Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (32 page)

“Dude,” he says, “I agree it’s not easy to be you. But you know what? You ought to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Because despite all your problems, what you don’t realize is pretty much anyone in the world would
kill
to have your life. Hell, I know
I
would.”

“Huh.” We sit there. I sip my tea. Then it occurs to me. My solution is sitting right here, right beside me. Over the course of my life some of my greatest ideas have come to me while I was using psychedelic drugs, and this is one of the greatest ever. There’s no time to waste.

“Kid,” I say, “how’d you like to go for a ride in the jet?”

By the time we touch down
in Scottsdale the details have been worked out. Ja’Red will get a billion dollars, plus the Jobs Jet and the Jobs Domicile, and of course the Jobs jobs, at Apple and Disney. There’s no paperwork, just a verbal agreement. If there’s prison time to be done after the feds are through, he does it and keeps quiet.

Five days later, when we’re moved from the clinic to the safe house, Matt the male model spy is there waiting for us. He’s handled the paperwork. He’s lined up a private compound on an island with round-the-clock security, plus a new jet, untraceable, and a list of airports around the world where I’ll have landing privileges. I’ll have two billion dollars, spread out in bank accounts in different countries. The whole family will take on new names.

As for Ja’Red, there’s no guarantee that he will keep his mouth shut, except that he knows that if he ever spills the beans he’ll have about twelve hours to live before Matt and his friends track him down, which is a pretty good incentive. He swears he won’t get cold feet, and I believe him. Why would he? The kid gets to run Apple. It’s the best job in the world. Better yet, he gets to be me. He gets to stand on stage at Macworld and be worshipped like a god by people who have camped out overnight in the rain just so they can get in first and sit down front and maybe touch the hem of his robes.

That, I have to admit, is one thing I’m really going to miss.

Yes, I was there
at the Macworld conference in January. I was in the auditorium, sporting an usher’s uniform and my new look. It’s kind of hard to describe. Imagine Alan Arkin with a big beard and slightly Asian eyes, you’ll have an idea. All morning I showed people to their seats and roamed around the hallways at the Moscone Center, even walked right up to people I knew and spoke to them—and nothing. Nobody had a clue. It’s amazing what these surgeons can do.

Ja’Red, meanwhile, looked so much like me it was scary. It was like watching myself up there. The docs have aged him a bit, but he still looks great.

And he did an amazing job. He showed off the new iPhone and the Apple TV product, ran through the demos without a hitch, used his clicker, hit all of his cues.

Next day the papers and bloggers were ecstatic, saying the old Steve was back, looking tanned and rested and ready, with new energy and passion and enthusiasm. By the time those sto
ries arrived I was already
desaparecido,
zooming off to parts unknown, where I remain today, stretched out on a lounge chair with a seventeen-inch MacBook Pro on my lap, finishing this manuscript and watching the reports about the madness surrounding the iPhone, which is going on sale today in the United States.

We call our place Casa del Fin del Mundo. Spanish is not the local language here, but Mrs. Jobs thinks it sounds cool, and I agree. We’ve got the offspring set up in a private school. Nobody here has any idea who we are. Even if you met me, which you might do one day, you wouldn’t recognize me. You’d never even know we’d crossed paths.

I don’t keep up with day-to-day stuff at Apple, though I still touch base with Ja’Red occasionally, using our amazing iChat AV videoconferencing software. Sometimes he asks for advice, though to be honest he’s mostly just being nice. He doesn’t need any help from me. Our December quarter was another blowout—record sales, record profits. The stock is soaring. It’s up fifty percent from the start of the year, hitting new highs every week.

Of course this is great news for Ja’Red. Better yet, it has been very bad news for that traitorous butt plug Tom Bowditch. According to Ja’Red, Tom freaked out when I didn’t stage a fake death. He was sitting on a huge short position, and expecting that the Death of Steve would destroy the stock price and enable him to make a killing. He hadn’t anticipated the doppelganger maneuver. When the stock started going up, Tom got squeezed and was forced to cover his position. As he covered, however, he drove up the stock. So he kept having to buy at higher and higher prices. By the time the fiasco was over he’d lost a hundred million dollars. Buddha be praised.

