Over the last few months, a steady flow of visitors came by the house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton came to visit, as did President Obama, for dinner with a select group of Silicon Valley leaders. John Markoff, of the New York Times, and Steven Levy, who had written several books about Silicon Valley, including ones about the development of the Macintosh and the iPod, dropped by together to pay their respects. Bill Gates wound up spending four hours with Steve one afternoon. “Steve and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story’s too complicated,” Gates says. “I mean, yes, Steve did brilliant work, and if you had to say—you know, leave me out of it—one person who had the most impact on the personal computer industry, particularly from where we sit now, you’d pick Steve Jobs. That’s fair. But the difference between him and the next thousand isn’t like, you know, God was born and he came down from the hill with the tablet.” The two had developed a friendship and a sense of mutual respect despite their differences. “There was none of that need to put the other person down that afternoon,” says Gates. “We just talked about the things we’d done, and where we thought things were headed.” Gates wrote him a final, personal letter just weeks before his death.
The members of his executive team came by regularly. His worsening health made an already tight group of executives even closer. They talked with him about work, and sometimes they’d just hang around to watch a movie or have dinner. Their work together on what Cook calls the “treadmill” of Apple’s perpetual innovation machine had only intensified as the company gained momentum. “Steve had been close to the first group,” says Laurene, referring to the team with Fred Anderson, Avie Tevanian, and Jon Rubinstein that had saved Apple with Steve, “but he loved the last group. I think it was because of the amazing, amazing work they did together.”
On August 11, a Sunday, Steve called Tim Cook and asked him to come over to the house. “He said, ‘I want to talk to you about something,’ ” remembers Cook. “This was when he was home all the time, and I asked when, and he said, ‘Now.’ So I came right over. He told me he had decided that I should be CEO. I thought then that he thought he was going to live a lot longer when he said this, because we got into a whole level of discussion about what would it mean for me to be CEO with him as a chairman. I asked him, ‘What do you really not want to do that you’re doing?’
“It was an interesting conversation,” Cook says, with a wistful laugh. “He says, ‘You make all the decisions.’ I go, ‘Wait. Let me ask you a question.’ I tried to pick something that would incite him. So I said, ‘You mean that if I review an ad and I like it, it should just run without your okay?’ And he laughed, and said, ‘Well, I hope you’d at least ask me!’ I asked him two or three times, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ because I saw him getting better at that point in time. I went over there often during the week, and sometimes on the weekends. Every time I saw him he seemed to be getting better. He felt that way as well. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.”
Cook had been the obvious candidate for years. He had already run the company twice, during Steve’s medical leaves in 2004 and 2009. And Steve preferred an internal replacement. “If you believe that it’s important to understand Apple’s culture deeply, you wind up clicking to an internal candidate,” explains Cook. “If I were leaving this afternoon I’d recommend an inside candidate, because I don’t think there’s any way somebody could come in and understand the complexity of what we do and really get the culture in that deep way. And I think Steve knew that it also needed to be somebody that believed in the Beatles concept. Apple would not be served well to have a CEO that wanted to, or felt like they needed to, replace him precisely. I don’t think there is such a person, but you could envision people trying. He knew that I would never be so dumb as to do that, or even feel that I needed to do that.”
Steve had discussed the subject with Cook for years, so none of this came as a surprise. And they had talked often about the fate of Apple after Steve’s death. As Cook puts it, “He didn’t want us asking, ‘What would Steve do?’ He abhorred the way the Disney culture stagnated after Walt Disney’s death, and he was determined for that not to happen at Apple.”
Eight weeks after Steve told Cook he was making him CEO, things took a sudden turn for the worse. “I watched a movie with him the Friday before he passed away,” Cook remembers. “We watched Remember the Titans [a sentimental football story about an underdog]. I was so surprised he wanted to watch that movie. I was like, Are you sure? Steve was not interested in sports at all. And we watched and we talked about a number of things and I left thinking that he was pretty happy. And then all of a sudden things went to hell that weekend.”
John Lasseter got a call from Laurene, who told him he should come quickly for one last visit. “We just hung out in that study they had turned into a bedroom for him. We talked all about Pixar, all the things at Disney, and stuff like that. And then I kinda looked at him and he said, ‘Yeah I need to get a nap now.’ I got up to go, and then I stopped, and I looked at him and came back. I gave him a big hug, and a kiss, and I said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.’
“He’s special,” says Lasseter. “It’s funny, there’s a little group of people who were very close to Steve up until the very end. And we all miss him very much. I was at Laurene’s birthday party [in November 2013], her fiftieth birthday, in San Francisco. I got there a bit early, and Tim came in. He came over and we started talking, and of course we started talking about Steve. I said, ‘Do you miss him? I really miss Steve.’ And I showed him this,” says Lasseter, pointing to the favorites list on his iPhone. “I still have Steve’s number on my phone. I said, ‘I’ll never be able to take that out.’ And Tim took out his iPhone and showed me—he still had Steve’s number in his phone, too.”
“LIFE SHOULD BE about renewal and growth,” says Jim Collins. “Most great leaders don’t start out that way, they grow into it. And that’s what Steve did. I don’t see it as a success story, but a growth story. I wish I could have seen Steve Jobs 3.0. Seeing him from age fifty-five to seventy-five would have been fascinating. If you’re in good health at that age, 3.0 should be the best. But we don’t get to see that.”
“There are three things you need to be considered a truly great company,” Collins continues, switching gears to Apple. “Number one, you have to deliver superior financial results. Number two, you have to make a distinctive impact, to the point where if you didn’t exist you couldn’t be easily replaced. Number three, the company must have lasting endurance, beyond multiple generations of technology, markets, and cycles, and it must demonstrate the ability to do this beyond a single leader. Apple has numbers one and two. Steve was racing the clock [to help it get number three]. Whether it has lasting endurance is the final check, something we won’t know for some time. There are lots of good people there, and maybe they’ll get it.”
By the time of his death, Apple was truly extraordinary in just about every way that mattered to Steve. By 2011, it could safely be said that no other American corporation had a comparable record of innovation and success. Its internal goal, of continually developing great products in an efficient, unbureaucratic method built around the productivity of and collaboration between small teams, had been successful in ways that defy the fact that the company had grown to 60,000 employees at the time of his death. Its revenue stream was so much more profitable and diversified than it had been when he returned in 1997. Its management team was a veteran group that had been remarkably stable over the years. Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Fred Anderson, and Tony Fadell were notable departures, but others remained with institutional memory and remarkable chops. Most important of all, the company had shown an astounding capacity to conceive, develop, manufacture, and market products that really and truly were insanely great. It was doing everything Steve had ever hoped a company could do.