Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (11 page)

Nobody will talk to us. Finally we give up and head back to the headquarters, where Paul Doezen comes rushing up.

“I’ve been looking all over for you. Your assistant said he didn’t know where you were, and you didn’t have your cell phone.”

“Bam,” Lars Aki says, shooting an invisible rifle at Paul. “You dead, sucka. You gone.”

“Lars,” I say, “we can’t fire the CFO.”

“The rules are the rules, dude.”

“He’s the CFO.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Paul says.

“Nothing.”

Lars gives me this disgusted look. “Dude, I’m going windsurfing.”

“What is it,” I say to Paul as we ride up in the elevator.

“The shorts,” he says.

“Whose shorts?”

“The short sellers. I gave you the spreadsheet. Remember?”

“Vaguely. Not really. What about them?”

“Short interest has doubled again. I’ve got a lead on who’s doing it.”

He gives me this look like a dog that’s just fetched a stick and is waiting for praise. He’s practically wagging his tail. But as I’ve explained before: I never give praise. Ever.

We get to the top floor and head to my office. I sit down. He starts to do the same, but I tell him to remain standing.

“I don’t have time for a chat,” I say. “Just tell me what you know.”

“Company’s registered in the Cayman Islands. Here.”

He slides me a piece of paper. The name of the company is Ianus.

“Please tell me that’s not some kind of joke about an anus,” I say.

“Yah-nus,” he says. “The Roman god. Also called Janus. It’s where the word ‘January’ comes from.”

“I knew that. But thanks for the history lesson. Who’s behind it?”

“Hard to say. There’s cut-outs inside of cut-outs, companies in the Caymans connected to companies in the Isle of Man. Shell companies, post office boxes, phone numbers that don’t work anymore.”

“Meaning?”

He shrugs. “Meaning we have no idea. Whoever’s behind this knows what they’re doing.”

“Maybe it doesn’t even matter. Who cares, right? Does it matter?”

“Your stock is your lifeblood. It’s your oxygen. Someone’s coming after it. I spent ten years on Wall Street. I know how these assholes operate. Someone is making war against you. We had some guys from Credit Suisse in the other day. They heard something about Microsoft trying to drive down the stock and buy the company on the cheap.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Hey, Microsoft needs an operating system. But it could be anybody. Hedge funds, private equity guys. Maybe they figure they can bang us down, buy us cheap and then flip us. Who knows? I’m going to send a couple guys down to the Caymans, see what they can turn up. I can get Moshe to help. He’s got some guys with intelligence backgrounds.”

“Not Moshe. Leave him out of it. And keep this quiet. Don’t use the company planes. Fly commercial. Pay cash for the tickets. Keep it off the expense sheets.”

He gives me a look. “You worried there’s someone inside?”

“Aren’t you?”

He doesn’t need to answer. Of course he is.

Short-sellers,
leakers, competitors, U.S. Attorneys, SEC lawyers, in-house lawyers, conference organizers, beard colorists, couture consultants—all these distractions contribute to the random craziness that is always whirling around me and making it even more difficult for me to focus and concentrate on creating beautiful products. And now ever since we announced the SEC stuff we’ve been besieged by investment bankers and management consultants and every other kind of corporate advisory firm wanting to sell us some bullshit compliance services. It’s like we’ve been hit by a car crossing the street and every bloodsucking ambulance-chasing lawyer in the world sees us as a sales opportunity.

I know people imagine that I just wander in here and think big thoughts and boom, invent the next iPod. I wish. There’s way too much happening, way too many demands on my time.

Consider that after Paul leaves I find I’ve got four hundred and thirty two emails waiting for me, plus fifty-something while you were out notes. These are unique while you were out notes that I had created specially for me on handcrafted virgin pulp paper made from baobab trees in Madagascar. I spent a month looking at various kinds of paper pulp and then another month trying to pick the right shade of off-white and finally chose one called “Cotton Cloud” that is really pleasing to the eye.

The notes are arranged in order of importance. On top is a message from Steven Spielberg. Before I can even sit down and call him, my phone buzzes and it’s Ja’Red saying he’s got Spielberg’s assistant on the line. I tell him fine, let me know when Spielberg is on the line and then patch me in. He comes back and says Spielberg’s assistant wants me to get on the line first and then he’ll go get Spielberg. I tell him to hang up. They call back and say, again, that Spielberg wants me to get on the phone first and then they’ll patch him in. Again, I tell Ja’Red to hang up.

Finally, a few minutes later, Spielberg himself calls. He’s acting all cool, like nothing happened. Whatever. Fine. Play it that way. He’s also huffing and puffing and out of breath. He tells he’s calling me from his treadmill, and do I mind if he puts me on speaker so he can work out while we talk. I tell him no, I don’t mind, but let me put you on speaker too, and then I make a point of typing really loudly on my keyboard so he thinks I’m doing email instead of devoting my full attention to him. Honestly I hate all this dick-slapping that goes on in these calls but with the Hollywood guys it’s always like this. If you don’t play along they figure they can walk all over you.

So Spielberg says that there is this huge war raging in Israel and Lebanon right now, but of course the American media isn’t covering it at all. They’d rather report on Britney Spears putting her baby in the microwave. But it’s totally serious, and totally bad. Spielberg has an idea for a DreamWorks-Pixar joint venture, an animated movie about two boys, one Israeli and the other Palestinian. Sort of
Schindler’s List
meets
Aladdin
but using that funky humanoid animation from
Polar Express.
Elton John will write the songs.

“Okay,” I say, “but will there be any talking fish? Talking cars? Some superheroes?”

