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CHAPTER 7: The Golden God

From Burn Book by Kara Swisher, 2024

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. (STEVE JOBS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT SPEECH, 2005)

Here are two things to know about Steve Jobs: First, he was always acutely aware that life was finite; second, he could never resist a chance to tweak Bill Gates.

I’ll admit I enjoyed both things about him-that is, until I was standing backstage at the ATD conference in 2007. Jobs was doing a solo interview onstage with Walt Mossberg, and just like that, Jobs’ patented smirky smile (or was it a smiley smirk?) was on full display. Uh oh, I thought, something was about to go down.

Walt dove into how Jobs had pulled Apple from the brink of bankruptcy a decade earlier (with an important financial assist from Microsoft’s Gates, by the way). Since then, Jobs’ company had become one of the most important creators for the Seattle software giant’s products, which prompted the following exchange.

Ice. Water. In. Hell. The moment those words came out of his mouth, I had just one thought: Steve Jobs just fucked us.

“There’s that Steve Jobs humility,” said Walt, looking slightly stricken. I knew exactly what was going through Walt’s head. Months earlier, we had managed to put together the interview of our lives, convincing Jobs and Gates, tech’s most iconic pair, to appear together on the same stage. Now we were just hours away from that historic event and Jobs was not playing nice. Incredibly, other than at marketing events, Jobs and Gates had never sat together to chew over their deeply complex and competitive relationship that had defined the modern digital landscape. Their joint struggle with the world and each other was arguably the story of tech, as each took a different path to introducing consumers to the digital universe.

Walt had carefully laid the groundwork to get the pioneers to sit for a joint interview, and it was no small effort. Jobs and Gates shared a longtime antipathy. Gates thought Jobs to be precious in his approach, and Jobs thought Gates had little respect for product excellence. But the two also shared an obvious admiration for each other. Gates had built Microsoft into a business colossus that Jobs was indeed jealous of. And Gates had never reached the status Jobs had as the golden god who melded art and science, creativity and utility, beauty and design. Jobs was what passed for a cool kid in Silicon Valley terms, while Gates was a geek’s geek. If both died on the same day, one observer told me, Gates’s obituary would begin by noting that he was “the world’s richest man” while Jobs’ would begin with the words “tech’s greatest visionary.” In short, Gates had spent his life being the world’s wealthiest Goofus to Jobs’ elegant Gallant.

That’s why Walt approached Jobs first, knowing that Gates would jump at the chance, while Jobs would play hard to get. More than any other journalist, Walt had developed deep relationships with both, especially since he essentially had become an important arbiter of the products they released. Once Jobs said yes first, Gates quickly followed. ATD did not typically put out press releases, but as soon as both were in, we did, figuring that once the news of the event was public, it would be harder for either to back out.

In addition to the joint appearance, we offered separate solo interview blocks to each company. Steve Ballmer, who had become CEO of Microsoft in 2000, grabbed their slot. Jobs fronted the Apple session since only he could talk about new products and business specifics. These nuts-and-bolts interviews would allow us to focus the joint interview on loftier and more forward-looking questions. Our hope was to avoid some of the internecine squabbles that the pair had become well known for over the decades. Big thoughts and big ideas and no trash talk, we had joked to Microsoft’s Frank Shaw and Apple’s Katie Cotton, the comms pros who had the unenviable job of wrangling these titans.

But now, by Jobs, during his solo session, referring to Microsoft as “hell,” he was basically implying that Gates, who ran the joint, was Satan. Of course, the dig immediately got back to Gates, who skulked into the green room in an agitated state. Jobs had publicly pantsed him once again and he did not like it one bit.

After Walt wrapped up the one-on-one, Jobs headed to the green room and entered with a “hey what’s up?” attitude and a shit-eating grin. Walt and I had scheduled a short meeting for the six of us to go over how we envisioned the upcoming joint session-without flagging the possible questions, which we never did for any speaker, even for these two. As we discussed format, Gates glumly limited his responses to yes and no, while Jobs took jaunty to an obnoxious level. Walt, Katie, Frank, and I traded looks of concern that this was going to be a disastrous interview. We persevered and asked Gates a question about some small detail. Suddenly he blurted out: “Why would I know that? I run hell.”

