Steve Jobs

the Internet. “Steve’s sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling,” according to Amelio. “He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were describing a performance of Olivier as Macbeth.”
    Gassée came in afterward, but he acted as if he had the deal in hishand. He provided no new presentation. He simply said that the Apple team knew the capabilities of the Be OS and asked if they had any further questions. It was a short session. While Gassée was presenting, Jobs and Tevanian walked the streets of Palo Alto. After a while they bumped into one of the Apple executives who had been at the meetings. “You’re going to win this,” he told them.
    Tevanian later said that this was no surprise: “We had better technology, we had a solution that was complete, and we had Steve.” Amelio knew that bringing Jobs back into the fold would be a double-edged sword, but the same was true of bringing Gassée back. Larry Tesler, one of the Macintosh veterans from the old days, recommended to Amelio that he choose NeXT, but added, “Whatever company you choose, you’ll get someone who will take your job away, Steve or Jean-Louis.”
    Amelio opted for Jobs. He called Jobs to say that he planned to propose to the Apple board that he be authorized to negotiate a purchase of NeXT. Would he like to be at the meeting? Jobs said he would. When he walked in, there was an emotional moment when he saw Mike Markkula. They had not spoken since Markkula, once his mentor and father figure, had sided with Sculley there back in 1985. Jobs walked over and shook his hand.
    Jobs invited Amelio to come to his house in Palo Alto so they could negotiate in a friendly setting. When Amelio arrived in his classic 1973 Mercedes, Jobs was impressed; he liked the car. In the kitchen, which had finally been renovated, Jobs put a kettle on for tea, and then they sat at the wooden table in front of the open-hearth pizza oven. The financial part of the negotiations went smoothly; Jobs was eager not to make Gassée’s mistake of overreaching. He suggested that Apple pay $12 a share for NeXT. That would amount to about $500 million. Amelio said that was too high. He countered with $10 a share, or just over $400 million. Unlike Be, NeXT had an actual product, real revenues, and a great team, but Jobs was nevertheless pleasantly surprised at that 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. Jobsresisted. 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 Gassée 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,