven Dwarves from Snow White. These are intended to match the pillars holding up the roof on the outside of the headquarters building, which are also Disney cartoon figures, only they’re nineteen feet tall. Who can work in a place like this? Everywhere you go there are pictures of Mickey and Minnie and Goofy. Face it. It’s weird.
I used to think the movie business would be kind of glamorous. In fact most of the work gets done in crappy-looking office parks or on lots that have all the charm of an airplane hangar. At the executive level these companies are run by moronic MBAs, just like every other big company. Talk to any BlackBerry-toting movie-company vice president and you might as well be visiting a company that makes cars, or potato chips, or pharmaceuticals. If you’re wondering if this is why so many movies suck so badly, it is.
At the board level it’s even worse. Most movie companies are run by absolute idiots. Disney’s board includes a guy from an electric utility; a guy from a cosmetics company; a guy from Sears; a guy from a liquor company; a guy from Procter & Gamble; a guy from Starbucks; a Latina lady from some Mexican newspaper who’s here, let’s face it, because she knocks down two diversity categories with one shot; a guy from a software company that’s practically out of business; and a woman whose big claim to corporate fame is that she used to work at Cisco Systems.
Now these mental giants, these paragons of virtue, these captains of industry, are sitting around the Mickey Mouse table drumming their fingers and giving me dirty looks. And I’m feeling sick. Not metaphorically, but literally. Ja’Red and I spent the night at Larry’s house in Malibu. I broke into the liquor cabinet and drank too much vodka, trying once again to erase the image of that kid in Longhua. I slept on the couch, in my clothes, and woke up with creatures chasing each other around inside my intestines. Larry’s housekeeper was cooking eggs. I ran to the bathroom and threw up.
“Steve,” Iger says, “nobody’s saying this is your fault. We’re just saying that as the guy who was running Pixar, and the guy who I presume is most intimately familiar with how that company was run, you’re going to have to be our point man on this issue. And so we’d like it if you could kind of walk us through what happened with regard to these options and various other issues regarding compensation. But as I said, nobody is saying it’s your fault.”
Translation: It’s your fault.
Whatever. Now I’m actually grateful that I’m hung over. I try to explain to them what happened. I tell them how a few years ago John Lasseter started making noise about leaving Pixar. He was making these threats, ironically enough, because Disney was trying to lure him away.
Thing is, John Lasseter was the creator of Toy Story. He’s the greatest animator who ever lived, a genius on the level of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo.
There was no way we were going to lose him. So we wrote John a new contract, with a huge bonus, a huge raise, and a load of stock options. To sweeten things a little bit more we backdated the options so they’d be more valuable. He stayed. He went on to make Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, both of which won Oscars and raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for us.
“My opinion? I think we did the right thing,” I say. “You can hate me if you want to, but I will not apologize for keeping John Lasseter attached to Pixar. Also, has it not occurred to you that the reason I had to do what I did was that you guys, right here at Disney, were trying to poach him away from Pixar? Do you realize that? If anything, this mess is your fault. You guys caused it. Now you’re trying to blame me. I think you should all be ashamed of yourselves.”
Rule Number One when talking to people who think they’re powerful is this: Insult them. Tell them they’re stupid. Challenge them. Unlike the rest of the world, they’re not used to this kind of abuse. Nobody ever talks to them like this. The disrespect knocks them back on their asses real fast.
Sure enough Iger starts backpedaling about how there’s no need to get angry here or to make personal attacks but we need to figure out how to solve the problem, blah blah, so I cut him off and say, “Robert, you know not whereof you speak. Please stop talking. Are you done? Good. Now I’d like you to take a deep breath, and hold it, and don’t let it out until I say so.”
