Steve Jobs

didn’t focus on as rigorously as they did cancer or pain. He was having eating problems and losing weight. Partly this was because he had lost much of his pancreas, which produces the enzymes needed to digest protein and other nutrients. It wasalso because both the cancer and the morphine reduced his appetite. And then there was the psychological component, which the doctors barely knew how to address: Since his early teens, he had indulged his weird obsession with extremely restrictive diets and fasts.
    Even after he married and had children, he retained his dubious eating habits. He would spend weeks eating the same thing—carrot salad with lemon, or just apples—and then suddenly spurn that food and declare that he had stopped eating it. He would go on fasts, just as he did as a teenager, and he became sanctimonious as he lectured others at the table on the virtues of whatever eating regimen he was following. Powell had been a vegan when they were first married, but after her husband’s operation she began to diversify their family meals with fish and other proteins. Their son, Reed, who had been a vegetarian, became a “hearty omnivore.” They knew it was important for his father to get diverse sources of protein.
    The family hired a gentle and versatile cook, Bryar Brown, who once worked for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. He came each afternoon and made a panoply of healthy offerings for dinner, which used the herbs and vegetables that Powell grew in their garden. When Jobs expressed any whim—carrot salad, pasta with basil, lemongrass soup—Brown would quietly and patiently find a way to make it. Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.
    Beginning in early 2008 Jobs’s eating disorders got worse. On some nights he would stare at the floor and ignore all of the dishes set out on the long kitchen table. When others were halfway through their meal, he would abruptly get up and leave, saying nothing. It was stressful for his family. They watched him lose forty pounds during the spring of 2008.
    His health problems became public again in March 2008, when
Fortune
published a piece called “The Trouble with Steve Jobs.” It revealed that he had tried to treat his cancer with diets for nine months and also investigated his involvement in the backdating of Apple stock options. As the story was being prepared, Jobs invited—summoned—
Fortune
’s managing editor Andy Serwer to Cupertino to pressure him to spike it. He leaned into Serwer’s face and asked, “So, you’ve uncovered the fact that I’m an asshole. Why is that news?” Jobs made the same rather self-aware argument when he called Serwer’s boss at Time Inc., John Huey, from a satellite phone he brought to Hawaii’s Kona Village. He offered to convene a panel of fellow CEOs and be part of a discussion about what health issues are proper to disclose, but only if
Fortune
killed its piece. The magazine didn’t.
    When Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G in June 2008, he was so thin that it overshadowed the product announcement. In
Esquire
Tom Junod described the “withered” figure onstage as being “gaunt as a pirate, dressed in what had heretofore been the vestments of his invulnerability.” Apple released a statement saying, untruthfully, that his weight loss was the result of “a common bug.” The following month, as questions persisted, the company released another statement saying that Jobs’s health was “a private matter.”
    Joe Nocera of the
New York Times
wrote a column denouncing the handling of Jobs’s health issues. “Apple simply can’t be trusted to tell the truth about its chief executive,” he wrote in late July. “Under Mr. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways—the speculation over which products Apple will unveil at the annual Macworld conference has been one of the company’s best marketing tools. But that same culture poisons its corporate governance.” As he was writing the column and getting the standard “a private matter” comment from all at Apple, he got an unexpected call from Jobs himself. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant asshole who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a