We all froze. Except Jobs, who was holding a very cold bottle of water that was drenched with condensation. He extended his hand with the water bottle toward Gates. “Let me help you,” Jobs said playfully. And that, thankfully, broke the very ice that he had made.

We had finished our backstage confab when I asked the two to take a joint photo. That year’s conference was sponsored in part by Kodak, which was using new tech and capturing each speaker in high resolution. Despite some resistance, Gates agreed to pose with Jobs. “This is for history,” I said to both. The image is indeed iconic, with the pair appearing from the sternum up. Gates stands on the left with messy hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a button-down striped shirt. Jobs is on the right, a couple of inches taller, hair trimmed, in his wire-rimmed glasses and black turtleneck. Gates is smiling, showing his teeth, while Jobs’ lips are closed in a familiar smirky smile.

Minutes later, the two walked onto the conference stage and the audience broke into a standing ovation. Both Jobs and Gates reacted with surprise and even became emotional. I think neither had deeply thought about how closely aligned they would be for all of eternity. But not yet, since Jobs could not resist the tweak. Early in the interview, I threw a softball, asking them both: “What’s the greatest misunderstanding about your relationship?” The smiley smirk again curled at the edges of Jobs’ mouth, as he deadpanned: “We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade now.” The crowd loved it, although Gates looked uncomfortable, caught between wanting to roll with the obvious sexual undertone “hey we’re gay” joke in order to not seem uncool and being, well, uncool. Jobs laughed along with the audience. Gates did not.

Gates did muster up some sweetness later. Despite always having a hard time with the heartfelt parts, Gates gestured to Jobs and noted: “It’s been fun to work together. I kind of miss some of the people who aren’t around anymore. People come and go in this industry. It’s nice when somebody sticks around and has some context for all the things that have worked and not worked.” While Gates had always been overly aggressive in business and pushed Microsoft in ways that would attract much-deserved scrutiny, one of his most enduring characteristics was a deep love of learning. This admirable trait would come to define the next chapter of his life, which he dedicated to charitable endeavors related to health and climate change via the Gates Foundation. Gates and I had a prickly relationship through most of the time that I covered Microsoft’s weak-sauce Internet-focused efforts, but once he stepped away from the company in 2008, he became much more willing to listen than overtalk. He grew to understand the much longer game he was in and could impact.

Jobs almost never lost the idea that this was a very short life and that eternity was very long. And now, despite making a remarkable recovery from a cancer scare years earlier, he had mortality on his mind more than ever. He looked directly at Gates and took stock of their long history. “You know when Bill and I first met each other and worked together in the early days, generally, we were both the youngest guys in the room,” Jobs commented. “I’m about six months older than he is, but roughly the same age. And now when we’re working at our respective companies-I don’t know about you-I’m the oldest guy most of the time. That’s why I love being here.”

Jobs then looked at Walt, who was eight years older and already white-haired. The audience laughed and Jobs joined them. Always a good sport, Walt responded, “Happy to oblige.” Jobs continued speaking about his relationship with Gates.

And then, he delivered his famous one-more-thing. “I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or Beatles song,” Jobs said in perhaps one of the more wistful moments I ever saw him in. “And there’s that one line in a Beatles song, ’You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.’ ” He paused for exactly the right amount of time, the consummate performer, and then added: “And that’s clearly true here.” He gestured to Gates with a little wave. The audience broke into an audible “Awww,” and then began applauding. Gates’s eyes darted around, avoiding eye contact with all of us. Walt and I stood to signal that was the (perfect) end to the interview. Gates and Jobs shook hands and then stood together.

As the ATD crowd again rose to its feet, none of us in the room knew that Jobs would be gone less than five years later. His death would resonate in ways that are still being felt, and I don’t say that lightly. Jobs was no angel, and both his personal and business lives were littered with examples of a man of many faults. Those who covered him earlier and more closely than I did, labeled this “the reality distortion field” that Jobs was able to weave over the company and himself. Still, he represented a consistent excellence when it came to making products, a prescience into possible negative consequences of what his company was making, a regard for design as an equal to tech, and a critical ability to envision the future in terms of both promise and problems. Jobs deserved the many kudos he got, especially as one Internet mogul after another showed through moves both petty and venal over time that they always fell short.