Then, in a matter of seconds, I hypnotize the other frigtards, and in an extremely patronizing voice, a voice you might use when talking to a group of third graders, I explain that I want them all to go home tonight and sit down in a quiet place and do some real soul-searching. “Look into your hearts,” I say, “and ask yourselves how you really feel about what you’ve all tried to do to me here today. If you want to apologize to me now, you can. Or you can send me a note later. Or a phone call. Thank you for your time. I won’t be taking questions. Goodbye.”
That’s it. I walk out. In the car on the way to the airport I gaze out the window at the palm trees and the garish buildings and I wonder how anyone lives here. I hate Los Angeles. I always have. I hate all of the people here. The fawning, the flattery, the obvious insincerity, the constant backstabbing. What really bugs me is the way people kiss my ass everywhere I go. Sure, the adulation is nice. But they worship me for the wrong reasons. They don’t have any idea of who I am or what I’ve accomplished. All they know is that they’ve seen me on TV or in the pages of Vanity Fair. I’m famous. If they’re slightly more clued in they know that I ran Pixar and I’m the biggest shareholder in Disney; so, in their miserable little movie business, which as far as anyone down here is concerned is the only business that exists, I’m a big shot.
Never mind that Apple alone is twice the size of the entire
U.S. box office for all movies combined. Never mind that the computer industry as a whole dwarfs all of Hollywood, and that no movie studio will ever make the kind of profit margins that a software company like Microsoft does. Never mind that the morons who run the movie business have created a high-cost, high-risk business model that any clever child could tell you makes no sense, and that ninety-five percent of what they do involves churning out garbage and praying it sells. No, down there they really believe their own hype. They really believe they’re important, and that what they do matters.
On the jet I sleep. By Friday evening I’m home in Palo Alto and seriously considering selling my shares in Disney and walking away from the movie business altogether.
“Who needs the hassle?” I tell Mrs. Jobs, as we’re doing our bedtime yoga. “For that matter, maybe I should quit Apple too. See how well they do without me.”
“They wouldn’t last a year,” she says. I tell her about the kid in Longhua, the one who kept staring at me. “Poor you,” she says. “You shouldn’t have to see that.”
“I know, right?”
I’ve been giving some thought to the China situation and how we might fix things there. One obvious solution is we could start paying decent wages. But according to Paul Doezen, who ran the numbers, this would mean we’d have to charge seven hundred dollars for our high-end iPod instead of three hundred and forty-nine dollars. Bottom line: it’s a non-starter. If we’re going to make products that people can afford, these products need to be assembled in Chinese sweatshops. And I have to go there to China and see them and feel my soul being fed into a wood-chipper.
“This is the price we pay,” Ross Ziehm told me on the plane. “This is the sacrifice that we make so that millions of people might have beautiful objects that restore a sense of childlike wonder to their lives. Is it painful? Yes. Does it harm us? Yes. But we must do this. We must suffer so that others can be happy. It is what we are called to do.”
“A guy can only take so much,” I say to Mrs. Jobs.
“Just breathe,” she says. “Let it out. That’s it. Breathe.”
“I’m slipping,” I say. “I can’t focus. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. Or when I do sleep, I’m having bad dreams. Nightmares.”
This is in my shrink
’s office, in Los Gatos, an emergency visit. It’s Saturday night, and he’s supposed to be watching his kid in a school play, but I got him to skip that and see me instead. My shrink specializes in treating orphans and adoptees. He does past life regressions, karmic repatterning, soul clearing, and journey-work. Bruce Upstein, Ph.D., is the name on his office door and on his bills, but during our sessions he goes by Linghpra. He’s in his late fifties, freakishly thin, and sports a ponytail that reaches halfway down his back.
“Tell me about the nightmares,” he says.
We’re sitting on pads on the floor, in the lotus position. There’s no furniture in the office, just rugs and mats. The walls are hung with Tibetan tapestries. The room is on the seventh floor of an office building, with a glass wall looking out toward the Santa Cruz Mountains.
I tell him about my dream where I’m being crucified next to Bill Gates.
“Actually,” he says, “a lot of people have that dream.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shrugs. “Windows users. They hate the guy.”
