• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Was Steve losing his mind?

Why risk blowing the deal with Perot?

Ross seemed oddly unfazed as Steve humiliated one of his own people. Ross turned to the man next to him and said: “I used to be like that when I was his age, but then I learned you catch more flies with honey. Steve, leave him alone and let’s get to work.”

• • •

IN FEBRUARY 1987 they did the deal. Perot paid $20 million for 16 percent of the company, or $1.25 million per percentage point. Steve had snookered him. Days earlier Steve had been offering stock to the Silicon Valley venture capitalists at one-fourth that price, only $300,000 per point, and they had rejected the offer as far too expensive. But Steve shrewdly grasped how excited Ross was. The older guy didn’t even flinch when Steve lost control and revealed his dark side. So Steve asked for an outrageously high price, and Ross paid up without hesitation.

Ross craved a piece of the future and he didn’t want to blow his chance over a few lousy million dollars. In 1979 he had talked with Bill Gates about buying Microsoft but he had balked at the asking price, which was less than $60 million. In 1986, after Microsoft went public, its stock had a value of well over $1 billion. Ross had passed up the opportunity to make more than sixteen times his money, a billion-dollar profit in only seven years. The easiest billion dollars . . . ever! He had blown it with Bill Gates! He wasn’t going to blow his second chance now with Steve.

So he visited the empty factory, he toured the Next headquarters at Deer Park Road, he met the staffers. They were wary of his media image as a jingoistic curmudgeon—Susan Barnes’s mother in Dallas had a bumper sticker that said “Honk if you hate Ross Perot”—but Steve asked them to decide for themselves. When they actually met Ross, they were charmed by him.

Weeks later, on his second visit to Deer Park, he bounded out of his limousine, entered the building, and greeted the receptionist by name. Then he went on to greet everyone by their first names. He amiably chatted up every employee who passed him randomly as he went through the hallways, no matter whether their positions were lofty or lowly. He would talk with them all as if they were old buddies. His approach to human relations was straight from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. He was an old-school salesman, a master of a dying art.

He did the deal, and he expected a lot of attention for it. When Ross talked about holding a press conference, he said: “Steve, you know we’ll get a lot of people to come, because you’re a white monkey and I’m a white monkey. Put the two of us in a cage and it’s a real circus.”

It was a circus. Louise Kehoe, a correspondent for London’s Financial Times, was astonished by how the aging billionaire was so visibly awed by the younger entrepreneur, how Ross Perot was exhibiting such fawning admiration. “He was acting like a starstruck teenager,” she recalls. “He was just totally blown away by Steve.”

• • •

IN THEIR BRIEF COURTSHIP Ross Perot saw the captivating side of Steve Jobs, though that day in the factory he also had a glimpse of Steve’s darker side, his penchant for turning on colleagues with a wicked tongue. Ross was wrong in his quick appraisal that as Steve got a little older he too would learn that “you catch more flies with honey.” Steve already knew how to catch flies with honey. He could be all sweetness and seduction, especially when he was wooing prospective employees or business partners. But when it came to realizing his vision, he used every possible strategy to get people to strive for perfection as he saw it. He would praise them and inspire them, often in very creative ways, but he would also resort to intimidating, goading, berating, belittling, and even humiliating them. He could be Good Steve or he could be Bad Steve. When he was Bad Steve, he didn’t seem to care about the severe damage he caused to egos or emotions so long as he pushed for greatness.

From his years at Apple his reputation was known throughout the