The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [111]
From 1985 to 1995 he had felt alienated from the clubby atmosphere of the Silicon Valley establishment, but now he started to socialize more with the other techno-moguls. In 1998, Scott McNealy was talking about Steve with one of Steve’s former executives. Scott said that he liked Steve and that “we’re good friends but not get-drunk get-buck-naked friends.” But Scott tried to get a little closer to Steve. The following year, he planned a camping trip with Steve and Steve’s software executive, Avie Tevanian. The three men were all bringing along their young sons. Reed Paul Jobs could play with Maverick McNealy. Scott confessed privately that he wasn’t much of a camper but he always liked the opportunity to drink a lot of beer with his male buddies.
Steve Jobs began socializing more with business leaders from outside of the valley, too. He attended investment banker Herb Allen’s annual Fourth of July mogul-fest in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he hobnobbed with famous names like Oprah Winfrey, Paul Allen, Barry Diller, Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, Warren Buffett, and Katharine Graham. At the event he also rubbed shoulders with Michael Dell, who ate his words about how Steve should have closed down Apple. These days the rival mogul was saying publicly that Apple’s iMac was a “wake-up” call to the rest of the industry about the value of design and ease of use.
In its October 1999 issue Vanity Fair promoted Steve from No. 14 on its “New Establishment” power list to a lofty No. 7, ranking him above many CEOs from companies that were much larger than Apple, such as Disney’s Michael Eisner, IBM’s Louis Gerstner, and Intel’s Andy Grove. Steve had what Vanity Fair’s editor Graydon Carter liked to call the “X factor,” a charisma and buzz and fascination that was an invaluable asset for a mogul. Despite the high ranking, Steve was outraged by one paragraph in the Vanity Fair article, which read: “Jobs, 44, who is well known for his intolerance of ’bozos’ (i.e. people who aren’t nearly as smart as he is), signaled his dismay at one meeting by pouring a glass of water over the head of an employee. And during a job interview with a young woman, he was wearing loose-fitting shorts and no underwear, which didn’t stop him from uncrossing his legs and nonchalantly flashing the unsuspecting applicant.”
Steve was incensed when he read the passage (which was written by the author of this book). It exacerbated his resentment of the media. Later that week in September 1999, his public relations people brought him into a conference room to meet with an accomplished journalist. Their deal was that the forty-five-minute interview would be taped and transcribed and then appear verbatim as the cover story for Wired magazine. The journalist was a rabid admirer of Apple, and he was trying to provide a friendly forum for Steve’s ideas.
Steve stormed into the room and looked uncomfortable from the first minute.
The reporter began by asking an easy question that had been fed to him by the Apple p.r. people. Steve answered grudgingly, then began to berate the journalist.
“At forty-four, if you could go back and give advice to your twenty-five-year-old self, what would you say?” the reporter asked.
“Not to deal with stupid interviews,” Steve said in a nasty tone. “I have no time for this philosophical bullshit. I’m a very busy person.”
The reporter was shocked and intimidated. “My questions weren’t even close to hostile,” he recalls. “They were softball questions. But Steve was radiating