by Daniel Lyons
“Ya know, Steve,” she says, “the Euros ain’t the only ones who can bend you over and stick it up your ass.”
So I kind of laugh and go, “Well, ma’am, I appreciate your offer to help us out, but the thing is, with some of this stuff, like the options witch hunt, well, we need some help on this stuff right now, you see? We can’t really wait until 2008. Also, the thing is, I’m planning to endorse Al Gore, if he runs, because he’s on my board, and he’s going to save the planet from melting, and he’s going to make my pal Bono the head of the Supreme Court or something.”
She stares at me with this flabbergasted look, as if she can’t believe that someone else actually dared to speak instead of genuflecting and doing whatever she tells them, which is I guess what most people do around her.
Then she says, in that stupid chipmunk voice of hers, “You know, I really didn’t come here for a dialogue, I just wanted to give you information and leave, but since you raised the issue, let me reassure you, the world isn’t melting, Steve. Honestly. Al made that movie to scare people. Although if you want to know what’s really scary it’s the prospect of having that hillbilly in the White House. Do you know how much of a mess he made during our time there? Do you have any idea what it was like to be constantly stamping out his stupid ideas! I mean Kyoto? Fuck me, seriously.
“You do realize that Al has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, right? They keep him medicated beyond belief. That’s why he talks like that. Every so often he’ll go off his meds and cook up some stupid idea. Whenever he did, the rest of us would all have to go racing around to find his shrink and get him shot up with something or other and put back in his straitjacket.”
“Well,” I say, “if Al doesn’t run, then I’m probably going for Jerry Brown. Or Ralph Nader. Or maybe Obama.”
“Stevie, honey, you can endorse Osama bin Laden for all I care. You can go stand on a street corner wearing a fucking sandwich board and dance around in your tighty-whities. I just want your money, sweetie. It’s really simple. If you pay up, I help you. If you don’t, I won’t. Okay? By the way, what is up with those hippie eyeglasses? There’s these things called contact lenses now, have you heard of them?”
Now I’m the one who’s stunned. Nobody makes fun of my John Lennon glasses. Nobody. Seriously.
For a long time I just sit there, staring down at my hands, trying to stay calm. Doerr, who knows how I feel about my glasses, says, “Steve, whatever you’re thinking, just let it go, okay? Let it go.”
But I can’t help myself. I go, “Lady, let me tell you something. I grew up in this Valley, okay? And nobody comes into our Valley and talks to us like this. You see the guys in this room? We’re guys who build things. All right, with the exception of the VCs, who are parasites. But I’m talking about the rest of us. We’re engineers. We’re the guys who built the friggin Internet, with our bare hands. Do you understand? Me personally, I’ve been through hell and back. I’ve been fired from my own company. I’ve survived cancer. Then I invented the friggin iPod. I’m not scared of you. Let’s get something straight. I’ve got five billion dollars. If you want some of that, you come here and you ask me. Not tell me. You ask. You kiss the ring, just like your husband and everybody else. You got that straight?”
“Well,” she says, “that was a lovely speech. You know in Washington we have this thing called etiquette. Have you heard of it?”
“You know,” I say, “in California we have this thing called Pilates. Have you heard of it? You should check it out, because let me tell you, you’ve got a really big fat lumpy ass. I mean you can’t even tell if there’s actually an ass in there. It’s like two big garbage bags full of oatmeal. Seriously.”
Her face starts to shake. Beside her, I swear, Bill is working very hard at not laughing. The rest of the room is silent.
Finally, way down at the far end of the table, T.J. Rodgers stands up and starts doing a slow clap. Some others join in. Soon the whole room is clapping and shouting, Steve, Steve, Steve— except for Doerr, who’s all bummed out because his Secretary of State job just went up in smoke.
The Clintstones and Soros make for the door, with Doerr scrambling after them apologizing and begging them not to leave, but Hillary says, “Fuck you, gerbil, don’t call me ever again,” and she throws us all the finger. We all roar laughing and give her the finger right back. Ha! Thanks for coming to California, lady. Come back anytime!