Spielberg gets kind of sniffy and says, “I’m talking about serious
cinema verite
type animation.”

I tell him he shouldn’t start busting out the Latin words just because he knows I didn’t go to college. He says, “It’s French,” and I’m like, “Whoa there, wait a minute, you’re gonna make an animated movie
in French?
Are you kidding? Does Elton John even
speak
French? I mean,
Hello?
Is this really Steven Spielberg on the phone? Is this the guy who made
E.T.
and
Poltergeist?
Are you turning into Francis Ford Crapola or something? Because if that’s the case, why not pull a Mel Gibson and do the whole movie in ancient Aramaic, or Maori, or that click-click language from Africa. Or Palestinian.”

Thing about Spielberg is, he’s a very cool guy and very brilliant and everything, but he tends to cop a huge ’tude with anyone who doesn’t agree with his vision one hundred percent and do whatever he says.

“Steven,” I say, “maybe I didn’t go to film school, but trust me, I know what sells, right? I invented the friggin iPod, okay? Have you heard of it? So here’s my idea. Instead of two boys we make it a boy and a girl, and we bump the age up a bit, like make them teenagers, so we can get a love story going, and we draw the girl really inappropriately hot, like in
Pocahontas,
and we put her in tight outfits or whatever, so we widen our audience and get some eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old males in the theater, not just kids. We cross-promote by having the characters wear iPods and we get a tie-in with McDonald’s to make falafels with a movie theme wrapper.”

Spielberg says nothing. He’s cranking away on this treadmill. Finally he makes this big theatrical sigh and says, “Maybe we can talk later or something.”

“Whatever,” I tell him. “You’re the one who called me, remember? So, like, good luck with your cartoon movie in Latin or whatever.”

As if that’s not bad enough,
a few minutes later I get a call from Sir Richard Branson. The guy is crazy as a loon, I swear to God, and I never would have picked up my phone except I saw it was a call from England and I thought it might be Paul McCartney wanting to talk about getting the Beatles music onto iTunes. Instead I hear old Branson barking and I’m thinking,

Jesus Christ, first Spielberg, now this. Is there a full moon or something?

“I’m up in my balloon!” he shouts, and I’m thinking,
Of course you are, you friggin twat, where else would you be?
For the life of me I will never understand what it is about rich guys and balloons.

“I’m on my satellite phone!” he screams. “I’m wearing a space suit and a helmet. We’re at fifteen thousand feet, flying over northern Mongolia. Gorgeous. Can you hear me? Look, I’ve had this massive brainstorm. Can you hear me?”

I tell him I can’t. He plows ahead anyway.

“Mate,” he says, “here’s my pitch and I’ll get right to it. We’re going to create a new section on Virgin Atlantic, right behind Upper Class, and call it iPod Class. The whole section is redone in that glossy white color like an iPod. The walls, the seat backs, the seat cushions, the carpet, the bathrooms, everything in bloody shiny white, like you’re sitting smack inside an iPod. We throw in some fake champagne and cheap sushi and bang up the fare price by thirty percent over Coach, or Lower Class as we’re now calling it. You’re separated from everyone else by tinted plexiglass walls, so the punters in back can see you, and you just sit there looking cool and going, ‘Yeah, how jealous are you lot, you’d love to be in here in iPod Class, wouldn’t you,
as if.
Ha!’

“The message is, Look at me, I’m young, I’m cool, I’m obnoxious and
nouveau riche
and
arriviste,
I’m tech savvy, I’m a dotcommer, I own lots of cell phones and PDAs and gadgets, I live in Silicon Valley and I wear loafers without socks, I’m better than you, and when I fly . . . wait for it . . . I fly
iPod Class.
The chavs and the Irish’ll go nuts for it. We’ll get David Beckham and his wife to do the adverts.”

“Richard, I don’t get it. What’s the iPod connection?”

“Hrm, well, uh, yah, whatever, who knows, but it’s marketing innit? It’s marketing. Like there’s an Upper Class and now there’s an iPod Class. It’s all white, like an iPod. Geddit?”

The truth is I hate Branson because he made such a big deal about his stupid Virgin online music store and he was all Mr. Smack Talk about how he was gonna kick the crap out of iTunes, and now he’s pretending he’s my big “mate.” Maybe the altitude is messing up his head and he figures I don’t remember what a cockbreath he was on the music store.

So I push back and say I don’t see the synergy and I don’t want to dilute the brand, which I know is going to piss him off, because, as you might have noticed, old Branson has a teensy little ego problem.

Sure enough he gets all snippy and says in this fake plummy accent, “I’m sorry, did you say
dilute the brand?
My God I think I’m going to choke on a piece of
foie gras. Dilute the brand?
That’d be quite a feat, mate, diluting your brand. I mean I’ve been to your stores, Steve. The bloody Tivoli iPal? It’s an FM radio! Only it’s painted white and has a plug for an MP3 player. I don’t hear you bitching about that, Steve.”

By then he’s practically screaming. I don’t know if it’s all an act or if he really is a complete psycho. I tell him, “Branson, my bro, cool out, do some yoga, smoke a doob, cut a fart in your space suit or whatever, but sure, go for it, set the controls for the center of the sun. Have the lawyers work it out and give old Steve a slice of the action. God bless you, you crazy goat-bearded bleached-hair balloon-flying freak.”

“Bloody
right!
” he says. “Mate, you won’t regret this! You can break the bottle of champagne on the first plane and take the maiden voyage, right alongside the Beckhams, my word as a gentleman.”