Unlike a lot of journalists, I was not a Jobs fanboy. We often argued about things and disagreed intensely. Once, he came up to me at an event in San Francisco in 2010 after he had debuted the Apple’s Ping social network. He had described the network onstage as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” a confusing launch that concluded with Chris Martin of Coldplay singing a trio of songs including “Viva La Vida,” whose lyrics are about a king admitting regret. Afterward in the demo area, Jobs asked me what I thought of Ping. “It sucks and it’s going to be a failure and, most of all, Chris Martin hurts my ears,” I replied. He grimaced. Martin was a friend of his. But after a few back-and-forths, Jobs said, “You’re probably right.” He acknowledged that Apple was following in the social space and not leading, a fact he hated as much as he hated Facebook and Myspace.

I can tell you very few figures in positions of power like Jobs ever admitted even the slightest mistake to me that readily. Maybe it helps that he didn’t have to do it that much. His career had very few duds and a nearly unblemished record of spot-on product choices. In the half-dozen public interviews that Walt and I did with him from 2003 until his death in 2011, he touted many of these inventions, often well before they were in the hands of consumers. Ping was the outlier. Most Apple products are well made, meticulously designed, and work beautifully. Some tech innovators focus on the product and others focus on the consumer. Jeff Bezos, for example, approached Amazon with an astonishing consumer sensibility. He’d do anything for the customer-almost to a fault. But Jobs pushed Apple to be more of a product-driven culture.

Other companies didn’t seem to care about either the consumer or the product. It sucks when people settle for an uninspiring product. Facebook comes to mind. These companies tend to see themselves as utilities. We all need electricity, so it doesn’t have to be beautiful or delightful. That’s why the electric company gets away with draping ugly wires all over beautiful cities, ruining the view. But I truly appreciate and enjoy my Apple products, which almost always contained both a chip and an idea. Of all the ideas Jobs touted, mobility and wireless were the most significant.

In 1998, I had a revelation about the next move in the technology revolution: “I snipped my copper umbilical cord one sunny weekday not long ago,” I wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Canceling my land-line phone account, cutting off service to my home for good, and rendering the telephones that had long sat on tables in every room as useless as my closeted bread machine, I took the final step in a lifelong attempt to free myself from the wires that tethered me. Casting my fate to the heavens, quite literally, I decided to go wireless. Completely wireless. All wireless, all the time, everywhere.” That was easier said than done, of course, as I fiddled through a series of mobile devices that were not quite ready to navigate the ecosystem of programs and services to which I needed to be connected. Apple had also missed the boat with its ill-fated Newton personal digital assistant device that debuted in 1993 and was DOA soon after. Jobs dumped the Newton when he returned to the troubled company in 1997, eleven years after his initial ouster at Apple by a board that did not believe in him.

But by 2001, Jobs had made a big splash with the iPod and then begun to ruminate on the iPhone. The original concept started out as a tablet with a stylus, which is what a lot of companies were working on at the time. At the 2010 ATD conference, Jobs divulged to Walt and me that “I had this idea of getting rid of the keyboard and asked my folks if we could.” As Jobs put it, “We said if you need a stylus, you’ve already failed.” The team came back with a reimagined tablet-basically an early iPad-which Jobs promptly tabled. “I thought, my God, we could build a phone out of this,” he said.

My God, indeed. Within a month of our Gates-Jobs interview, the first iPhone would be released to the public for $499 and a two-year contract with AT&T. Jobs had announced its arrival on January 9, 2007, at the MacWorld keynote in San Francisco. “We’re going to make some history together today,” he said. It was not an overstatement, although it would be twenty-four minutes into the presentation before he unveiled the stubby little device. “After today I don’t think anyone is going to look at these phones in the same way,” he said. He was right, even though up until that announcement, Jobs had repeatedly denied that Apple was even working on a phone. At D3 in 2004, I had jokingly told him to cook me up an “iPod phone,” and he replied, “Well, that’s a hard problem,” to which I said, “You’re smart,” to which he said, “Isn’t it funny a ship that leaks from the top?”

