The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [1]
Steve’s dream was being liquidated. He was at the nadir.
• • •
BY THE END OF 1993, he had virtually disappeared from the public’s consciousness. And then, only two years later, something happened that was sublimely bizarre. He suddenly reemerged in the spotlight: triumphant, vindicated, and far richer than ever before. His stunning redemption came from an unexpected source: it turned out that he owned another company, Pixar, which had struggled quietly for a decade. In November 1995, Pixar released the first full-length computer-animated feature film, Toy Story. The following week, Steve took Pixar public, and investors clamored to buy the shares. His 70 percent stake was suddenly worth more than a billion dollars. And then, only a year later, he returned to Apple, which during his long absence had suffered a desperate decline and began spiraling toward its demise. In the summer of 1997 he took the title of interim chief executive officer and became the company’s unexpected savior. He propelled Apple’s stock price from $13 a share to $118 a share in late 1999, raising the market valuation from less than $2 billion to almost $20 billion. It was an extraordinary resurgence.
On January 5, 2000, he stood at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, where only a few years earlier he had agonized over the premature postmortem in The Wall Street Journal. This time, though, he was facing the crowd as a conquering hero.
He stalked the stage for a very long time—two hours and thirteen minutes. Who else, besides Fidel Castro, could command the attention of his troops for such a long oration? No one in American business was so hypnotic. No one was so charismatic. And so they sat there patiently, four thousand people waiting for the news. By now, they knew exactly what to expect from one of Steve’s grand speeches. He always saved his biggest revelation for the very end. He created an unbearable sense of anticipation. And when he finally got around to it, he always dropped the bomb in the most casual way, as though it were an afterthought, as if he were oblivious to all the excitement.
“One last thing,” he said nonchalantly. After two and a half years of hesitation and indecision, he was finally accepting the title of chief executive officer of Apple Computer.
The thousands rose and rejoiced. Wave after wave of applause resonated through the vast hall. They chanted his name like a mantra: “STEVE! STEVE! STEVE! STEVE!”
His attempt at stoical coolness finally gave way to a half-smile that betrayed his pride and then to a look of bashfulness at the unbridled commotion he had caused.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, and within seconds an eerie quiet was restored, as the faithful waited for more words from their leader.
“You guys are making me feel funny now,” he said sheepishly, “because I . . .”
He was so emotional that he had to stop for a moment and regain his composure.
“. . . because I get to come to work every day and work with the most talented people on the planet,” he said. “It’s the best job in the world.”
• • •
AS THE YEAR 2000 BEGAN, Steve Jobs was adulated by a press corps that only a few years earlier had delighted in lambasting him. The old rap claimed that he was some kind of mystical visionary but he couldn’t run a company—he wasn’t a “manager.” But now his photo appeared on the cover of the January 10th issue of Business Week for its story “The Top 25 Managers of the Year.” The following week Fortune, which had once called him a “snake-oil salesman,” put his smiling face on its cover with a headline exclaiming “Stevie Wonder!”
As he turned forty-five in February 2000, he was as legendary and celebrated as when he first became a pop-culture icon during the glory years of his twenties—maybe even more so. Still, for all the press coverage, it was hard to find a profile of Steve Jobs that went beyond the sycophantic and the smoothly superficial. His public image had become