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The managers in the room instantly became timid.

Jeff went ahead and outlined his three-month plan for change.

“Jeff, that might be the way you did it at HP,” Steve said. “But I’m not a three-month guy, I’m an overnight guy.”

Steve wanted to cut off abruptly Apple’s relationship with one of its suppliers. Jeff was opposed to the idea, saying that it would risk a lawsuit and tie up Apple’s inventory.

Steve wasn’t afraid of a lawsuit.

“Call them and say fuck ’em,” he instructed.

Jeff had fifteen years’ experience in his field, and he wasn’t afraid to argue his position with Steve. But Jeff’s self-confidence only made Steve become more abusive and profane.

As Jeff left the room, he thought: Steve must have said “fuck” at least forty-seven times.

“Just fuck ’em” became one of Steve’s favorite lines.

When he had taken over, he had inherited a program called SOS Apple, which let people sign a contract for unlimited customer support over the telephone for a lifetime. It was a bad financial move for Apple. Steve said to shut it down.

What about the customers who have a contractual obligation? Jeff asked.

“Just fuck ’em,” Steve said.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Apple over the issue. Apple lost.

Jeff Cooke resigned in late October, after only four months on the job. He decided that he couldn’t abide being entirely deferential to Steve and not being allowed to come up with his own ideas. Still, he believed that Steve was a “phenomenal leader,” and that Apple’s turnaround was due to Steve’s vision and Steve’s ability to rally people around a clear, focused set of objectives. “Steve can do that better than anyone I’ve ever seen,” he says. The catch was that Steve’s implementers needed to be selflessly subservient.

“I call it trading a little bit of your soul for a lot of money,” Jeff Cooke says.

• • •

IN OCTOBER 1998, the Apple turnaround was clinched. Steve announced a third consecutive quarterly profit, $105 million. Apple’s stock price had tripled since he took over. Vanity Fair promoted him from No. 32 to No. 14 on its annual “New Establishment” ranking of the fifty leaders of the information age, just behind the Hollywood power broker David Geffen. The two moguls were friends. David had recently been living in Steve’s apartment in the San Remo on Central Park West while waiting for his own Fifth Avenue residence to be remodeled. Steve could empathize with David’s plight: he had spent $15 million on the I. M. Pei redesign of his Manhattan co-op, and the construction phase had taken five years.

Steve’s coziness with David Geffen came at a time when Steve was publicly at odds with David’s business partner Jeffrey Katzenberg and their studio, DreamWorks. Pixar was slated to debut its second feature film, A Bug’s Life, at Thanksgiving, but Jeffrey had rushed his production of Antz to get it into theaters a month earlier. Steve accused Jeffrey of copying Pixar’s idea for an animated movie about ants, which Jeffrey might have been exposed to while he was still at Disney.

As he had with Toy Story, Steve held his own screening of A Bug’s Life for his Silicon Valley friends and misleadingly called it a premiere. He threw the event at the Flint Center, the same place where he had unveiled the Macintosh and the iMac. The black-tie reception was held in a huge tent in the parking lot, with waiters serving sushi as well as vegetarian and Thai food. Pixar set up a velvet rope at the front and recruited people to pretend to be autograph hounds and fawn over the computer guys as if they were movie stars. Steve stood near the entrance, personally greeting his guests as they arrived. His old friend Bob Metcalfe pulled up in a limousine with Katrina Heron, the editor in chief of Wired. Alvy Ray Smith showed up. Since his long feud with Steve, Alvy had become a research fellow at Microsoft in Seattle. “When you’re finished with that ’sabbatical’ up there, come back to Pixar,” Steve told him. Yeah, right, Alvy thought.

Louise Kehoe from the Financial Times spotted Larry Ellison. “Larry was looking miserable