For five years the owner of the Jackling House in Woodside, California, has been trying to knock it down. He hates it so much that he has abandoned it to live a few miles away in Palo Alto. Pictures of the interior show a ghostly, decaying mansion. The owner can't knock it down because of protests from conservationists. But a deal has been done. He will spend US$600,000 to have it taken down and rebuilt elsewhere - not a big victory by his standards but a satisfying one. He has been having a hard time lately.
In June, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Inc and owner of Jackling House, had had a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, in April. He'd taken a house in Memphis to be nearby if a liver became available. He had chosen Tennessee because of its short transplant waiting list. But, even there, to get to the top of the list means you have to be close to death. He was, the hospital confirmed, "the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time".
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, author of the Apple 2.0 blog at CNNmoney.com, e-mails the grim details of his operation: "He's lost his gall bladder, part of his stomach, part of his pancreas, the upper end of his small intestine and now has someone else's liver, which probably means he'll be on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his life. That can't be fun."
Apple is worth about US$140 billion. But is it worth anything without Jobs? It is a company formed around his personality and inspiration. It is also the most watched, envied, admired and adored company in the world. And yet on January 5, Jobs had written to the "Apple Community" explaining that he was ill and taking six months off work. "Fortunately, after further testing," he wrote, "my doctors think they have found the cause - a hormone imbalance that has been 'robbing' me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis." So how, you may wonder, was it possible for Jobs to put out such a statement four months before a liver transplant? And how was it possible for consumer capitalism's greatest hero to pull off the Memphis Liver Caper in absolute secrecy?
The answer is that, along with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple's signature products. A cult of corporate omerta - the mafia code of silence - is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered.
"The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political," says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, "and often is an impediment to actually getting one's work done."
Some say another sign that Apple omerta has gone too far was the death of Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of Apple machines. He was given 16 prototypes of new iPhones. One disappeared. Facts beyond that get hazy but it is clear that Sun committed suicide by jumping from a 12th-storey apartment. Internet babble says he killed himself because of the vanished prototype and, therefore, because of Apple's obsessive secrecy. Yet secrecy is Apple's core marketing tool.
Jobs' specialities are two-hour presentations to prayer meetings of the faithful. These always end with the words "and one last thing", at which point he unveils the latest gizmo to geek hallelujahs. Rumours suggest he is, in spite of the transplant, about to do it again in the next few weeks. It will be a dual sensation: the sight of a walking, talking Jobs and of a new tablet computer, a sort of giant iPhone, which, some say, will yet again change the world. Excitement intensified early this month when an unnamed analyst was reported as having held the tablet. He said it was "better than your average movie experience".
The secrecy is all about preserving the magic of each new product. Apple hates personality stuff and press intrusion.
"We want to discourage profiles," an Apple representative says stiffly. Another rings around to try to halt the original publication of this piece.
Jobs doesn't like being questioned. Despite his attempts to find serenity through Zen Buddhism, the agony of interviews can get to him.
"He's a tough, prickly interview," says Elmer-DeWitt, "and he's always selling. Hard."
In fact, any interview situation with Jobs can turn nasty. One excessively strait-laced candidate for a job at Apple bored him so much, he sprang questions such as "How old were you when you lost your virginity?" and "How many times have you taken LSD?" (Jobs has said that taking LSD was one of the most important things in his own life.) Then he lapsed into a chant of "Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble."
"I guess I'm not the right guy for this job," said the candidate finally.
The liver transplant was not Jobs' first near-death experience. In 2004, he was found to have pancreatic cancer. This usually means certain death. It turned out his tumour was rare and operable. He returned to work and, in 2007, launched the iPhone. The iPhone joined the Mac computer, the iPod and the films of Pixar Animation Studios, all vastly successful, influential products brought to market by Jobs. But, even as the faithful queued overnight to get their hands on the first iPhones, new rumours were circulating about his health. These were given almost comical credence when his obituary was accidentally published by the Bloomberg news service in August last year. Then, in January, Jobs made his announcement. Then came news of the transplant. This indicated the cancer had spread to his liver. The signs are not good. On the other hand, he seems to be up and about. He has gone back to work and he's been seen at a concert by British band Coldplay.
The drama of it all is intense, important - not least for Apple shareholders - and strangely thrilling. Jobs, in business, has died before and risen from the grave. For the past 12 years he has been the risen god of Silicon Valley. Although, judged simply as an office politician, he can seem pretty hopeless. He blew it in 1985. Having launched the Macintosh, he was driven out of Apple by John Sculley, the chief executive he had lured from Pepsi-Cola with the words, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" Many at Apple were happy to see Jobs go.
