Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [146]
Jobs meanwhile was harried by private worries that had been provoked by the birth of a daughter to his high-school flame, Nancy Rogers. The child was born on Robert Friedland’s farm in May 1978 and Rogers was convinced that Jobs was the father. Jobs, who arrived at the farm a couple of days after the birth, helped Rogers settle on a name for the baby girl. They called her Lisa. After the birth Jobs and Rogers went their separate ways with the latter supporting herself and the child with the proceeds of a variety of waitressing and housecleaning jobs. Eventually she asked Jobs for a $20,000 settlement. Markkula, who thought this was too little, suggested Jobs pay $80,000. Jobs demurred and insisted that he wasn’t Lisa’s father. Absolutely convinced that he had nothing to do with the child, Jobs stopped making voluntary child-support payments on three occasions. “Each time we started to get a lawyer involved,” said Rogers’s father, “he started to pay.”
In May 1979 Jobs startled the Rogerses by agreeing to submit to blood tests to determine paternity. The analysis conducted by the department of surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, concluded: “The probability of paternity for Jobs, Steve . . . is 94.41%.” Jobs wasn’t swayed by the evidence and insisted that, thanks to statistical quirks, “twenty-eight percent of the male population of the United States could be the father.” Eventually he came to grips with what was an immensely painful matter and agreed to a court-ordered settlement. “I settled because we were going public and it was consuming a ton of emotional energy. I had to get it resolved. I didn’t want to defend a suit for ten million dollars.” Within a month of Apple’s stock offering, Jobs agreed to start paying Rogers $385 a month in child support, to cover the cost of the child’s medical and dental insurance, and also to reimburse the county of San Mateo for the $5,856 that it had spent on public assistance to support the baby.
As Jobs battled with his own troubles, outside interest in Apple continued to climb. The head of steam kept pushing up the price of the stock. At Apple the eventual price became the source of furtive bets and sweaty speculation. The price climbed so steeply that in Massachusetts the secretary of state for a time banned citizens of the Bay State from buying the stock because Apple violated state regulations that required a company’s book value to be at least 20 percent of the market value. During the first week of August 1980, Hambrecht and Quist (in which the Apple director and investor Arthur Rock was a limited partner) bought 40,000 shares for $5.44 each. When Apple’s first stock prospectus was published on November 6 it was anticipated that the stock would be priced between $14 and $17. Even on the morning of December 12, 1980, the day Apple finally went public, when the stock was priced at $22, there were still signs that it had been underpriced because at the end of the first day of trading it closed at $29.
The day of the stock issue turned into an unofficial company holiday. For of the 237 companies that made initial offerings in 1980, Apple’s was by far the largest and became the biggest initial offering since the Ford Motor Company went public in 1956. Apple’s switchboard operators found that a few callers were complaining that they hadn’t been warned about the actual day of the issue.
Around the company, computers were connected to the Dow Jones ticker and programmed to print the stock price every few minutes. There was a premature celebration when a few of the machines began spitting out the quotes for a company with the call letters APPL rather than Apple’s AAPL. Some people wanted to erect a mock thermometer