We all file out past Doerr, who is standing in his foyer looking all shattered because he really, really wants to be a cabinet member. Doerr gives us this fake little smile and says, “Thanks for coming, guys. Great seeing you, as always.”
When I got to my car, no lie, somebody has keyed my door. I know it was one of the Clintons. Probably Hillary. Fat ass.
I’m less than a mile down the road when my cell phone rings. It’s Tom Bowditch. He’s already heard what happened.
“Kid,” he says, “you are your own worst enemy. You know that? You’ve actually managed to make things worse.”
In the background there’s music playing. Girls are shrieking, and someone is shouting in Russian.
“Where are you?” I say.
“The Black Sea. Place called Sochi. On my boat.” The vehicle which Tom calls a boat is a three-hundred-foot-long mega-yacht that cost him a hundred million dollars. It attracts Russian hookers like light bulbs attract moths.
“You need a lawyer,” he says. “I’ve got one for you.”
It’s a guy in New York who represented a bunch of investment bankers and analysts who got in trouble after the dotcom crash. He also consulted on the Martha Stewart case and for some of the Enron guys. And he does a lot of work for the Mob, but only on the high-end cases and always behind the scenes.
“Trust me,” Tom says, “this guy is the best. He did the John Gotti case. Donald Trump keeps him on permanent retainer just to handle sexual harassment cases.”
“I’m surprised he has time to do anything else.”
“You and me both. Look, get ready to spend some money, because this guy costs a fortune. But when I tell you this guy’s the best, I mean he’s pure evil. And tough. Grew up in the Bronx. This guy could fuck a bag of broken glass and make it cry.”
“I’ll be sure to bring one with me when I meet him.”
“He’s coming to you. I sent my jet to get him. He’ll come to your house, not the office. He’s a freak about secrecy. Okay? Don’t say I never did you a favor.”
Bobby DiMarco is the guy’s name and yes, it’s Bobby, not Robert or Bob. Bobby. “Or some people call me Bobby D,” he says, and he’s one of those guys who shakes your hand and keeps pumping it and doesn’t let go. Hoo boy.
He’s in his late forties, about five-foot-five, and appears to be almost as wide as he is tall, with jet-black hair combed back from his face and a big brush mustache that makes him look like Geraldo Rivera. He’s wearing a navy blue suit which appears to be very expensive, and some very strong cologne. He’s carrying an aluminum briefcase with a lock on it.
Mr. Joebs, he calls me. With a long “o.” Which is one of my pet peeves. I mean, could I be any more in the public eye? Are there really still people who don’t know how to pronounce my name? Really? And if this guy is so good how come he hasn’t even bothered to check this out?
I explain it to him nicely. “It’s Jobs,” I say. “Rhymes with knobs.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Great.”
Fair enough. I don’t like him. Who says I need to like the guy? I ask him my usual job applicant questions, like, “How many times have you done LSD?” and “When did you lose your virginity?”
“Pass,” he says. “Now listen. I’ve looked over everything, and I hate to tell you, but honestly, the government does have a case here. Not a big case, but a case. Enough to indict anyway.”
He goes on to tell me how things will work, which is that, just like in the Martha Stewart case, they’ll bring me in and ask me loads of questions and try to get me to li
e.
“It’s called a perjury trap,” he says. “Martha fell for it. But don’t worry. I’m going to be with you. We’re not going to walk into that. Martha’s big mistake was she went in there without a lawyer thinking she could talk to these assholes like they’re human beings. Know this right now. These are not human beings. And this is not about justice. This is about savage motherfuckers—excuse my French, I’m sorry—savage predators who want to make a name by taking you down. I know, because I used to be one of them. You ever watch these shows on the nature channels, out on the Serengeti or whatever? With the predator and the prey? It’s like that. It’s not because it’s right or wrong. It’s not about the law, or justice. These guys are predators. They’ve decided to hunt you. Okay? Are we straight on this?”
“This meeting isn’t doing a lot for my mood,” I tell him.
