Apple: Entry 3

Steve at Apple

“What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating,” said Steve about his release from Apple. The central trauma of his life was being given up as a child and now he had been kicked out of the company he had founded. He was young, handsome, rich, and lost at this point in his life and he didn’t know what to do with himself. On his time away, he took off to Italy to travel and talk about personal computers to the Soviet Union. He eventually got in touch with his biological mother and discovered that he had a sister. The two met and became fast friends. After about a year, Jobs came up with a comeback plan. He was going to get revenge on the ones at Apple that tossed him out and was going to show them. He was going to build “the perfect company,” and it was going to design desktop supercomputers with unheard-of speed and the name of the company would be named NeXT. However, it didn’t succeed like Steve wanted it to. It produced strikingly distinctive object but was way too expensive for the market. Consumers still bought NeXT computers and called them “the most beautiful machines ever built,” but it was clear that the company wouldn’t make it. However, when Jobs met a young woman named Laurene Powell, his life turned around. Laurene was a tall, blonde, Jersey girl studying for an MBA who heard Jobs speak at Standford after he was booted out of Apple. In 1991, the two were married and went on to have 3 children. Steve became a completely different person according to family and friends. “He had sweetness to him, a contemplative quality,” they said. In 1986, Jobs became CEO of a little company called Pixar. He turned the graphics division into an animation studio, cut a deal with Disney for distribution, and picked up the company for nearly $5 million. When the company went public, Jobs was sitting on stock worth $1.1 billion. He suddenly looked like a genius again. In the meantime, Apple was struggling. He didn’t like seeing what he created going down so he staged a comeback and convinced the board into buying NeXT’s software for $400 million and use it for Apple’s future system which turned out to be OS X. Jobs was finally back in charge and made a turn-around for the company. 

Sources: The Steve Jobs Nobody Know, by Jeff Goodell, Steve Jobs: by Walter Isaacson