Obviously, Apple was already working away on a phone, but Jobs kept up the canny cat-and-mouse act. He was nothing if not an entertaining fabulist, telling Walt onstage at D6 in 2006 that he had absolutely no plans to create a mobile phone. Jobs explained that one obstacle was working with a telecom company, which required jumping through hoops. “I don’t like going through orifices,” he joked, comparing telco giants to sphincters. A year later, he had managed to pass through the orifice in a major deal with AT&T. When we pointed out his deception, Jobs shrugged. So, we shrugged, too. Because nothing mattered but the phone he held in his hand, which was about as perfect as it got. While many have argued that other companies, from Samsung to Microsoft to Nokia, could have made this critical mobile leap to app-driven smartphones with multi-touch screens and a real web browser, no company had the combination of personality, design sense, and pure pushiness that would make Apple the dominant global hub technology.

By 2010, Apple’s market valuation would surpass Microsoft’s, a major milestone. A week later, Jobs was back on the ATD stage and I asked him if he had a thought or two about that. “For those of us who have been in the industry a long time, it’s surreal,” he responded. “But it’s not why any of our customers buy our product. Remember what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they’re going to be the right horses moving forward. We’re trying to make great products. Have courage of our convictions… [Customers] pay us to make those choices. If we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t.”

This was an utterly different attitude than most companies, who valued the ability to pivot endlessly, too often reaching for ideas that were determined not by quality but by hierarchy. “The best ideas have to win,” Jobs insisted over and over to me. He utterly rejected the idea of speed (move fast) and destruction (break things). He believed in working for as long as you needed to get the design and technology right, which was one of Apple’s persistent characteristics.

Former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive reminisced about how Jobs operated, at my final Code conference in 2022. “One of the huge challenges particularly amongst large groups is that when you’re talking about an idea, often the thing that is easiest to talk about-that is measurable, that’s tangible-are the problems,” Ive said. “And he was masterful at keeping people focused on the actual vision of the idea. He had a wonderful reverence for the creative process.”

Jobs was also at the forefront of media, having bought Pixar in 1986 from George Lucas. Jobs was also deeply interested in newspapers, music, books, and more. At the 2005 ATD, Jobs turned to the audience and asked, “How many of you have heard of podcasts?” Guess how many people raised their hands? No one. Jobs continued, “Okay great. So let me start at the beginning and tell you what this is all about. Podcasting is a word that’s a concatenation of iPod and broadcasting. Put together-podcasting.” The best he could do at the time was to describe podcasting as “Wayne’s World for radio.” He explained that anybody could record a show and broadcast it out on the Internet for fans who would download the show from their computer to their iPod. Jobs concluded, “It’s getting very exciting.”

And, unlike most CEOs in Silicon Valley, he contemplated the impact of technology and new media on society. He liked journalism-at least in theory, although in practice he was a master manipulator of the press. Still, take Jobs saying this: “One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press. We all know what’s happened to economic businesses. News gathering and editorials are important. I don’t want to descend into a nation of bloggers.”

Compare that with Elon Musk-who might have been the natural inheritor of Jobs’ status-tweeting on March 23, 2023, that all press inquiries to Twitter, the microblogging site he bought, would receive a poop emoji in response. (More on Musk later. Obviously.) Suffice it to say that this is something Jobs never would have done and, in fact, would have abhorred. I am also certain Jobs would have despised Musk in his current incarnation.

Perhaps most importantly, Jobs thought a lot about privacy. This quote is from the 2010 ATD conference, which I tried to trim down, but gave up because it’s worth reading in its entirety:

Silicon Valley is not monolithic. We’ve always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley. For example, we worry a lot about location in phones. Before any app can get location data, we make it a rule that they have to ask. We ask: “This app wants to use your location data; is that all right with you?” Every time they want to use it, we ask. We do a lot of things like that to ensure that people understand what these apps are doing…. A lot of people in the Valley think we’re really old-fashioned about this, and maybe we are. But we worry about this. Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for in plain English and repeatedly. That’s what it means. I’m an optimist. I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data. Ask them. Let them know precisely what you’re going do with their data. That’s what I think.

To my mind, this kind of thinking made Jobs the most consequential figure of the modern tech age, as he daisy-chained his way from the desktop computer to the laptop to the iPod to the iPhone and to the iPad. Jobs did not just transform tech devices; he transformed music and movies and communications and photography. He envisioned then oversaw the creation of a series of tech that was intuitive, while gliding on innovations that were inevitable.

