Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine Page #6

for me to be adopted at birth

by a lawyer and his wife.

Except that when I popped out,

they decided at the last minute

that they really wanted a girl.

So, my parents,

who were on a waiting list,

got a call in the middle

of the night, asking,

"We've got an unexpected baby boy.

Do you want him?"

They said, "Of course."

My biological mother found out later

that my mother had never

graduated from college

and that my father had never

graduated from high school.

She refused to sign

the final adoption papers.

She only relented a few months later

when my parents promised

that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life.

You know, another paradox

for him, you know, here's a guy,

you know, being pissed off

that he was left for adoption,

and when he has a child,

he wants to run the other way.

Yes, that's a huge paradox.

Even when I first met Steve, the fact

that he was given up for adoption

was a huge emotional issue

in his life.

I was, I remember,

right here on the lawn

telling Lisa McMoyler, who lived

across the street, that I was adopted,

and she said, "So, does that mean

your real parents didn't want you?"

Ooh, lightening bolt. I remember

running into the house.

I think I started crying, asking

my parents, and they sat me down.

They said,

"No, you don't understand."

They said,

"We specifically picked you."

That was clearly

a very defining image in his life,

both that he was rejected

and that he was special.

The IPO was November 1980.

By the summer of 1980,

it was clear it was going to happen,

and so Steve's net worth

was going to go from $10 million

to around $200 million.

And I think he had the opportunity

to completely reinvent himself.

In his reinvention, some

people who helped him were left behind.

Woz had no taste for management,

so he left Apple with a big stock

package and a lifetime stipend.

Daniel Kottke had been

one of Apple's first employees.

In the run-up to the IPO,

an Apple executive offered

to give Daniel the same amount

of stock that Steve would give.

Steve replied,

"Fine. I'll give him zero."

Jobs also saw an opportunity

to rewrite his history with Chrisann.

He composed a fiction which implied

she had many sexual partners,

and he claimed he was sterile

and therefore did not have the physical

capacity to procreate a child.

A woman with a baby,

and I was that threatening to them.

If he'd said, "I can't do this,

but let me help

because I can be practical here,"

that would have been...

...made for so much.

But it almost seemed that the point

was to be out of integrity.

When a court-ordered DNA test

proved Jobs's paternity,

he stopped fighting Chrisann

in court.

She was on welfare at the time,

so Jobs reluctantly agreed to pay

$500 a month in child support.

When Apple went public,

he was worth nearly $200 million.

Steve is so hugely successful,

and yet he treated

so many people so badly.

How much of an a**hole

do you have to be to be successful?

What is the moral of the story here?

Hello. I am Macintosh.

It is with considerable pride

that I introduce a man

who's been like a father to me.

Steve Jobs.

He didn't know

what real connection was.

So he was a part of the technology

that connected the world.

Does that make sense?

He made up another kind of connection.

You know,

I didn't sleep a wink last night.

There's a version of Steve Jobs

presenting the iPhone

where you can see his own feeling

of "I love this object."

Isn't this awesome?

His stuff was beloved,

but it wasn't that he was beloved.

He wasn't a nice guy.

First, he had a reputation

as a womanizer,

and then he had a reputation

as sort of not caring about anybody

and as being kind of a tough guy.

People are not connected to him

because of his character.

That is not people's connection to him.

In Be Here Now by Ram Dass,

one of the memories I still have

after all these years

was when someone goes into

a state of enlightenment...

...but they do it while

they're still attached to their ego...

They call that, as I recall him

saying it, "the golden chain."

And that's what I feel

happened to Steve.

He went into magnificence

and into enlightenment, but he...

He just...

He blew it.

Steve Jobs blew it?

How many people in the world

believe that?

He made products everyone loved.

He was the computer era's

most successful entrepreneur.

How could anyone think he blew it?

The entrepreneur's a person

who wants to shake things up,

who wants to change things,

who sees a better way of doing that.

But he or she tends to be

a royal pain in the neck.

Apple computer has sued

its co-founder and former chairman,

Steven Jobs, to stop him

from starting a rival company.

Jobs quit Apple last week in a bitter

fight with his board and management.

So, Apple is reorganizing.

John Sculley is taking control

from Steven Jobs.

Tell us about your departure

from Apple.

Oh, it was very painful. I'm not even

sure I want to talk about it. Um...

What can I say? I hired the wrong guy.

- That was Sculley?

- Yeah.

And... he destroyed everything

I'd spent ten years working for.

What did you do

after you left Apple in 1985?

I started two companies.

One was started

by buying the computer-graphics

division of Lucasfilm.

We christened it Pixar.

Pixar was acquired by Disney.

I'm on the board of directors

of the Walt Disney Company.

And the other was called NeXT.

From having left

or been bounced from Apple,

did he have a kind of a chip

on his shoulder?

Was there some...

Was this Steve in the wilderness?

I don't think he felt he was

in the wilderness at all.

I think he felt he was on a path.

He was on a mission.

Where are we going to?

In 1986, after he had left Apple

and was in the process

of starting this new company,

"Esquire" convinced him to

give a journalist a week of his time.

So, I basically spent that week

with him,

talked to him a lot, went to dinner,

sat in on meetings,

and got to see Jobs as he was

at that moment in his life.

But, I mean, I agree that...

Let me back up a bit.

So, somebody's got to say,

"Here's what we can do,

and we can make it happen,

and here's the level of thing

we can ship in 16 months."

And what I hear him saying is,

"Well, anything more than

a port of Mac author, forget it."

And boy, that just makes me smoke.

If he was in a meeting

and somebody said,

"Here's a great idea," and put the idea

out there and he didn't like it,

he'd just chop the person

into mincemeat.

The problem I've got, though,

is one,

will everybody believe

that the stake is in fact in the ground,

and, secondly,

when software comes back

and says what they can do

by summer or spring of '87,

will they be telling us the truth?

Well, George, I can't change the world,

you know.

What do you want me to do?

What's the solution?

But you see,

what we can learn is...

What I want is probably irrelevant.

I mean,

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