Steve Jobs

a trip, Erin wanted to delay the departure by half a day, but she was afraid to ask her father. Eve, then twelve, volunteered to take on the task, and at dinner she laid out the case to her father as if she were a lawyer before the Supreme Court. Jobs cut her off—“No, I don’t think I want to”—but it was clear that he was more amused than annoyed. Later that eveningEve sat down with her mother and deconstructed the various ways that she could have made her case better.
    Jobs came to appreciate her spirit—and see a lot of himself in her. “She’s a pistol and has the strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s like payback.” He had a deep understanding of her personality, perhaps because it bore some resemblance to his. “Eve is more sensitive than a lot of people think,” he explained. “She’s so smart that she can roll over people a bit, so that means she can alienate people, and she finds herself alone. She’s in the process of learning how to be who she is, but tempers it around the edges so that she can have the friends that she needs.”
    Jobs’s relationship with his wife was sometimes complicated but always loyal. Savvy and compassionate, Laurene Powell was a stabilizing influence and an example of his ability to compensate for some of his selfish impulses by surrounding himself with strong-willed and sensible people. She weighed in quietly on business issues, firmly on family concerns, and fiercely on medical matters. Early in their marriage, she cofounded and launched College Track, a national after-school program that helps disadvantaged kids graduate from high school and get into college. Since then she had become a leading force in the education reform movement. Jobs professed an admiration for his wife’s work: “What she’s done with College Track really impresses me.” But he tended to be generally dismissive of philanthropic endeavors and never visited her after-school centers.
    In February 2010 Jobs celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday with just his family. The kitchen was decorated with streamers and balloons, and his kids gave him a red-velvet toy crown, which he wore. Now that he had recovered from a grueling year of health problems, Powell hoped that he would become more attentive to his family. But for the most part he resumed his focus on his work. “I think it was hard on the family, especially the girls,” she told me. “After two years of him being ill, he finally gets a little better, and they expected he would focus a bit on them, but he didn’t.” She wanted to make sure, she said, that both sides of his personality were reflected in this book and put into context. “Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not extraordinary in every realm,” she said. “He doesn’t have social graces, suchas putting himself in other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind, the advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands.”
    President Obama
    On a trip to Washington in the early fall of 2010, Powell had met with some of her friends at the White House who told her that President Obama was going to Silicon Valley that October. She suggested that he might want to meet with her husband. Obama’s aides liked the idea; it fit into his new emphasis on competitiveness. In addition, John Doerr, the venture capitalist who had become one of Jobs’s close friends, had told a meeting of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board about Jobs’s views on why the United States was losing its edge. He too suggested that Obama should meet with Jobs. So a half hour was put on the president’s schedule for a session at the Westin San Francisco Airport.
    There was one problem: When Powell told her husband, he said he didn’t want to do it. He was annoyed that she had arranged it behind his back. “I’m not going to get slotted in for a token meeting so that he can check off that he met with a CEO,” he told her. She insisted that Obama was “really psyched to meet with you.” Jobs replied that if that were the case, then Obama should call and personally ask for the meeting. The standoff went on for five days. She called in Reed, who was at Stanford, to come home for dinner and try to persuade his father. Jobs finally relented.
    The meeting actually lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. “You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To