Steve Jobs

for him to attack you, even bite your head off, as he processed your ideas. “You never win an argument with him at the time, but sometimes you eventually win,” said James Vincent, the creative young adman who worked with Lee Clow. “You propose something and he declares, ‘That’s a stupid idea,’ and later he comes back and says, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ And you want to say, ‘That’s what I told you two weeks ago and you said that’s a stupid idea.’ But you can’t do that. Instead you say, ‘That’s a great idea, let’s do that.’”
    People also had to put up with Jobs’s occasional irrational or incorrect assertions. To both family and colleagues, he was apt to declare, with great conviction, some scientific or historical fact that had scant relationship to reality. “There can be something he knows absolutely nothing about, and because of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows what he’s talking about,” said Ive, who described the trait as weirdly endearing. Yet with his eye for detail, Jobs sometimes correctly pounced on tiny things others had missed. Lee Clow recalled showing Jobs a cut of a commercial, making some minor changes he requested, and then being assaulted with a tirade about how the ad had been completely destroyed. “He discovered we had cut two extra frames, something so fleeting it was nearly impossible to notice,” said Clow. “But he wanted to be sure that an image hit at the exact moment as a beat of the music, and he was totally right.”
    From iCEO to CEO
    Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the
interim
in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone bytaking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. “I make 50 cents for showing up,” he liked to joke, “and the other 50 cents is based on performance.” Since his return in July 1997, Apple stock had gone from just under $14 to just over $102 at the peak of the Internet bubble at the beginning of 2000. Woolard had begged him to take at least a modest stock grant back in 1997, but Jobs had declined, saying, “I don’t want the people I work with at Apple to think I am coming back to get rich.” Had he accepted that modest grant, it would have been worth $400 million. Instead he made $2.50 during that period.
    The main reason he clung to his
interim
designation was a sense of uncertainty about Apple’s future. But as 2000 approached, it was clear that Apple had rebounded, and it was because of him. He took a long walk with Laurene and discussed what to most people by now seemed a formality but to him was still a big deal. If he dropped the
interim
designation, Apple could be the base for all the things he envisioned, including the possibility of getting Apple into products beyond computers. He decided to do so.
    Woolard was thrilled, and he suggested that the board was willing to give him a massive stock grant. “Let me be straight with you,” Jobs replied. “What I’d rather have is an airplane. We just had a third kid. I don’t like flying commercial. I like to take my family to Hawaii. When I go east, I’d like to have pilots I know.” He was never the type of person who could display grace and patience in a commercial airplane or terminal, even before the days of the TSA. Board member Larry Ellison, whose plane Jobs sometimes used (Apple paid $102,000 to Ellison in 1999 for Jobs’s use of it), had no qualms. “Given what he’s accomplished, we should give him five airplanes!” Ellison argued. He later said, “It was the perfect thank-you gift for Steve, who had saved Apple and gotten nothing in return.”
    So Woolard happily granted Jobs’s wish, with a Gulfstream V, and also offered him fourteen million stock options. Jobs gave an unexpected response. He wanted more: twenty million options. Woolard was baffled and upset. The board had authority from the stockholders to give out only fourteen million. “You said you didn’t want any, and we gave you a plane, which you did want,” Woolard said.
    “I hadn’t been insisting on options before,” Jobs replied, “but yousuggested it could be up to 5% of the company in options, and that’s what I now want.” It was an awkward tiff in what should have been a celebratory period. In the end, a complex solution was worked out that granted him ten million shares in January 2000 that were