“They should.”
“That software takes a toll on people. I see it every day. A lot of people want to see bad things happen to Gates. We see a lot of Windows-related disorders. Post-traumatic stress, that kind of thing.”
“But in my dream I’m being crucified too. What’s that all about?”
“Separate issue. You’re being persecuted. You’re being tried for sins that you didn’t commit. You might be punished. I suppose you feel like you’re being punished already. The bad press, for example. I imagine that’s very hurtful.”
“It is.” I reach for a Kleenex, and wipe my eyes. I’m trying not to cry, but it’s not easy.
I tell him about the trip to China, and how it just seems so unfair that I have to go endure that sort of thing.
“I don’t know how you do it,” he says. “It takes great strength on your part.”
“It does,” I say. “It saps my energy. It drains me. Then I have to come back here and sit down and try to be creative again. It never lets up. I don’t need to be doing this. I could go sit on a beach for the rest of my life. I could be out racing sailboats, like Larry Ellison. I could be running some bogus philanthropy like Bill Gates. But am I? No. Like a fool, I’m still coming in to work every day. I’m still putting in eighteen-hour days. I’m working my ass off. Battling with engineers. Yelling at idiots. Firing people. Getting hassled by everyone. Traveling too much. Never getting enough sleep. Why? Why am I doing this?”
“We’ve talked about this,” Linghpra says. “It’s the hole. The hole in your soul, remember?”
“What are you, Doctor fucking Seuss? What’s with the rhyming?”
“I’m sorry. You’re right.” He pauses. He gathers his thoughts. “There’s an emptiness,” he says. “A vacuum. You try to fill it with work.”
“I never should have gone to China. That kid. I can’t stop thinking about him. All I want to do is make the world a better place. I have a gift. I want to share it. But it hurts. It physically hurts me. And then I get back here and my own government is attacking me. They’re making me out to be a criminal. For what? Because I got paid for my work. Paid well, fair enough. Paid a lot. But look at the value I delivered. Apple’s market value has grown sixty billion dollars since I took over. Sixty. Billion. Dollars. I go in every day, I’m doing a thousand things at once, and somehow, okay, maybe somehow, along the way, I made a mistake. Maybe. For this they want to put me in jail? After all I’ve done for the world? Because of a typo? I should be getting the Nobel Prize. Instead they’re measuring my neck.”
“You’re right. It’s not fair.”
“And do you know what’s going to happen? Nobody’s going to want to run a public company anymore. Because you can’t do the job. Nobody can. You make one slip, you interpret one thing the wrong way, and boom—you’re a swindler. You’re running a scam. You’re lying to shareholders. You’re perpetrating a fraud on the American public.”
I stop. I take a deep breath and let it out. I roll my neck, trying to release the tension.
“This is good,” Linghpra says. “This is good work.”
I can’t help it. I start to cry.
“Let it out,” Linghpra says. “The tears are cleansing.”
He leans forward and takes my forearms in his hands. It’s an energy flow exercise that we do. You form a circuit and let energy move back and forth between two people, using a form of emotional osmosis. My anger seeps away into him, and his calmness flows into me. He’s acting like a radiator, taking the heat from my soul and dissipating it out into the room, returning my energy back to me in a cooler state.
Soon I’m letting go. I begin to sob. Big, heavy, gulping sobs. Linghpra guides me down onto a yoga mat. I lie on my side, with my legs curled up. He lies behind me, cradling me.
“You’re a good person,” he says.
He pulls himself against me. He holds me tight in his arms and we stay like that for a long time, while he tells me how good I am, and how whatever bad that’s happened, it’s not my fault.
After therapy I go out driving. For hours I roll up and down Route 280 between San Jose and San Francisco, listening to Bob Dylan and trying to clear my head. At about two in the morning I’m heading north in this fantastic section of sweeping turns between Sand Hill Road and Woodside when police lights appear in my rearview mirror and I get pulled over.