But, over those critical years-perhaps the most productive of his life-Jobs was dying. It was in that interview in 2010 that I decided not to ignore what was apparent to everyone in the audience: While he had rallied, Jobs was now declining physically in a much more dire way. But as rail-thin and sallow as he was, he still exuded excitement over what was to come, even as he stressed the immutable values he would never abandon. I recall being struck that Jobs was so full of life, even as it was visibly seeping away from him, that I had to ask: “What do you imagine the next ten years of your life is going to be about?”

He was quiet at first and I could feel the crowd hold its breath, not quite believing I had asked a dying man such a question. “Um, you know…” Jobs said and paused. And then, much to my surprise, he addressed an issue we had previously clashed about: how he had manhandled a media organization when it got hold of an iPhone prototype. I had thought Apple’s actions were vaguely thuggish and had told him so, while Jobs regarded the journalist as a thief.

“This is probably a bad example, but I am going to use it. When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got a lot of advice from people who said, ’You gotta just let it slide. You shouldn’t go after a journalist because they bought stolen property and they tried to extort you. Apple’s a big company now. You don’t want the PR. You should let it slide,’ ” he said. “And I thought deeply about this and I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.”

Jobs was just building up a head of steam on this topic, which was more about him as a human and as an entrepreneur than about a stolen phone. “We have the same values now as we had then. Maybe we are a little more experienced and certainly more beat up. But the core values are the same. We come into work wanting to do the same thing today as we did five or ten years ago, which is build the best products for people,” said Jobs, noting that getting emails from satisfied customers fueled him daily. “That’s what kept me going five years ago and that’s what kept me going ten years ago when the doors were almost closed. And it’s what will keep me going five years from now whatever happens. So, I don’t see why you have to change if you get big.” In other words, I won’t go changing to try and please you, which is a piece of advice I would think about for myself and my career many times after hearing it from him. Changing, for sure, but with certain values and mainstays that would never alter.

Of all the big products that Jobs introduced, none was more consequential than the iPhone, which impacted everyone and everything. While there had been other phones, Apple’s version was a pioneer that allowed the introduction of a spate of other mobile-oriented digital companies including Airbnb (2008), Uber (2009), and Instagram (2010). The iPhone would also force larger entities like Facebook to drastically shift their business models or shift around it, as Google would in 2008 with the introduction of its Android platform.

I would always try to figure out how Jobs reinvented products over and over again, since they were not derivative, as so many inventions were, and expanded the market rather than contracted it. Thanks to the iPhone, the company would ten times its value under CEO Tim Cook (while also gaining far too much power over the app ecosystem). I cannot underscore how hard it was to conceive of a massive idea like this at that moment in time, especially since Apple was facing an already entrenched market that was dominated by Samsung, Nokia, and others.

In one interview with us, Jobs let loose with what seemed like a hokey bromide that I had heard from far too many in tech, who never seemed to deliver on the promise as much as deliver for themselves. “Let’s stop looking backward,” Jobs declared. “It’s all about what happens tomorrow. Let’s go invent tomorrow.” Of course, the cynical journalist in me thought such statements were largely meaningless. But when Jobs said it, I actually believed it. Maybe I, too, had slipped into Jobs’ reality distortion field, but the more time I spent with him, the more I thought what he said made sense and his intensity was at his core. One of the many things I thought his critics got wrong about Jobs was that he was passionless and cold. My take: As an entrepreneur, Jobs was too passionate, which led him to push hard-and sometimes too hard-on what he believed in. Over time, he and what he represented would prove to be a rarity.

Near the end of his life, Jobs spoke about how people consumed media. “The media industry is kind of screwed since the best technologists are working for people like me and not you,” he told me and many others, at a meeting with Rupert Murdoch’s executives. He had been invited at the behest of Murdoch, since he and Jobs had become friends of a corporate sort, with Jobs determined to liberalize the old media dragon and, presumably, Murdoch determined to figure out the magic of Apple. There and elsewhere, Jobs noted that tech would become the new gatekeepers of media in the digital age. He had already moved in that direction earlier than anyone in Silicon Valley and he was not stopping. Jobs had sent the warning much earlier at an unforgettable event when he introduced the iPod in 2001 at the Town Hall auditorium at Apple’s old headquarters. As he pulled the small and elegant device out of his jeans pocket, he uttered the memorable marketing slogan: “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

As usual, Jobs was spot on: Media was screwed.

Linked from 16/9/2005 Journal