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Alvy knew that he had crossed the border one day during a Pixar board meeting, when he inadvertently preempted Steve’s authority. “An unspoken law with Steve Jobs is he owns the whiteboard,” Alvy says. “That’s his stage, and you just intuitively knew not to mess with it.” When Alvy casually began writing on the board, Steve reacted furiously.

“You can’t do that!” Steve protested, as if he were a selfish child guarding a toy.

Their faces were only inches apart as Steve screamed at him. Steve resorted to petty invective. He even insulted Alvy’s southwestern accent. Then he stormed out of the room.

“It was ugly,” Alvy recalls. “Steve turned on me with everything he had.”

Alvy was stunned. He needed to sort out what had happened, so he took his family away to a rented beach house at Sea Ranch, a three-hour drive up the winding Pacific coast.

“What did I do?” he plaintively asked his wife.

After enjoying two decades working in a group of brilliant researchers and creative artists who shared power and treated each other as equals, with respect and consideration, Alvy refused to accept his role in what he thought of as a “master-slave relationship” with Steve Jobs. “I knew that I couldn’t have a person like that in my life,” he recalls.

Alvy decided to quit.

Steve didn’t want him to leave Pixar. He came into Alvy’s office, took out a sheet of paper, and drew a line that slanted upward, then down, and then up again. This was the “hero-asshole roller coaster,” Steve explained. In the beginning, Alvy was a hero. Now, he was an asshole. But if he tried harder, maybe he could become a hero again.

Steve was willing to give him another chance.

Alvy wasn’t persuaded by the bizarre pep talk. He left Pixar in 1991 and founded his own company, Altimira, with plans to make 3-D graphics software. His product would reflect the same basic idea as one of Pixar’s products, but he wouldn’t steal any of Pixar’s software code. He would write his own code from scratch. Since the inspiration came from his work at Steve’s company, he offered to give 10 percent of the new venture to Steve. If Alvy’s startup succeeded, Steve would be very well compensated. It was a good deal for both sides.

Alvy lined up well-known venture capitalists, who were ready to finance his new company. He needed Steve’s cooperation so the investors wouldn’t fear a legal morass. But Steve simply didn’t trust Alvy. He thought that Alvy was trying to screw him somehow. Instead of the 10 percent stake, Steve demanded a $25 royalty on every copy of Altimira’s software, which would make it very hard for Altimira to turn a profit.

“Steve had me by the balls,” Alvy says. “My venture capitalists weren’t going to close the deal without Steve. They all wanted to out-negotiate Steve. But when Steve is irrational, you can’t negotiate with him.”

With his fate in limbo, Alvy was overcome by intense, debilitating stress that undermined his physical health and his closest personal relationships. He went to two psychiatrists and a marriage counselor. He suffered an attack of chest pain and found himself being wheeled through the corridors of Marin General Hospital, where the doctors rushed into action, suspecting that he was in cardiac arrest. It turned out to be a bizarre lung problem. He was convinced that the weird malady was somehow induced by the tension of dealing with Steve Jobs.

• • •

BEFORE LONG, the brain drain resumed at Steve’s companies.

Bud Tribble was next. When he had married a fellow cofounder, Susan Barnes, the other insiders joked that the news would have to be disclosed to Next’s investors, because it increased the company’s “risk factors”: if one spouse-executive quit and felt mistreated by Steve Jobs, the other might leave, too.

That’s exactly what happened.

“I didn’t see how we were going to be successful,” recalls Bud. The problem was that Steve’s passion was for the physical machine while Next’s real asset was its intangible software. “Next’s hardware was not head-and-shoulders above