Steve At Home:
Bachelor days
Steve Jobs grew up in a lower-middle class
suburban neighborhood in the 1960s. When he was a young adult, in the early
1970s, he delved into eastern mysticism, Zen Buddhism, and hippie ideals. Then
he started Apple and became a millionaire at 23, an icon of entrepreneurialism
and capitalism. It is not hard to picture how big of a shock to his values this
new status must have created. In his late 20s, while he was still single, Steve
Jobs was not living the life of a typical young nouveau riche.
He bought a large house in Los Gatos, not far
from his parents' and Apple, which he almost didn't furnish (the famous 1982 Diana Walker picture in his living room was taken in
that house) He kept his peculiar food habits, staying a vegan and fasting for
spa few weeks - although he sometimes allowed himself some fish and even meat
once in a while. And he worked. He worked really, really hard, and spent most
of his waking hours at Apple — including weekends. He didn't have many friends
a the time, although he socialized quite a bit, including in New York where he
purchased a luxurious apartment in the San Remo Towers. (Diane Keaton once told the story of how he tried to woo her when she was living
there).
In 1984, Jobs bought the Jacking mansion in
Woodside and moved in a few months later. His life remained pretty much the
same, the mansion remaining unfurnished, apart from the kitchen where a young
couple he had hired prepared him his vegan meals. Steve's longtime girlfriend,
Tina Redse, whom he met during that year, hated staying at the empty house. She
kept her house in Palo Alto, which was also a refuge when she and Steve would
have one of their frequent fights. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he asked her
to marry him, and she declined because it would "drive her crazy".
A few weeks later, a new woman entered the
life of Steve Jobs while he was giving a talk at Stanford. "There's this
beautiful woman and she's really smart and she has this dog and I'm going to
marry her", he told his sister Mona over the phone that night. And he did:
Laurene Powell became Mrs. Jobs on March 18, 1991.
Family man
Steve Jobs's lifestyle changed a lot after the
birth of Reed, his first child with Laurene. He took his family very seriously,
and became an affectionate father. Until the end of his life, he would keep
that same way of life: that of a hard-working CEO, but one who don't choose the
celebrity circuit: "What's astonishing is how normal a family life it is.
Steve just never went out socially. He was home every evening", wrote Jobs's biographer Walter
Isaacson. Jobs himself said: "I have a very simple life. I have
my family and I have Apple and Pixar. And I don't do much else."
Indeed, Steve Jobs apparently turned into a
loving father and peaceful neighbor, the sighting of whom was commonplace to
the residents of Palo Alto. However, in his official biography,
Isaacson reveals that the relationships between Jobs and his children was not
all that idyllic. Although he had a special relation with his son Reed, the
same apparently cannot be said of his daughters. He often had arguments with
his first daughter Lisa, his child with Chrisann Brennan; he apparently did not
pay much attention to Erin, his second, quiet daughter; but he liked the strong
will and temper of his youngest child, daughter Eve.
Isaacson writes: "Jobs developed a strong
relationship with Reed, but with his daughters he was more distant. As he would
with others, he would occasionally focus on them, but just as often would
completely ignore them when he had other things on his mind. 'He focuses on his
work, and at times he has not been
there for the girls,' Powell said. At one
point Jobs marveled to his wife at how well their kids were turning out,
'especially since we're not always there for them.' This amused, and slightly
annoyed, Powell, because she had given up her career when Reed turned two and
she decided she wanted to have more children."
Apart from his wife and children, Steve Jobs's
inner family circle also included his biological sister Mona Simpson. The
daughter of Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, Mona was a brilliant
writer whom Jobs discovered in 1986, after tracking down his biological
parents. "My brother and I are very close," Simpson said in 1997.
"I admire him enormously." Jobs said: "We're family. She's one
of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of
days." They remained friends even after Mona published her second novel A
Regular Guy ,which was heavily inspired by Jobs's relationship with Lisa. In
her essay Driving Jane, Lisa recounted her stupefaction at seeing her
personal history described in great detail in her aunt's book. As for Jobs, he
didn't read the book so as not to get mad at his sister.
Jobs also connected late in life with his
biological mother Joanne Simpson (born Schieble), although they did not become
very close, as he always considered Paul and Clara Jobs to be his true and only
parents. He never sought to contact Abdulfattah Jandali, his biological father,
because of the way he had abandoned his mother and sister when they were young.
However, he revealed to biographer Isaacson that the two had met by chance in the early
1980s when Jobs frequented Jandali's restaurant in San Jose
The real deal
In his post about working with Steve Jobs, Mike Evangelist wrote: "In my dealings with him I've seen one thing
vividly: Steve Jobs is the real deal. This is not some sort of act".