“Hey, look, you should be smiling! We can do way better than Martha. She did five months in and five months with a bracelet. The worst we’re going to do is one or the other. Five at home with a bracelet, or five inside and no bracelet.”
“Wow. Only five months? Well now I feel great. How much are you charging me?”
“It’s like I tell Tom. You want someone to tickle your asshole with a feather, hire Richard Simmons, or go talk to those cheerleaders you got working on your legal team at Apple. You want the truth, call me.”
He says we should definitely put off meeting Doyle for as long as possible, and whatever I do, I should never sit down with Doyle or talk to anyone from his office unless I’ve got DiMarco and about fifty other lawyers with me. I tell him Doyle looks to me like a complete frigtard and he says, “No, see, that’s where you’re wrong. Doyle is a very, very smart guy. And this kid he’s got working for him, this William Poon? Scary smart. And fucking vicious.”
“Maybe you hadn’t noticed,” I say, “but I’m pretty smart myself.”
He coughs into his hand and says we should move on and discuss strategy. He starts to explain his plan of action but I cut him off and tell him I’ve already figured out the strategy.
“First off, we admit Sonya and Zack actually did something funky, and maybe they deserve to go to jail. But what does any of this have to do with me? You see? Where’s the connection? I don’t see it. Yes, they gave the options to me. If anything, that makes me the victim. They dragged me into this. Right? I didn’t put my name on any documents. They did.”
“Well,” he says, “I like the way you’re thinking here.”
“So can we run with this?”
“Um, no.”
“What?”
“Look, it’s complicated. Anyway, the point is, anything that happens from now on, you let me deal with it. Okay? You don’t say anything. No more meetings with Sampson. Definitely no meetings with the feds. You got it? Unless I look it over first and set the ground rules and sit there with you.”
He gets up to leave.
“You know what else I don’t get?” I say.
“What’s that.”
“Bill Gates foists Windows off on the world, and he remains a free man. I give the world OS X, the iMac, and the friggin iPod. I save Apple from what looked like certain death. I make billions for our shareholders. Now they want to throw me in prison and throw away the key. What’s up with that?”
“Hey,” he says, “I’m a lawyer, not a shrink, all right? Here.” He hands me his card. “There’s a cell number on the back, in red. That’s my private line. Call me any time you want, day or night. Doesn’t matter what time it is. And like I said, zip the lip.”
Next morning I arrive at the Jobs Pod and there on my desk— the big one, the one with nothing on it— someone has placed a copy of the Wall Street Journal. Ja’Red swears he has no idea how it got onto my desk. “It was there when I got in,” he says.
The paper has been taken apart so that the B section is on top. Right on page B1 they’ve got one of their cheesy little line drawings of my own chief operating officer, Jim Bell. There’s also a huge profile, which fills the entire right-hand column of B1, and a full jump page describing what a wonderful, smart, professional guy Jim Bell is, telling all about his childhood in Mississippi and where he went to college and how he was summa cum laude at Ole Miss and first in his class at Stanford Business School. Man.
In case you don’t know what it means to have your company’s Number Two guy glowingly profiled on B1 of the Wall Street Journal, let me explain it to you: someone is trying to kill me. And I’m pretty sure I know who it is.
This maneuver is classic Tom Bowditch, using the press to tee up his new CEO. You can tell it’s Tom because with Tom it’s always the Journal. Not the Times. Tom hates the Times, thinks they’re too liberal. But he’s got friends at the Journal. He feeds them dirt on companies, and in return, when he needs a favor, he picks up the phone. He’ll put a bug in the ear of some editor at the Journal, who passes word to some other editor, and next thing you know it’s getting mentioned to a reporter, and it’s all so smooth that this poor sap reporter who wrote the article probably believes he thought it up himself.
Basically, Tom is the devil. I’ve always known that. I just thought that he was my devil. Wrong, apparently. The other reason I know he’s involved is because I know Jim Bell wouldn’t have the balls to try to stab me in the back on his own.
