What I have always loved about business journalism, and what I have learned from the very best colleagues I’ve worked with, is that there is always a human side to the seemingly calculated world of industry. I knew this was true about Steve when he was alive—no one else I have ever covered was so passionate about the creations of his business. But only in writing this book have I come to understand just how much the personal life and the business life of Steve Jobs overlapped, and just how much the one informed the other. You can’t really understand how Steve became our generation’s Edison and Ford and Disney and Elvis, all rolled into one, until you understand this. It’s what makes his reinvention such a great tale.

AT THE END of our first interview, Steve walked me down the neat and glimmering hallways of NeXT’s headquarters to the exit. We didn’t exchange small talk. As far as he was concerned, our conversation was over. As I exited he didn’t even say goodbye. He just stood there, looking out the glass doors toward the entrance of the parking lot on Deer Creek Road where a crew of workmen was installing a 3-D version of the NeXT logo. As I drove away, he was lingering there still, staring at his hundred-grand logo. He knew in his bones, as he would say, that he was about to do something great. In reality, of course, he had no idea what was ahead of him.

Chapter 1

Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah

On a cold December afternoon in 1979, Steve Jobs pulled into the parking lot of the Garden of Allah, a retreat and conference center on the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He was tired, frustrated, angry, and late. The traffic on 280 and 101 had been at a standstill much of the way up from Cupertino, way down south in Silicon Valley, where the company he’d founded, Apple Computer, had its headquarters, and where he had just suffered through a meeting of Apple’s board of directors, which was chaired by the venerable Arthur Rock. He and Rock didn’t see eye-to-eye on much of anything. Rock treated him like a child. Rock loved order, he loved processes, he believed that tech companies grew in certain ways according to certain rules, and he subscribed to these beliefs because he’d seen them work before, most notably at Intel, the great Santa Clara chipmaker that he had backed early on. Rock was perhaps the most notable tech investor of his time, but he in fact had been reluctant to back Apple at first, largely because he’d found Steve and his partner Steve Wozniak unpalatable. He didn’t see Apple the way Jobs saw it—as an extraordinary company that would humanize computing and do so with a defiantly unhierarchical organization. Rock simply viewed it as another investment. Steve found board meetings with Rock enervating, not invigorating; he had looked forward to a long, fast drive to Marin with the top down to get rid of the stale stench of seemingly endless discussion.

But the Bay Area was shrouded in mist and rain, so the top stayed up. Slick roads made the traffic stultifying, so much so that it took all the pleasure out of the drive in his brand-new Mercedes-Benz 450SL. Steve loved the car; he loved it the way he loved his Linn Sondek audiophile turntable and his Ansel Adams platinum prints. The car, in fact, was a model for what he thought computers should be: powerful, sleek, intuitive, and efficient, nothing wasted at all. But this afternoon the weather and the traffic had defeated the car. Consequently he was about half an hour late to the initial meeting of the Seva Foundation, a creation of his friend Larry Brilliant, who looked like a little Buddha himself, albeit in track shoes. Seva’s goal was pleasingly ambitious: eliminate a certain kind of blindness that affected millions of people in India.

Steve parked and got out of the car. At six feet tall and a trim 165 pounds, with brown hair that touched his shoulders and deep, penetrating eyes, he would have been striking anywhere. But in the three-piece suit he’d worn to the board meeting he looked particularly resplendent. Jobs didn’t quite know how he felt about the suit. At Apple, people wore whatever they wanted. He often showed up barefoot.

The Garden of Allah was a quaint sort of mansion, built on a hillock up Mount Tamalpais, the verdant peak overlooking San Francisco Bay. Nestled into a covey of redwoods and cypress trees, it meshed classic California Arts and Crafts style with the feel of a Swiss chalet. Built in 1916 for a wealthy Californian by the name of Ralston Love White, it had been operated by the United Church of Christ since 1957 as a retreat and meeting site. Steve walked across the lawn of the heart-shaped driveway, climbed some stairs to a broad veranda, and entered the building.

Inside, one look at the crew gathered around the conference table would have told any casual bystander this was not your typical church gathering. On one side of the table was Ram Dass, the Jewish-born Hindu yogi who in 1971 had published one of Steve’s favorite books, Be Here Now, a bestselling guide to meditation, yoga, and spiritual seeking. Nearby sat Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead singer and guitarist—the Dead would be performing a benefit for Seva at the Oakland Coliseum on December 26. Stephen Jones, an epidemiologist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, was in attendance, as was Nicole Grasset. Brilliant and Jones had worked for Grasset in India and Bangladesh as part of the World Health Organization’s audacious—and successful—program to eradicate smallpox. The counterculture’s favorite trickster philosopher, Wavy Gravy, was there, too, sitting with his wife near Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, the founder of India’s Aravind Eye Hospital, which eventually would help millions of people with an operation that repairs blindness caused by cataracts, a malady that then plagued the region. Brilliant was hoping to pull off something almost as audacious as wiping out smallpox. His goal for Seva was that it would support the work of people like Dr. V (as Brilliant called Venkataswamy) by setting up eye camps throughout Southern Asia to restore sight to the blind in poor rural areas.

Steve recognized a few of the folks. Robert Friedland, the guy who had convinced him to make a pilgrimage to India in 1974, came up and said hello. And he recognized Weir, of course; he admired the Grateful Dead, even though he thought they didn’t have the emotional or intellectual depth of Bob Dylan. Steve had been invited to the gathering by Brilliant, whom he’d first met in India, five years earlier. After Friedland sent him a 1978 article detailing the success of the smallpox program and talking a bit about Brilliant’s next steps, Steve sent Brilliant five thousand dollars to help get Seva rolling.

It was quite a collection of people: Hindus and Buddhists, rockers and doctors, all accomplished, all gathered in the United Church of Christ’s Garden of Allah. Clearly, this was not the place for your traditional corporate chieftain, but Steve should have fit right in. He meditated often. He understood the search for spiritual fulfillment—in fact, he had gone to India specifically to learn from Brilliant’s guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji, who had died just a few days before Steve arrived. Jobs felt a deep restlessness to change the world, not just build a mundane business. The iconoclasm, the intersections of different disciplines, the humanity present in that room, all were representative of what Steve aspired to. And yet for some reason he couldn’t settle in.

There were at least twenty people in the room Steve didn’t recognize, and the conversation had not quieted or slowed much when he introduced himself. It seemed to him that many of them didn’t even know who he was, which was a little surprising, especially in the Bay Area. Apple was already something of a phenomenon: the company was selling more than 3,000 computers a month—up from around 70 a month at the end of 1977. No computer company had ever blossomed this way, and Steve was sure the next year would be even more explosive.