Indeed, Steve's way of life proved that he applied the same values at home and
at work.
Steve Jobs spent the last twenty years of his
life in a simple country house in Palo Alto. Although the house is larger than
your typical suburban house, and relatively expensive at around $4 million, it
does not stand out in the wealthy city of Palo Alto, and is a testament to
Jobs's modest lifestyle. Despite his net worth of over $8 billion, his garden
had no walls and he did not even lock the front door.
Time reporters Cathy Booth and David Jackson
had a glimpse of the life at the Jobses in 1997. They wrote:
"Laurene has planted a garden of wildflowers, herbs and vegetables all
around. The rooms are sparsely decorated, the only extravagances being Ansel
Adams photographs. We dine as the Jobses always do: both are strict vegans,
eating no meat products. Dinner is pasta with raw tomatoes, fresh raw corn from
the garden, steamed cauliflower and a salad of raw shredded carrots. While the
adults eat, their six-year-old son picks lemon verbena and other herbs in the
garden for the after-dinner tea. His reward is a tickle and being tucked into
bed by Dad. Conversation is a mix of politics, Laurene's work setting up a
mentor group for a nearby high school and tales of a presidential visit last
summer when Bill Clinton rang up and invited himself to dinner so he could meet
with Silicon Valley executives. "We had to rent a Dumpster to clean out
the house before they came!" says Jobs, whose prenuptial housing style was
"spare," if that's the term for lacking furniture. The couple giggle
over their search for cheap wine glasses to serve the President. The menu was,
naturally, vegan. Grabbing a couple of bottles of mineral water from the
fridge, the two took off for a stroll around Palo Alto. Jobs was
barefoot."
Life at the Jobses did have some
peculiarities: the strict vegan meals; the absence of TV for the kids, lest it
stifle their creativity; and the occasional dinner with Bill Clinton or Rupert
Murdoch. But overall they had a very quiet, typical life similar to millions of
couples in America.
Besides his simplicity, Steve Jobs was also a
great perfectionist in his personal choices, not only at work. His sister Mona
explained at a memorial event held in his honor that "They once embarked
on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage.
The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half
the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed
old." Jobs himself explained how he had spent several weeks debating which
washing machine to buy with his family. Most people speculate this is why his
furnishing habits were so spare: it was because he wouldn't buy anything short
of perfect — and perfect was a rare thing to buy.
Jobs, who was also 'strictly business' at
work, suffered no waste of time. In one interview, he explained that it was why
he wore the same thing everyday, his famous black mock turtleneck: so he didn't
have to waste time picking what to wear every morning. There are several
explanations as to how he ended up wearing so many turtlenecks. In the
biographySteve Jobs, Isaacson
recalls Jobs explaining, "So I asked Issey [Miyake] to make me some of his
black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them. […]
That's what I wear. I have enough to last for the rest of my life." John
Lasseter remembered a slightly different story: "He found this one really
great black turtleneck which he loved – I think it was Issey Miyake – so tried
to buy another one and they didn't have any more. He called the company and
asked if they would make another one, and they refused. So he said: 'Fine, how many
do you have to make before I can buy them?' So they made them – I think he has
a closet full of them.'"
Personal beliefs
Steve Jobs didn't vote when he was young, as
he professed in an interview with Playboy.
After he left Apple in 1985, he caressed the idea of a career in politics,
which was suggested to him by his friend and fellow Los Altos Zen Center adept,
California governor Jerry Brown. But his mentor PR man Regis McKenna explained
to him it wouldn't be that easy: Steve Jobs was risking public exposure for his
private life, including its darkest sides, such as abandoning his daughter or
taking LSD in college. Jobs gave up the idea and eventually founded NeXT.
As he grew older, Jobs became a supporter of
the Democratic Party. He was friendly with President Clinton, whom he
entertained at his house with Hillary while in office, and he invited Al Gore
to join Apple's board in 2003. Although Steve didn't donate to the Democrats in
his name, his wife Laurene contributed to each campaign to the fullest amount
possible for an individual.
However, Steve Jobs was not a liberal on every
subject. In 2011, as his health declined severely, he still accepted to attend
a dinner with President Obama on February 17. He was blunt: "You're headed
for a one-term presidency," he told the president, according to Steve Jobs. "To
prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more
business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China,
and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely
because of regulations and unnecessary costs."
