counteroffer. He accepted immediately.
One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio insisted that he needed to “have skin in the game” and take the payout in stock that he would agree to hold for at least a year. Jobs resisted. Finally, they compromised: Jobs would take $120 million in cash and $37 million in stock, and he pledged to hold the stock for at least six months.
As usual Jobs wanted to have some of their conversation while taking a walk. While they ambled around Palo Alto, he made a pitch to be put on Apple’s board. Amelio tried to deflect it, saying there was too much history to do something like that too quickly. “Gil, that really hurts,” Jobs said. “This was my company. I’ve been left out since that horrible day with Sculley.” Amelio said he understood, but he was not sure what the board would want. When he was about to begin his negotiations with Jobs, he had made a mental note to “move ahead with logic as my drill sergeant” and “sidestep the charisma.” But during the walk he, like so many others, was caught in Jobs’s force field. “I was hooked in by Steve’s energy and enthusiasm,” he recalled.
After circling the long blocks a couple of times, they returned to the house just as Laurene and the kids were arriving home. They all celebrated the easy negotiations, then Amelio rode off in his Mercedes. “He made me feel like a lifelong friend,” Amelio recalled. Jobs indeed had a way of doing that. Later, after Jobs had engineered his ouster, Amelio would look back on Jobs’s friendliness that day and note wistfully, “As I would painfully discover, it was merely one facet of an extremely complex personality.”
After informing Gassee that Apple was buying NeXT, Amelio had what turned out to be an even more uncomfortable task: telling Bill Gates. “He went into orbit,” Amelio recalled. Gates found it ridiculous, but perhaps not surprising, that Jobs had pulled off this coup. “Do you really think Steve Jobs has anything there?” Gates asked Amelio. “I know his technology, it’s nothing but a warmed-over UNIX, and you’ll never be able to make it work on your machines.” Gates, like Jobs, had a way of working himself up, and he did so now: “Don’t you understand that Steve doesn’t know anything about technology? He’s just a super salesman. I can’t believe you’re making such a stupid decision. . . . He doesn’t know anything about engineering, and 99% of what he says and thinks is wrong. What the hell are you buying that garbage for?”
Years later, when I raised it with him, Gates did not recall being that upset. The purchase of NeXT, he argued, did not really give Apple a new operating system. “Amelio paid a lot for NeXT, and let’s be frank, the NeXT OS was never really used.” Instead the purchase ended up bringing in Avie Tevanian, who could help the existing Apple operating system evolve so that it eventually incorporated the kernel of the NeXT technology. Gates knew that the deal was destined to bring Jobs back to power. “But that was a twist of fate,” he said. “What they ended up buying was a guy who most people would not have predicted would be a great CEO, because he didn’t have much experience at it, but he was a brilliant guy with great design taste and great engineering taste. He suppressed his craziness enough to get himself appointed interim CEO.”
Despite what both Ellison and Gates believed, Jobs had deeply conflicted feelings about whether he wanted to return to an active role at Apple, at least while Amelio was there. A few days before the NeXT purchase was due to be announced, Amelio asked Jobs to rejoin Apple full-time and take charge of operating system development. Jobs, however, kept deflecting Amelio’s request.
Finally, on the day that he was scheduled to make the big announcement, Amelio called Jobs in. He needed an answer. “Steve, do you just want to take your money and leave?” Amelio asked. “It’s okay if that’s what you want.” Jobs did not answer; he just stared. “Do you want to be on the payroll? An advisor?” Again Jobs stayed silent. Amelio went out and grabbed Jobs’s lawyer, Larry Sonsini, and asked what he thought Jobs wanted. “Beats me,” Sonsini said. So Amelio went back behind closed doors with Jobs and gave it one more try. “Steve, what’s on your mind? What are you feeling? Please, I need a decision now.”
“I didn’t get any sleep last night,” Jobs replied.
“Why? What’s the problem?”
“I was thinking about all the things that need to be done and about the deal we’re making, and it’s all running together for me. I’m really tired now and not thinking clearly. I just don’t want to be asked any more questions.”
Amelio said that wasn’t possible. He needed to say something.
Finally Jobs answered, “Look, if you have to tell them something, just say advisor to the chairman.” And that is what Amelio did.
The announcement was made that evening—December 20, 1996—in front of 250 cheering employees at Apple headquarters. Amelio did as Jobs had requested and described his new role as merely that of a part-time advisor. Instead of appearing from the wings of the stage, Jobs walked in from the rear of the auditorium and ambled down the aisle. Amelio had told the gathering that Jobs would be too tired to say anything, but by then he had been energized by the applause. “I’m very excited,” Jobs said. “I’m looking forward to get to reknow some old colleagues.” Louise Kehoe of the
The next day Jobs drove to Pixar. He had fallen increasingly in love with the place, and he wanted to let the crew there know he was still going to be president and deeply involved. But the Pixar people were happy to see him go back to Apple part-time; a little less of Jobs’s focus would be a good thing. He was useful when there were big negotiations, but he could be dangerous when he had too much time on his hands. When he arrived at Pixar that day, he went to Lasseter’s office and explained that even just being an advisor at Apple would take up a lot of his time. He said he wanted Lasseter’s blessing. “I keep thinking about all the time away from my family this will cause, and the time away from the other family at Pixar,” Jobs said. “But the only reason I want to do it is that the world will be a better place with Apple in it.”
Lasseter smiled gently. “You have my blessing,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“It’s rare that you see an artist in his thirties or forties able to really contribute something amazing,” Jobs declared as he was about to turn thirty.
That held true for Jobs in his thirties, during the decade that began with his ouster from Apple in 1985. But after turning forty in 1995, he flourished.
He had told Larry Ellison that his return strategy was to sell NeXT to Apple, get appointed to the board, and be there ready when CEO Gil Amelio stumbled. Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the
And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant, reluctant, perhaps coy.
He returned to Apple officially in January 1997 as a part-time advisor, as he had told Amelio he would. He