The big indictment that was supposed to come down in January never materialized. Right now, in fact, it’s looking like this backdating scandal is going to blow over, as the case against El Jobso has been falling apart. For one thing, during the past week, iPhone mania has swept the nation, and thousands of Apple faithful have taken to the streets, camping out for days so they could be the first to buy iPhones. A few days ago U.S. Attorney Francis X. Doyle had the bad luck to be walking past the Apple store in San Francisco when this madness was taking place, and I’m sorry to report that the mob recognized him, thanks in part to some flyers that Moshe Hishkill and his intelligence team may or may not have left in the area. Some say Doyle slipped while fleeing the mob and fell under a bus; others say he was pushed. Who can say? Anyway, within hours Zack Johnson and Sonya Bourne both suffered aphasic memory loss regarding their time at Apple, leaving no one to testify against me. William Poon, the Zune-using prosecutor, is long gone too; earlier this year he quit the U.S. Attorney’s office and joined a law firm, to specialize in . . . wait for it . . . defending executives who’ve been caught up in backdating scandals.

If the charges do blow over, I’d love it if someone would find a way to hold the SEC and the U.S. Attorney accountable for their actions, for their threats and accusations and smear jobs in the press, for tarnishing my name and driving me into self-imposed exile. But I doubt this will happen. I won’t hold my breath waiting for the feds to offer an apology for what they’ve put me through.

The truth is, I’m enjoying my time off. I’ve had a chance to focus on me for a change. It’s been really healing for my soul. We have a full-time guru with us, Baba SunMoonStar, and every day we pray and meditate. I also spend time surfing, and doing yoga, and making lists of foods I won’t eat. And I’ve been tackling all those heavy-duty intellectual projects that I’ve been putting off for so many years, like learning Japanese and reading Dante’s
Inferno.

During our last iChat Ja’Red asked me, “Dude, like, if this backdating scandal goes away or whatever, like, what are you going to do?”

I understood that what he really wanted to know was whether I planned to return. The answer is, I probably will come back—not for my sake, but for the sake of the world. Sure, maybe I’m a sociopath, as Bobby DiMarco said. I’ve been meditating and non-thinking about that accusation quite a bit out here, and something important has occurred to me: The world needs sociopaths. Who else ever gets anything done? Sociopaths are the ones who create, who lead, who inspire, who motivate. Was Buddha a sociopath? No doubt. Gandhi? Crazy as a loon. Same for Picasso, and Hemingway, and John Lennon. Geniuses like us may not be entirely pleasant, but let’s face it, we’re necessary.

So I’ll probably go back, but not to Apple. For one thing, Ja’Red has turned into a really first-rate CEO. For another, I don’t like what the job of running Apple has become. It’s no fun anymore. I don’t want to spend my time haggling with music and movie industry scumbags. I’d rather start a new company. I’ll go back to my roots and do what I love most and what I do best— I’ll put together a team of engineers and create the next great machine.

I’m already working on an idea that I dreamed up one day while I was sitting on the beach. I’ve started putting together some sketches. It’s this computer built entirely out of a single sheet of touch-screen plastic that you can roll up and carry with you in a tube. All of the parts—the keyboard, the screen, the battery, the speakers—can be contained in a sheet that’s only one-sixteenth of an inch thick. Some labs in Japan have been making prototypes. So far they don’t really work too well, and they’re prohibitively expensive. But the technology keeps getting better, and component prices are coming down. The guys in Japan say that by 2012 they’ll be able to manufacture these things in large volumes for less than two thousand dollars apiece. I’m pushing them to get there by 2010.

Casa del Fin del Mundo 29 June 2007