Jobs also had firm beliefs regarding public
education. He voiced his point of view on several occasion, including an extensive interview with
Computerworld in 1995 and a press conference in Texas in 2007. Steve thought the worst evil of
public education were the 'corrupt' unions of teachers, which he denounced for
blocking reform, and called "off-the-charts crazy". He advocated that
"principals should be able to hire and fire teachers based on how good they
were" and that "schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m.
and be in session eleven months of the year". He also often called for the
digitalization of notebooks, a dream he caressed toward the end of his life,
and that Apple made true in January 2012 with iBooks Author and iTunes U.
On a more spiritual note, Steve Jobs did not
have any religion, although he was an adept of Zen Buddhism. In the late 1970s,
he attended meditation sessions and primal scream therapies at the Los Altos
Zen center. The center was led by Otogawa Kobun Chino, a soto Zen monk. Jobs
later adopted Otogawa as his teacher, and hired him as 'spiritual advisor' for
NeXT, then to celebrate his wedding with Laurene in 1991. The comic The Zen of Steve Jobsdescribes
their relationship.
Regarding God and life after death, he
explained his beliefs to Walter Isaacson late in his life: "He talked about his
experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and
his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. 'I'm about fifty-fifty
on believing in God,' he said. 'For most of my life, I've felt that there must
be more to our existence than meets the eye.' He admitted that, as he faced
death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an
afterlife. 'I like to think that something survives after you die,' he said.
'It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a
little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that
something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.' He fell silent for
a very long time. 'But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch,'
he said. 'Click! And you're gone.'"
Steve Jobs & Money
Steve Jobs used to say: "I was worth
about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I
was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and… it wasn't that
important — because I never did it for the money". The truth is that
although he never spent his money lavishly, Jobs often used it politically in
the course of his career.
Steve's sister Mona Simpson said during her
eulogy "This is not to say that [Steve] didn't enjoy his success: he
enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved
going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to
buy the best bike there. And he did." There was a little more to that.
Steve received a private jet (a Gulfstream V) as a gift
from the Apple board in 2000, which he used to take his family to Kona Village
in Hawaii almost every year. He bought a new model of the same car every 6
months (a Mercedes SL55 AMG in his later years), so he wouldn't have the legal
obligation to get a license plate — and he was a reckless driver to boot. And
in 2010-2011, he spent a considerable of time designing a yacht with a glass
deck, which he hoped to use to take his family on vacation, and to eventually
retire. Yet all these millionaire perks where nothing compared to what he could
afford with his $8.3 billion dollar net worth (in 2011)… compare and contrast
with his good friend Larry Ellison, multi-billionaire co-founder of Oracle.
However, Steve's relationship with money was a
bit odd. When Apple went public in 1980, he refused to give away stock and
preferred to keep as much as possible to himself. When Woz asked him to give
stock to Dan Kottke, the college friend that traveled with him to India and
helped him out in the garage, Steve replied: "Fine. I'll give him zero."
The same happened fifteen years later, during the Pixar IPO. Steve made sure
that he, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter got plenty of stock, but all the
employees who had stuck with the company for many years, despite its failures,
were hardly compensated at all. In fact, Steve had taken back their stock in
1991, when he created a new company where he was the sole owner in exchange for
another line of credit from his personal money. When he came back to Apple, he
insisted to have a $1 salary and kept him for his 14 years there, but he got
generously compensated with stock and options. He actually even asked for more
options in 2001, a SEC investigation revealed: "It wasn't so much about
the money," he told an SEC lawyer. "Everybody likes to be recognized
by his peers. … I felt that the board wasn't really doing the same with me. I
just felt like there is nobody looking out for me here, you know… So I wanted
them to do something, and so we talked about it. … I thought I was doing a
pretty good job."The board approved an option on 7.5 million shares.
Some suggest it was a political use of stock
and had nothing to do with their value. This is the same rationale that made
Steve sell all but one of his Apple stock back in 1985, after he left the
company, even though it made little business sense.
After Jobs's death, a controversy arose again
about his lack of any philanthropic initiatives. The refrain goes that Jobs
never gave money to philanthropy, and that after shutting down Apple's
philanthropic arm in 1997, when the company was in dire straits, he never
reinstated it later. He wouldn't talk about it to his biographer Walter Isaacson either. The truth is that he made donations to
a couple of institutions, including the Stanford Hospital, and that he was a
big help in the (RED) campaign by creating a red iPod. However, he did not
spend his time picking up charities, feeling he served a better cause by
working for Apple and creating money that his shareholders could distribute. He
actually started a foundation in 1986, but closed it after 15 months, as he spent all his time at NeXT.
Sources: www.allaboutstevejobs.com
Sources: www.allaboutstevejobs.com
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