So what can I do? I call Jim, ostensibly to congratulate him. My call goes through to voice mail. I try Tom. Suddenly he’s not picking up either. So I leave him a voice mail saying, “I know this is your work, asshole. I’ve seen you in operation, doing this very same thing when you were on the board at Ford, remember?”
Of course Tom isn’t quoted in the story or even mentioned by name. Neither is Jim Bell. They make a big point of saying that Jim Bell wouldn’t speak to the reporter. Same for Apple. A company spokesman declined to comment.
So let’s think about this. One day, for no good reason, and with no cooperation from Apple, the Journal just decided to profile some executive at Apple that nobody has ever heard of before. Really. Wow. Plus the story is loaded up with a bunch of flattering quotes and anecdotes from Jim’s friends. You think those people spoke to the Journal without Jim’s permission? Please.
But I must admit, whoever put this together did a splendid job. It’s one of those stories where the real message is located between the lines, and you need to decode it. It’s aimed directly at the guys on Wall Street. And the not-so-hidden message is, “Don’t worry, even if Jobs goes to jail, the company will be fine. There’s no reason to dump the stock.”
Some examples:
Jim Bell is a quiet and soft-spoken guy who stays out of the limelight but is largely responsible for keeping the company running. Translation: He’s already running the place.
When Steve Jobs had cancer a couple years ago, Jim Bell was in charge of the company. Translation: Don’t worry, we’re fine without El Jobso.
Jim Bell often receives inquiries from recruiters who want him to become CEO of some other company. Translation: He’s CEO material, and he’ll be great here.
Jim Bell has no connection to the mess with stock options. Translation: He’s clean, and ethical, unlike that son of a bitch Steve Jobs.
The article contains a few anecdotes about how old Jim straightened up our manufacturing processes and how everyone likes him. He’s smart and analytical and detail-oriented, and a courtly Southern gentleman to boot, as opposed to yours truly, who’s described as having a “mercurial temper and sharp tongue” and who “recently fired Apple’s legendary head of engineering, Michael Dinsmore, a move that alienated many inside the company.”
Bottom line: a coup is brewing. There’s a mutiny in the ranks, a battle for control of the company. It’s like that movie where the babysitter is getting these creepy phone calls so she calls the phone company and the operator says the creepy calls are coming from inside the house.
How long until the mutineers make their move? I give myself a month, tops. Any day now the phone will ring and
it’ll be Tom Bowditch telling me we have a special board meeting. Next thing you know I’ll be sipping margaritas with Carly Fiorina and Scott McNealy at some support group meeting for washed-up CEOs at Bennigan’s in Santa Clara. Maybe I can take up Segway polo with Woz. Or spend some of my money and get myself shot up into space, like all the other billionaires who don’t know what to do with themselves. Damn.
When I finally do reach Tom Bowditch he doesn’t even bother trying to deny it. “Kid,” he says, “we’re trying to cover our asses here, okay? This isn’t personal. It’s business. And this Dinsmore thing, kid, it’s serious. I’m urging you to seriously reconsider. At a time like this, to be firing key people? Think how it looks. And if you’re not careful you’re going to have a mutiny on your hands down there in the engineering labs.”
I try to seem cool. I tell Tom that I appreciate his position and that I’ll be happy to step aside if he thinks that’s what’s best for the company.
“I just hope you and the rest of the board remember what this company looked like before I came back,” I say.
“We all know how important you are to the company.”
“Important? I’m Steve Jobs.”
“That’s right.” He sighs. “You’re Steve Jobs.”
“I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?”
He says that yes, he’s heard of the iPod. I tell him that maybe he thinks I’m a pushover because the last time they kicked me out I put my tail between my legs and split. Well, not this time. This time I’m not some dumb kid. This time I’m fifty-one years old and I’ve got five billion dollars in the bank.
“I can hire enough lawyers to fight this thing for the rest of my life,” I say.
“You may have to do that.”
“You know what? You and Jim Bell want to rumble with me? Okay then, let’s do it. You want war? I’ll give you a war you’ll never forget.”
He says, “Steve. Please. Come on. It’s not like that.”
But he’s lying and we both know it. Because it is like that. It’s exactly like that.
