Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [140]
But for Scott the parting was devastating. In his darkest moments, he contemplated trying to assert that his authority had been wrongfully usurped and dreamed about returning to Apple and firing every vice-president. Rod Holt recognized the degree of Scott’s attachment to Apple. “Scotty had his whole life associated with Apple Computer. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. Scotty was always working. It didn’t leave him any margin for emotional distress, a drinking bout, or a hangover.”
Even though he owned the fifth largest chunk of the company, Scott stayed at his ranch house a few minutes’ drive from Apple, with the shades drawn. For a time he didn’t answer his telephone. When people called he said he felt fine though he didn’t bother to reply to some of the notes of sympathy that arrived. For months afterward when talk turned to Apple Scott’s face looked glum and he became morose and listless. About the only time his spirits perked up was when he showed that he could still remember all the parts numbers of the Apple II. But mostly Scott slept late, fed his cats, sprawled on an enormous couch, and watched television on a screen that dropped down from the ceiling of his living room. He played the organ, listened to Wagner, fielded telephone calls from his stockbroker, and made occasional trips to a nearby garbage dump to launch model plastic rockets into the sky. “Apple,” he kept saying at the time, “was my baby.”
Among the people who knew Scott well, there was a mixture of embarrassment, distress, shame, and fury. Markkula took a few people aside and confided that firing Scott was the hardest thing he had done in his life but that Apple couldn’t weather his personal problems.
Jobs probably understood better than anybody else the extent of Scott’s humiliation. For months Jobs nursed a bleak, private, guilty fear, “I was always afraid that I’d get a call to say that Scotty had committed suicide.”
THE PLATINUM CREDIT CARD
Wealth complicates life. At Apple riches arrived more quickly, with a greater force, and in larger quantities than anybody had contemplated. The sums involved were so disconcerting and extraordinary that they meant nothing when measured against hamburgers, sodas, walkie-talkie radios, and the other everyday yardsticks of El Camino Real. One obvious comparison was with great American fortunes but the term itself had become frowzy. In the last quarter of the twentieth century Apple’s founders and a few top managers became, in the malleable lingo of Silicon Valley, “zillionaires”—a perverse comment on inflation as much as language—and their portfolios assumed a distinctly Arabian flavor. They became young tycoons armed with a brute wealth that, at least on paper, was a match for most that had been made in the preceding one hundred years. Theirs were true fortunes which, on the occasions when the stock market treated Apple with reverence, came to dwarf the visible assets of the Prince of Wales, shade the tangible riches of the Catholic Church and make most of the captains of American industry look like paupers.
At the beginning of 1977, when Jobs, Wozniak, and Markkula had tried to place a value on the parts in the garage and the design of the Apple II, they valued the rump of the partnership at $5,309. A year later when the