Once upon a time, Steve Jobs told me that he didn’t like to think of himself as a businessman. Rather, he said, he thought of himself as a creative person—“a person who builds neat things.”
It was the fall of 1986, and he was reflecting on his self-identity as we were driving in his Mercedes coupe from Palo Alto to San Francisco. He was 31 years old at the time. The year before, he had lost a power struggle inside Apple and left the company. When I was assigned to profile him for Esquire magazine, he was in the process of building a new computer company, called NeXT.
I was never one of the small handful of tech reporters Jobs confided in, but for some unknown reason, he let me spend a week with him while NeXT was in start-up mode. I spoke to him late at night in his car, and in NeXT’s offices, with its $10,000 sofas and $2,200 chairs, not to mention an entrance staircase designed by I.M. Pei. I watched him brutally berate one of his executives in a meeting—and then lavish praise on that same person half an hour later. I saw him obsess over the color of the walls in the factory NeXT was building. I saw him refuse to listen to his team when they told him something he didn’t want to hear. This was the Steve Jobs I had read about when he’d been at Apple: a marketing genius who obsessed over the tiniest details, but also a brat and a bully who pushed people to the brink.