That's Bad Steve. But then there's Good Steve. Abused employees, if they survive, often find themselves praised to the heavens. They ride on what is know as the "hero-asshole roller coaster" and they live inside the "reality distortion field": Jobs' uncanny ability to convince people that the utterly impossible is, in fact, entirely possible.
Good Steve is the only businessman to be accorded rock-god status by millions. Apple nuts queue overnight to hear him speak and they aren't wrong for one crucial reason: though personally worth US$3.4 billion, Jobs is one of them, the great consumer of his own products.
"Jobs is not an engineer," says writer Dan Lyons, "he can't really design anything and he doesn't know anything about circuits. But he is the ultimate end-user, the guy who is on our side."
To call Jobs a control freak is to call rain wet. When building the first Mac, engineers wanted to include "expansion slots" into which people could slide kits to customise their machines. Jobs resisted. The machine was his and it had to be closed and perfect. And he's still at it: he has made it impossible for buyers even to change the batteries on his latest laptops. Jobs also has a bizarre obsession with the insides of his machines. He drives his engineers mad by insisting that the insides look beautiful, even though his customers won't see them. This code of impenetrable perfection even extends to Jobs' view of his body. He has always been a fussy eater and health problems have intensified this. His favourite dish was once said to be shredded raw carrot without dressing.
Jobs is, in the words of the psychiatrist and scholar of leadership Michael Maccoby, "a productive narcissist". To Jobs, the world is an epiphenomenon, a side effect of his existence. Or rather, it is a pyramid with Jobs at the top, a few bright people just beneath him and then the rest of us - the "bozos". The customer bozo is not, to him, always right. His customer-relations motto is from Henry Ford: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." In a world driven by technology, only the technocrats know what we want and need.
Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, was once simply the Santa Clara Valley, a land of orchards. Now it's a land of smart, rich people who eat breakfast daily suffused with the conviction that today is the day they will make billions and change the world. It was here, in the town of Mountain View, that Jobs spent his childhood. He was born to Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali in San Francisco. They were young and unmarried and, as a result, he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. They seem to have provided a good home but many are convinced that the mere fact of the adoption did much to form Jobs' character. Maccoby thinks the key might be the idea of the absent or lost father.
"The very striking thing about productive narcissists, particularly men, is that they grow up in families where there is an absent or weak father figure. You can see this in narcissistic presidents like Obama, Clinton, Reagan and Nixon. They struggle with their identity and view of the world. So they tend to come up with a very original view of things and are then driven to find followers."
Jobs dropped out of college. Again, this seems to have been crucial. Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, says his lack of a proper education in a world of highly educated people left him permanently insecure, especially in matters of taste. "He was someone who had great wealth from his early 20s. He was worried about not being seen as a brilliant sophisticate, so he had gurus to help him. There was this anxiety about being judged, combined with a natural instinct about the tremendous importance of design."
There was another sense in which Jobs seemed to miss out. Deutschman says he "lagged the zeitgeist". He was too young - 12 in 1967 - to enjoy the full hippie, summer-of-love experience. Yet he seemed to want to catch up, travelling, like the Beatles, to India to find enlightenment and returning, unlike the Beatles, a Buddhist. Desperate to catch up, he even dated Joan Baez, the folk-sing-ing goddess of the counterculture. Some said it was because she had been Bob Dylan's lover, and Jobs is crazy about Dylan. According to Deutschman's book, he later said gracelessly: "I would have married Joan Baez but she was too old to have my children."
Which brings me to the matter of Jobs and women. This has been a rocky road. When his first serious girlfriend, Chris-Ann, became pregnant, he refused to accept it was anything to do with him. Lisa, his daughter, was born in a commune in Oregon in 1978. They have since been reconciled. That would be that but for the fact that, in the early 1980s, Jobs rediscovered his biological parents. They had married and had a daughter, Mona Simpson, his sister. She was a highly regarded novelist, who in 1996 published A Regular Guy, about a driven, narcissistic superstar businessman and his relations with the daughter he had abandoned.
At every turn, Jobs' story seems to grow into fiction and then myth. He seems to go for blond, athletic Californian girls. It may be one more aspect of his pursuit of belonging in the pampered groves of the Valley. In 1991, at a Zen Buddhist ceremony, he married a woman - Laurene Powell - with precisely that look. They are still together and have three children.
