The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [113]
The irony about Steve Jobs is that he strives obsessively to make products for the masses but he is often mean-spirited when one of the little people dares to engage him in a conversation about his work or his products. Steve’s handlers at his public appearances say that while Steve is masterful onstage in front of thousands of fans, he is uncomfortable face-to-face with single fans and he hates signing autographs. When a Next salesman tried to talk with Steve at a Next sales conference in Santa Cruz, Steve kept interrupting the man mid-sentence and repeating, “You don’t know whereof you speak.” Even as Next was struggling, Steve dared humiliate a loyal salesman in front of his peers.
No-name ordinary people never get much of a chance with Steve, but even the most brilliant and accomplished people have trouble getting along with him for more than a few years. “Quite honestly, no one is Steve’s friend,” says Guy Kawasaki, who did two stints as an Apple executive and has had careers as a successful author and entrepreneur. “Either you are useful to him or not. Steve isn’t immoral, he’s amoral. He doesn’t know that what he’s doing is wrong. He calls you a bozo but not because he wants to hurt you.”
“It’s hard being his friend,” says Bob Metcalfe, who has done so for twenty-two years. “He’s pissed off the rest of the world. He burns a lot of people and they can’t understand. And when you’re with him he’s so opinionated and expressive. My rule is not to let myself be persuaded by Steve when we’re together. Steve can win any argument, even when he’s wrong, because you can’t assemble the facts quickly enough. Steve pisses people off because he can bully them intellectually and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He will not go along with the gang. He’s not really a team player. He’s persuasive even when it’s not in his interest to be so.”
Steve is oddly intolerant even with other powerful people. In the late 1990s, Steve and Laurene invited Bob Metcalfe to picnic with them at a Joan Baez benefit concert in a park. When Bob took out his roast-beef sandwich, Steve glared and lectured him about eating meat.
Steve is maddening and demanding as a friend, but he can be intensely loyal in certain cases. He kept up his support for old college friend Elizabeth Holmes even when she spent a few years in a Marin County commune that turned into a pernicious religious cult. When Elizabeth was matched with another cult member in an arranged marriage, Steve was the only one of her friends from the outside world who accepted the invitation and attended her wedding.
Steve expected his friends to be intensely loyal to him. When the Next cofounders began to quit on him in the early 1990s, it was like “breaking a covenant of trust,” recalls Susan Barnes. Steve would only let them back into his world if he wanted or needed something from them. Not surprisingly, Steve came to the end of the 1990s with few longtime friends. He was still in contact occasionally with Bill Fernandez, his best buddy from his high school years, who had moved to Tucson and become a freelance website designer. Bill was touched when Steve said that Bill was the person who had known him the longest now that both of Steve’s adoptive parents had died. Steve also said that Bill was his model for how to be a father. Bill was proud of his role as a parent, but he was surprised by the comment, since Steve never bothered to ask Bill for advice about parenting, except for one time when Steve asked about protecting kids from the dangers of light sockets.
Steve’s friends realized that much of his charm came from his flattery, but Steve was so deft that they usually fell for it anyway. In the late 1990s, when Steve was trying to renew his friendship with Jef Raskin following many years of estrangement, Steve knew the right strings to pull.