It’s this total CHPs guy. He’s even got the mustache.
“Sir,” he says, “do know why I’m standing here?”
“Um, because you couldn’t get into college?”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“Oh, thank you, officer. I’m so grateful. I’m going to recommend that you get a medal for your outstanding police work.”
I hate cops. Always have. This one informs me that I was going ninety miles per hour. I explain to him that the Mercedes I’m driving has a six-hundred-horsepower engine and can go two hundred miles per hour.
“It’s not like I’m in some Volkswagen Golf and I’m gonna blow a gasket or something,” I say. “Ninety miles an hour in this car is like standing still. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s nobody else out here. The freeway’s completely empty.”
The guy gets all pissy and wants to see my license. I don’t have my license with me. “Do you really not know who I am?”
He tells me to step out of the car.
“Look, sugar tits,” I say, “I’m Steve Jobs. I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?”
Bit of advice here: Do not under any circumstances ever refer to a male highway patrolman as “sugar tits.” Next thing I know I’m flat on the pavement, face down, hands cuffed behind my back. Then I’m in the back of a cruiser and deposited in a lockup in Redwood City.
Also in the cell is some drunk kid who appears to be about seventeen years old and says he works at Kleiner Perkins. He got picked up in his Ferrari on a DUI and has vomited into the sink in the cell. The fascist pigs say they can’t clean the sink until tomorrow.
I demand my one phone call. The cop who’s running the lockup says the phones aren’t working. I tell him I’ll use my cell phone. He claims they can’t give me my cell phone, for safety reasons.
“You’re afraid I’m going to beat myself to death with a cell phone?”
“You’ll just have to wait,” he says. “Maybe you can spend a little time thinking about what you did wrong.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Believe what you want.”
“You’re going to wish you didn’t do this to me.”
The cop just laughs.
The cell has cement walls, painted gray, with one small window with bars and wire mesh over it. I pop onto the cot in the lotus position and start meditating and humming my syllable. Pretty soon I can barely hear the Kleiner guy moaning. Even the smell of the puke isn’t bothering me so much.
At dawn a different cop
comes in and asks if we want any breakfast. He says they’re making a run to McDonald’s. Kleiner Boy orders two Sausage McMuffins, two hash browns, orange juice, and a coffee.
“Is there any chance you could get me a fruit cup?” I say. “Or a smoothie?”
“I’m not a waiter,” the cop says. “I’m going to McDonald’s. Do you want anything?”
I shake my head. But when the McDonald’s food arrives— I’m appalled to say this—the smell of it makes me crazy. Kleiner Boy sees me staring. “You want a bite?” he says.
I shake my head, but I’m still staring. My mouth starts watering. The next time he offers I say okay and he hands me one of the hash brown things. It looks like a scab that came off the back of a horse’s balls. But I have to admit, the taste of it— wow. The grease, the cooking fat, the salt. My God. Next thing I know I’m tearing into one of his Sausage McMuffins.
This is the first time I’ve tasted meat in more than thirty years. In five bites the sandwich is gone. A few seconds later my head is reeling. I lie back on the cot feeling like I’m going to slip into a coma.
I’m lying there fighting to remain conscious when the Apple lawyers arrive, along with Ja’Red. Our lawyers got a call from the captain of the barracks after he came in for his shift and found out who they were holding, and realized he was in deep shit. The lawyers see the McDonald’s wrappers on my cot and start freaking out.
“Who did this to you?” one of them says. “Who did this?”
All I can say is, “Ermmm, unnnhhh, oh, I, uh, ermmmm.”
One of my guys starts calling for a paramedic. Another starts screaming about Gitmo and the Geneva Convention. Ja’Red, who I’m starting to realize is probably the smartest of the bunch, has the presence of mind to call the Governator. Arnold tells the cops to get me out of the cell immediately, and to go to the captain’s office for a conference call.