His eviction from Apple in 1985 was a death and he did not go gently into that good night. One day he called Andrea Cunningham, a PR, to the Jackling House to talk about his new company. She found him in the almost entirely unfurnished house haranguing journalists about the iniquities of his usurper, Sculley. "He was pretty much ranting," she says. "It was just amazing."
Then came the wilderness years. Apple lost its way and, by the mid-1990s, it was on the verge of collapse. Its computers were dull and the Apple operating system was awful. Jobs' new company, NeXT, meanwhile, went nowhere. It made beautiful-looking computers for education. But they were expensive and impossible to sell.
In 1986 he bought - from the creator of Star Wars, George Lucas - a strange commune of brilliant men who were convinced that movies could be made on computers. It was called Pixar. They were inventing the technology as they went along. That, too, seemed to be going nowhere.
Saddled with these increasingly implausible projects, Jobs saw his massive wealth begin to dwindle. But vengeance is his and he will repay. Pixar went into partnership with Disney to produce Toy Story and Apple, crippled and loss-making, took over NeXT and brought Jobs back into the fold. Within months he was god again. Pixar grossed millions, then billions, and Apple brushed the dirt off its face and leapt out of the grave. First came the iMac, a toy-like, one-box desktop computer that can still be seen in groovy offices. Then in 2002 came the real payoff for the grim NeXT years. Mac OS X, the new operating system, was based on NeXT software. It was superb, infinitely better than Microsoft Windows and infinitely more beautiful. Millions returned to Apple.
World domination, however, was still to be had. He took it with the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. The first stole almost the whole of the MP3-player market and the second is doing the same to the mobile-phone market. Apple is now the consumer-electronics company by which all others are judged and found wanting.
Inevitably, with his health hanging by a thread, this raises the question: can they do without his burning product perfectionism?
"A lot of companies can do without that," Cunningham says. "There's probably a lot of business they can do with long-term incremental improvements to their products. But are they ever going to have another breakthrough product? I don't know."
"Apple will keep executing its current business plan," says Elmer-DeWitt. "But it will be different in one key respect: with Jobs there was a guy at the beginning and end of every project who had the authority to say, 'This sucks. Start over.' Whoever replaces him may share his vision and job title but he or she will not be the co-founder of Apple and won't have the same authority."
Then there is the mighty, epic question of Jobs himself. Can the Valley do without him? Can we? Opinions of his career swing between the Bad Steve/Good Steve poles. Those who focus on the former think he could have done it all without the tantrums and brutality. Gifted people have been damaged horribly by his behaviour. Jobs took against Alvy Ray Smith at Pixar and cut him out of the company history.
"He has failed many times but the press and the public overlook that in their rush to glorify him," says Smith.
Deutschman's book is a cool look at Bad Steve and poses the good question once asked by a college friend of Jobs: "How much of an asshole do you have to be to be highly successful?"
"I think Deutschman's book was a hatchet job," says Andy Hertzfeld, part of the original Macintosh design team, who is now at Google. "Steve is a complicated individual. Like many of us, the good and the bad aspects of his personality are inextricably linked."
"I think we need productive narcissists like Jobs," says Maccoby. "But there are always quirks. You may get an Abraham Lincoln or you may get an Adolf Hitler; you may get a Winston Churchill or you may get a Joseph Stalin."
The strength and relative stability of the firm make it clear that Jobs learned something from his first fall and his second coming. He learned, says Maccoby, that a narcissistic personality like his, with extremely dodgy people skills, needs a more consensual character to stay in check.
He found one in Tim Cook, Apple's comparatively serene chief operating officer and the likeliest successor. He's not Jobs but he's a rarity in the Valley - a "safe pair of hands".
All agree that Jobs made Apple into more than a company. To the believers it is a great cause; to the sceptics it is more sinister. "Apple is less of a company and more like a cult," says Lyons. "If the Church of Scientology went into consumer electronics it would be Apple."
The status of the company is beyond argument. It is watched by bloggers who trawl through its patent applications and analyse its every move. Yet the company continues to surprise and amaze.
Geniuses tend to see their own lives as universally significant, embodying the great currents of their age. They may not know they are doing this but it is evident in their work. Everything about Jobs suggests this is how he sees his life, as the distillation of the hi-tech revolution and of affluent, aspirational consumerism. He is, as Lyons says, "the ultimate end-user", both consumer and maker. He is one with the bozos and their gizmos. That's who he is.
The Times
