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By Root 638 0

a very good business person. He didn’t ask for more than he thought his work had been worth. That high-minded ethic was not assimilated by his adopted son. Steve had his father’s sense for shrewd buying but combined it with a more opportunistic approach to selling. Even as a teenager Steve had the soul and the skill of a dealmaker. If his father was a self-consciously fair trader, Steve was more in the image of a Persian-rug merchant. His father had a cynical, dour outlook, but Steve was an optimist. He would go to a yard sale, buy a stereo receiver, fix the headphone jack, and then hawk it for a substantial profit. His closest friend in high school, Bill Fernandez, lusted for the great TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck that Steve acquired through his artful trading. Bill realized even then that Steve could become a good businessman. Steve knew it too. In tenth grade he told his girlfriend Chris-Ann that he was going to be a millionaire.

Steve even talked his way into going to college for free. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to an expensive private school, but he went ahead nonetheless and enrolled in one, willful and defiant and unafraid to improvise his way through an impossible situation. Dan Kottke, who became Steve’s best friend at Reed College, recalls that Steve’s adventure in higher education was something of a scam, a boondoggle. By the time Dan met Steve in October of their freshman year, only a month into their first semester on campus, Steve had already dropped out. More accurately, he had never really dropped in. He enrolled in courses and moved into the dorms but he never paid for tuition, room, and board. When the bill for thousands of dollars was thirty days overdue, the money wasn’t there. Steve’s parents weren’t paying. Steve didn’t have the funds. So the college couldn’t recognize him officially as an undergraduate. But Steve had already established an easy rapport with the dean of students, Jack Dudman. He convinced the dean to let him audit classes and live in the dorms for free. There were plenty of empty dorm rooms. Many students dropped out of Reed during their first year because of the academic rigor. Other prestigious colleges had responded to the loose permissiveness of the sixties by easing their standards, but Reed remained uncompromisingly intellectual. It wasn’t surprising when freshman transferred to other schools with shorter reading lists and lower expectations. Steve wasn’t dropping out to escape the college and its intellectual life. He was finding a creative way to be part of it.

He freeloaded and scrounged out of necessity but he learned that he was good at it. He found free sources of vegetarian food at the local Hare Krishna temple and the All-One Farm commune. For an impromptu getaway he and Dan hitchhiked to the Oregon coast and spent the night sleeping on the beach. The teenage bohemians didn’t figure on the shifting of the tides. In the morning they woke up drenched in cold salty seawater. At least the vacation was free. When Steve wanted to go to Mexico, he hung out for a while at the Portland airport and talked his way onto a private plane that got him as far as San Diego.

He could talk his way into almost anything.

Steve knew how to get along without money, but then the money came and he didn’t know what to do with it. The money came so suddenly. He went from impoverished freeloader to instant millionaire in a frighteningly short time. At twenty-one he was a boomerang kid living rent-free in his old bedroom in his parents’ house. When Apple was incorporated in January 1977, the month before he turned twenty-two he had almost nothing. Then the Apple II began selling. “When I was twenty-three, I had a net worth of one million dollars,” Steve later told a reporter. “At twenty-four it was over ten million dollars, and at twenty-five it was over a hundred million dollars.” The figures were accurate. But he remained ambivalent about his windfall, uncomfortable with it, uncertain and self-conscious and insecure about how to spend it. His conflicted attitude toward money was