Begin with a snapshot. In the foreground is Apple CEO Steve Jobs, onstage at the Moscone Center at this year’s Macworld conference, the annual gathering of the Apple faithful. Many in the audience camped out on the sidewalk overnight to ensure they’d get in, a modern-day cargo cult awaiting news from above. And now, as Jobs begins describing this year’s trove of bright, shiny objects, a hush falls over the crowd.
Naturally, he is wearing his trademark Silicon Valley–boho outfit: black mock turtleneck and jeans, granny glasses on his nose, stubble on his cheeks, as if he’d spent all night in front of the LCD’s hypnotic glow. Jobs is in his element here, conjuring the market power of the iPhone and the iPod and dropping hints of what’s to come. Even though Apple’s recent offerings fall well short of revolutionary (see that gorgeous but flawed ultrathin laptop), it hardly matters. An hour and a half later, Jobs says goodbye, hands clasped in a modified namaste, and the audience cheers.
This is the Steve Jobs we know: the visionary college dropout who, with Steve Wozniak and $1,000 in seed money, cofounded Apple in 1976; the hippie entrepreneur who sold the idea of personal computing to the masses. He helped bring the original Mac to market almost a quarter-century ago and bankrolled a struggling Pixar through its early years. More recently, he has presided over Apple’s transformation from has-been computer maker to digital-lifestyle trendsetter, orchestrating the rollout of the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, which have changed life as we know it.
Snapshots, though, aren’t three-dimensional. As those who’ve followed his career know, there is another Jobs. This is the volcano-tempered boss who evaluates work with a tossed-off “This is shit” and fires employees on a whim, the young multimillionaire who once refused to pay child support, the Zen adherent who laps the globe in his $40 million Gulfstream jet. Despite his genius, Jobs has earned a spot alongside Henry Ford and Donald Trump in the pantheon of tycoons whose accomplishments are matched only by the size of their egos.
All of which raises a question or two. Why does such a manifestly brilliant guy have to be such a jerk? And why do so many of us love him anyway?
In recent years, several biographers have gamely tried to chart the depths of Jobs’ psyche, with little help from the man himself. He rarely speaks to the press, save for tightly scripted sound bites, so all these accounts are based on talks with old colleagues and Apple Deep Throats, supplemented by occasional in-depth interviews he’s granted to a few lucky reporters over the years. (This magazine has tried a number of times to coax Jobs into a sit-down. No dice.)
Each biographer makes much of the Great Man/Awful Man paradox. A seeker from the get-go, 19-year-old Jobs traveled to India in search of enlightenment, but he bargained with the locals so aggressively, according to Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon’s exhaustive iCon (2005), that he was almost run out of town. And in the decades since Jobs and Woz created Apple, claims Alan Deutschman in his engaging and gossipy, if now slightly dated, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs (2000), the “Good Steve” who inspires employees has become inextricably tied to the “Bad Steve” who terrorizes them.
So Jobs is a bundle of contradictions, everyone agrees. In his just-published biography, Leander Kahney, managing editor of Wired News and author of The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod, argues more precisely that it is Jobs’ proprietary brand of bad behavior that makes him great. Jobs’ unpleasant ways are actually adaptive traits, the business-world equivalent of an opposable thumb. “Where some see control freakery,” Kahney writes in Inside Steve’s Brain, “others see a desire to craft a seamless, end-to-end user experience. Instead of perfectionism, there’s the pursuit of excellence. And instead of screaming abuse, there’s the passion to make a dent in the universe.”
A convenient apologia, to be sure, but it rings true. Jobs has always had more of the “vision thing” than other CEOs, more of a proselytizer’s worldview, and his career can be read as the sustained pursuit of the goal he laid out at Apple’s birth: to put new technologies into the hands of ordinary users. Jobs’ force of will and hustler’s ruthlessness have carried the day again and again, from his bare-knuckled bargaining with former Disney chief Michael Eisner in the mid-1990s over the fate of Pixar to the 99-cents-a-song sweetheart deal he negotiated with major record labels in 2003 for his fledgling iTunes store. Occasionally, his pride got the better of him, as when he left Apple in the 1980s to form NeXT, a forward-thinking computer maker that flopped. But in 1997, Jobs engineered a triumphant return to Apple—and, soon after, the ouster of the Apple executive who invited him back. Where other biographers chase after ghosts, though, trying to persuade us that Jobs has become kinder and gentler over the years (he has been happily married, with kids, for decades), the new book makes clear that the King of Cupertino’s core traits—which Kahney defines as “obsessiveness, narcissism, perfectionism”—haven’t changed one bit.
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