There was something elegiac about all this, even though Steve often used the first moments of a presentation to update the crowd on Apple. This, after all, was a recitation of the story of his professional life. And the sentimental nature of the event grew when, after a dozen or so minutes, Steve sat down in the leather love seat to demonstrate how easy it was to use an iPad. This was, of course, a concession to his weakened state of health. But it served the product, too. He leaned back, and navigated through a series of things you could do with your fingers on the iPad: send email, surf the Web, open up apps that let you listen to music, watch videos on YouTube, or even make “digital” finger paintings. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop,” he stated, with great satisfaction. His every move was projected on the big screen. Like every other presentation he had ever given, this one was staged with a clear intention: to show that this device was actually an invitation to a new kind of computing, something so natural and relaxed that it would slip right into your daily life with unimaginable ease.
While the iPad drew its fair share of initial criticism, the public instantly understood its appeal. The first-generation iPad was the fastest-selling debut product Apple had ever unleashed, racking up numbers that made the launches of the iPod and the iPhone pale by comparison: by the end of 2010, the company had sold nearly 15 million iPads.
IN 2009, STEVE had returned with vigor, just as he had after the initial operation back in 2004. But this time it was different. This time, everyone understood that his return would end, and they understood how it would end, even if they didn’t know when. There was no talk of being cured; instead, Steve was going to “live with it” as long as possible. Steve didn’t talk to many people about his medical woes, and he didn’t even spend much time discussing it overtly with his inner circle. But the real prospect of his death was there, and it was noticeable.
Bob Iger was aware of it. As Iger had expected, Steve had been a meaningful and yet unthreatening member of the Disney board ever since the Pixar sale in 2006. His relationship with Iger had become so strong that Steve had wanted Iger to join the Apple board, which Iger couldn’t do for fiduciary reasons. In fact, because of their friendship, Iger also turned down an invitation from Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt to be on Google’s board. “He told me he’d be jealous,” says Iger, with a wistful grin, although given how Apple’s relationship with Google eventually disintegrated, there was likely more to Steve’s reluctance than mere envy.
Before the liver transplant, Iger and Steve talked three or four times a week. They even saw each other over winter vacations in Hawaii. “I was at the Four Seasons, and he was at Kona Village. We’d walk together a lot. He had a daily walk that ended at the Four Seasons. We would walk and he’d try to convince me of stuff like, say, that white pineapple is better than yellow pineapple. And we’d sit on benches, and talk about music and the world. That’s where I told him the exciting news that we were looking to build a resort in Hawaii, a nine-hundred-million-dollar resort. I could tell he didn’t like the idea. I said, ‘Why not?’ He said it wasn’t a big enough idea. I said, ‘Nine hundred million dollars, Disney comes to Hawaii, that’s not a big idea? What’s a big idea in your mind?’ He said, ‘Buy Lanai’ [a small island in the state that was eventually purchased by Larry Ellison]. He thought we should build a theme park on the island, have all the visitors brought there by a special Disney transportation service. It was totally impractical.”
Most often, the two would meet in Burbank, when Steve came down to Disney headquarters for board meetings. Even though Iger was not on the Apple board (he would join it after Steve’s death), Steve would seek his advice about things going on at the company, and walk him through Jony Ive’s design lab whenever he came up to Cupertino. “We would stand at a whiteboard brainstorming,” remembers Iger. “We talked about buying companies. We talked about buying Yahoo! together.” By the time the Disney board meetings came around, Steve had usually been fully briefed by Iger. “We saw eye to eye on most things,” says Iger. “It wasn’t anything preplanned, but when Steve opined, the board generally listened.”
That wasn’t true on everything, but Steve voiced his disagreements in a forceful but civil fashion. Steve hated stock buybacks, when companies purchase their own shares on the public market—a move that is supposed to be both a good investment for the company and a signal of its confidence to big investors. He made a strong case against it at one board meeting, but the company proceeded nonetheless. On the other hand, when Disney was about to enter a joint venture with Carnival Cruise Lines because Iger didn’t think he could get the board’s support to build two new, billion-dollar cruise ships, Steve passionately urged him, and eventually the board, to have Disney build the ships itself. “If this is a good business,” he said, “why are you going to put your brand in someone else’s hands?” Disney built the two new ships on its own.
Steve also helped with Disney’s retail business. In 2008, the company had bought back its stores, after having licensed them to outside operators for years. When the new head of retail first pitched the board on his plans, Steve, who always sat next to Iger, grew restless and started rolling his eyes. At one point during the presentation he just burst out, muttering “Bullshit!” in a way that everyone could hear. Iger kicked him in the shins to try to get him to muzzle himself. Once the presentation had ended, Steve asked the executive two simple questions: “What message are you sending to your customer when they walk through the door? What statement are you making?”
“The guy couldn’t answer the questions,” remembers Iger. “There was silence in the room.” Afterward, Steve told Iger he should fire the executive immediately. But Iger didn’t. “Steve was quick to judge people. That was a fault,” says Iger. “If he got better on that, it wasn’t something I saw. I always found that a shortcoming. I’d say to him, ‘First of all, I haven’t decided about the person, so you’ve got to give me a chance to form my own opinion.’ Or I’d tell him, ‘You’re just flat-out wrong about this person.’ In some cases he was proved right, and in others I was. Either way, I never got an ‘I told you so’ from him.”
A few weeks later, Iger brought the retail chief and a couple of others up to Cupertino for a daylong brainstorming session with Steve and Apple retail chief Ron Johnson. “He didn’t redesign our stores,” says Iger. “He didn’t even set foot in them, as far as I know. But he did give us a full day of his time, and they helped us come up with a guiding statement about the stores: This is going to be the best twenty or thirty minutes of your kid’s day.”
In the last couple of years it grew harder for Steve to travel, and he had to call in to some board meetings. But when he could make it down to Burbank for a meeting, he and Iger always tried to spend time together. Iger remembers the night when it really hit him that Steve was going to pass away, during a 2010 dinner at his home with his wife, Steve, and Laurene. “We all kind of knew there was an inevitability to him dying, not that any of us was willing to truly accept it, believe it, or articulate it,” Iger recalls. “But it was pretty evident. Steve made a toast that night. He said, ‘The two of us did an unbelievable thing, didn’t we? We saved Disney and we saved Pixar.’ He thought that being part of Disney had breathed a whole new life into Pixar. And clearly, Disney has never been the same since. Tears came to his eyes. Our wives had a hard time maintaining dry eyes. It was one of those moments: ‘Hey, look at what we did, my goodness! Wasn’t that cool, wasn’t that really special?’ ”