The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [5]
He suffered his midlife crisis at thirty and compressed it into three months, an overachiever even at personal trauma. He spent the summer flirting with romanticized notions of self-imposed exile, but ultimately he wasn’t able to resist the siren of public life. For all his accomplishments and fame, he still hadn’t fully proven himself, not to his own satisfaction and not to the world.
No one denied that Apple’s rise was aided immeasurably by his astonishing energy and persuasiveness and charisma and chutzpah (a word that he loved). And it was his personality that created the company’s culture and mystique. He was the media sensation. But from the early days Apple was actually run by older and more experienced businessmen, who were put in place first by the financial backers and later by the board of directors. Steve was allowed to head a renegade division, not the whole company. He never had the authority to approve expenditures of more than $250,000. He could buy a Bösendorfer grand piano for his team of engineers or fill up the office refrigerators with freshly squeezed fruit juices, but he couldn’t build a new factory or create a new computer without arduously lobbying for approval from other men. When he had wanted to try something spectacular, like risking $20 million in an effort to build a radically flat computer screen, the Apple board lacked confidence in him and rejected his plans.
By 1985 he hadn’t proven that he could thrive as the chief executive officer of an important corporation. Nor had he proven that he could repeat his initial success and show the skeptics that it wasn’t just a lucky accident of time and place, a once-in-a-lifetime historical fluke. His latest creation, the Macintosh, was greatly admired by the technocracy and attracted a small cultlike following on college campuses, but it seemed doomed to remain a commercial flop. Apple had optimistically projected sales of fifty thousand Macintoshes a month in 1985. The actual sales fell to five thousand a month, a pitifully low figure, an embarrassment. Wall Street blamed Steve for the financial failure of the ballyhooed machine; when he was ousted, the stock price rose. To the outside world it looked as though he had been fired by John Sculley, the executive he had recruited to run Apple. Their falling-out was incredibly painful, a “divorce,” as Steve told his friends. Before the split he had never felt so close to another person as he had felt to John, he said, but now he understood what divorce must feel like.
The rift with Apple’s board member Mike Markkula was also wrenching. Markkula had been something of a father figure to him. When Apple was still in Steve’s garage, Markkula had invested his own money in the company and helped write the business plan. Now, Steve told his friends, Markkula was bullying him, trying to scare him off, threatening to put him in prison for leaving Apple and supposedly stealing its technology.
Steve needed vindication. He openly ached to show that his vision of the future of computing was correct, that Apple’s board was wrong for pushing him aside, that he could change the world again. He left Apple with his cool hundred million, his “fuck-you money,” an expression he loved. And now, in September 1985, with the press