Steve Jobs

he’s brain-damaged.” Jagger’s daughter Jade, however, took to the computer immediately and started drawing with MacPaint, so Jobs gave it to her instead.
    He bought the top-floor duplex apartment that he’d shown Sculley in the San Remo on Manhattan’s Central Park West and hired James Freed of I. M. Pei’s firm to renovate it, but he never moved in. (He would later sell it to Bono for $15 million.) He also bought an oldSpanish colonial–style fourteen-bedroom mansion in Woodside, in the hills above Palo Alto, that had been built by a copper baron, which he moved into but never got around to furnishing.
    At Apple his status revived. Instead of seeking ways to curtail Jobs’s authority, Sculley gave him more: The Lisa and Macintosh divisions were folded together, with Jobs in charge. He was flying high, but this did not serve to make him more mellow. Indeed there was a memorable display of his brutal honesty when he stood in front of the combined Lisa and Macintosh teams to describe how they would be merged. His Macintosh group leaders would get all of the top positions, he said, and a quarter of the Lisa staff would be laid off. “You guys failed,” he said, looking directly at those who had worked on the Lisa. “You’re a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.”
    Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams, thought it was not only callous, but unfair. “These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers,” he said. But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”
    For the time being, Jobs and Sculley were able to convince themselves that their friendship was still strong. They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display. The first anniversary of Sculley’s arrival came in May 1984, and to celebrate Jobs lured him to a dinner party at Le Mouton Noir, an elegant restaurant in the hills southwest of Cupertino. To Sculley’s surprise, Jobs had gathered the Apple board, its top managers, and even some East Coast investors. As they all congratulated him during cocktails, Sculley recalled, “a beaming Steve stood in the background, nodding his head up and down and wearinga Cheshire Cat smile on his face.” Jobs began the dinner with a fulsome toast. “The happiest two days for me were when Macintosh shipped and when John Sculley agreed to join Apple,” he said. “This has been the greatest year I’ve ever had in my whole life, because I’ve learned so much from John.” He then presented Sculley with a montage of memorabilia from the year.
    In response, Sculley effused about the joys of being Jobs’s partner for the past year, and he concluded with a line that, for different reasons, everyone at the table found memorable. “Apple has one leader,” he said, “Steve and me.” He looked across the room, caught Jobs’s eye, and watched him smile. “It was as if we were communicating with each other,” Sculley recalled. But he also noticed that Arthur Rock and some of the others were looking quizzical, perhaps even skeptical. They were worried that Jobs was completely rolling him. They had hired Sculley to control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in control. “Sculley was so eager for Steve’s approval that he was unable to stand up to him,” Rock recalled.
    Keeping Jobs happy and deferring to his expertise may have seemed like a smart strategy to Sculley. But he failed to realize that it was not in Jobs’s nature to share control. Deference did not come naturally to him. He began to become more vocal about how he thought the company should be run. At the 1984 business strategy meeting, for example, he pushed to make the company’s centralized sales and marketing staffs bid on the right to provide their services to the various product divisions. (This would have meant, for example, that the Macintosh group could decide not to