Steve Jobs

Harvard, moved to New York City, and rarely communicated with her father. But she flew down to Memphis twice, and he appreciated it. “It meant a lot to me that she would do that,” he recalled. Unfortunately he didn’t tell her at the time. Many of the people around Jobs found Lisa could be as demanding as her father, but Powell welcomed her and tried to get her involved. It was a relationship she wanted to restore.
    As Jobs got better, much of his feisty personality returned. He still had his bile ducts. “When he started to recover, he passed quickly through the phase of gratitude, and went right back into the mode of being grumpy and in charge,” Kat Smith recalled. “We were all wondering if he was going to come out of this with a kinder perspective, but he didn’t.”
    He also remained a finicky eater, which was more of a problem than ever. He would eat only fruit smoothies, and he would demand that seven or eight of them be lined up so he could find an option that might satisfy him. He would touch the spoon to his mouthfor a tiny taste and pronounce, “That’s no good. That one’s no good either.” Finally Eason pushed back. “You know, this isn’t a matter of taste,” he lectured. “Stop thinking of this as food. Start thinking of it as medicine.”
    Jobs’s mood buoyed when he was able to have visitors from Apple. Tim Cook came down regularly and filled him in on the progress of new products. “You could see him brighten every time the talk turned to Apple,” Cook said. “It was like the light turned on.” He loved the company deeply, and he seemed to live for the prospect of returning. Details would energize him. When Cook described a new model of the iPhone, Jobs spent the next hour discussing not only what to call it—they agreed on iPhone 3GS—but also the size and font of the “GS,” including whether the letters should be capitalized (yes) and italicized (no).
    One day Riley arranged a surprise after-hours visit to Sun Studio, the redbrick shrine where Elvis, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, and many other rock-and-roll pioneers recorded. They were given a private tour and a history lecture by one of the young staffers, who sat with Jobs on the cigarette-scarred bench that Jerry Lee Lewis used. Jobs was arguably the most influential person in the music industry at the time, but the kid didn’t recognize him in his emaciated state. As they were leaving, Jobs told Riley, “That kid was really smart. We should hire him for iTunes.” So Riley called Eddy Cue, who flew the boy out to California for an interview and ended up hiring him to help build the early R&B and rock-and-roll sections of iTunes. When Riley went back to see his friends at Sun Studio later, they said that it proved, as their slogan said, that your dreams can still come true at Sun Studio.
    Return
    At the end of May 2009 Jobs flew back from Memphis on his jet with his wife and sister. They were met at the San Jose airfield by Tim Cook and Jony Ive, who came aboard as soon as the plane landed. “You could see in his eyes his excitement at being back,” Cook recalled. “He had fight in him and was raring to go.” Powell pulled out a bottle of sparkling apple cider and toasted her husband, and everyone embraced.
    Ive was emotionally drained. He drove to Jobs’s house from the airport and told him how hard it had been to keep things going while he was away. He also complained about the stories saying that Apple’s innovation depended on Jobs and would disappear if he didn’t return. “I’m really hurt,” Ive told him. He felt “devastated,” he said, and underappreciated.
    Jobs was likewise in a dark mental state after his return to Palo Alto. He was coming to grips with the thought that he might
not
be indispensable to the company. Apple stock had fared well while he was away, going from $82 when he announced his leave in January 2009 to $140 when he returned at the end of May. On one conference call with analysts shortly after Jobs went on leave, Cook departed from his unemotional style to give a rousing declaration of why Apple would continue to soar even with Jobs absent:
We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a