Steve Jobs

many also agreed with Jobs that he was “awfully naïve and childlike.” A few months later a United Way poster showing a destitute man went up on a company bulletin board. Someone scrawled on it “Woz in 1990.”
    Jobs was not naïve. He had made sure his deal with Chrisann Brennan was signed before the IPO occurred.
    Jobs was the public face of the IPO, and he helped choose the two investment banks handling it: the traditional Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley and the untraditional boutique firm Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco. “Steve was very irreverent toward the guys from Morgan Stanley, which was a pretty uptight firm in those days,” recalled Bill Hambrecht. Morgan Stanley planned to price the offering at $18, even though it was obvious the shares would quickly shoot up. “Tell me what happens to this stock that we priced at eighteen?” Jobs asked the bankers. “Don’t you sell it to your good customers? If so, how can you charge me a 7% commission?” Hambrecht recognized that there was a basic unfairness in the system, and he later went on to formulate the idea of a reverse auction to price shares before an IPO.
    Apple went public the morning of December 12, 1980. By then the bankers had priced the stock at $22 a share. It went to $29 the first day. Jobs had come into the Hambrecht & Quist office just in time to watch the opening trades. At age twenty-five, he was now worth $256 million.
    Baby You’re a Rich Man
    Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India andthen decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.
    He had a great love for some material objects, especially those that were finely designed and crafted, such as Porsche and Mercedes cars, Henckels knives and Braun appliances, BMW motorcycles and Ansel Adams prints, Bösendorfer pianos and Bang & Olufsen audio equipment. Yet the houses he lived in, no matter how rich he became, tended not to be ostentatious and were furnished so simply they would have put a Shaker to shame. Neither then nor later would he travel with an entourage, keep a personal staff, or even have security protection. He bought a nice car, but always drove himself. When Markkula asked Jobs to join him in buying a Lear jet, he declined (though he eventually would demand of Apple a Gulfstream to use). Like his father, he could be flinty when bargaining with suppliers, but he didn’t allow a craving for profits to take precedence over his passion for building great products.
    Thirty years after Apple went public, he reflected on what it was like to come into money suddenly:
    I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money.
    I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.
     
    He was not particularly philanthropic. He briefly set up a foundation, but he discovered that it was annoying to have to deal with theperson he had hired to run it, who kept talking about “venture” philanthropy and how to “leverage” giving. Jobs became contemptuous of people who made a display of philanthropy or thinking they could reinvent it. Earlier he had quietly sent in a $5,000 check to help launch Larry Brilliant’s Seva Foundation to fight diseases of poverty, and he even agreed to join the board. But when Brilliant brought some board members, including Wavy Gravy and Jerry Garcia, to Apple right after its IPO to solicit a donation, Jobs was