Self-reflection didn’t come easy for the thirty-year-old. In Europe he was still hailed as a revolutionary business figure, and his visits to heads of state, university presidents, artists, and others reinforced his vision of himself as an extraordinary person who had been done in by a conventional bureaucrat. That kind of ego inflation was accompanied by the real pain and insecurity resulting from getting rejected by the company he had founded. Later that summer, Steve phoned Barnes from Italy, so depressed that she started to worry that he might be suicidal.

But when he returned to the United States, he turned his focus right back to where it had always been: discovering the Next Big Thing. In early September, he met with the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Paul Berg, who told him about his frustration that computers were not yet speeding up the scientific research process significantly. Macs and PCs weren’t powerful enough to do the kind of computational modeling he needed to do, and mainframes and minicomputers were too expensive and unwieldy for many labs. Steve began to develop an inchoate vision of where computing might go next, and of the kind of powerful computer he now wanted to concoct for demanding users like Berg. With Barnes and others telling him how wrongheaded Sculley was, he knew he could woo a handful of powerful allies from within Apple to start a new company. And at an Apple board meeting on September 13, he told Sculley and the other board members what he planned to do.

He was going to start a new company, he told them. He would like to take a few “low-level” employees with him. The company would try to concoct a radically new, high-end computer “workstation” for a specific and limited market—the upper echelons of higher education. It would not, he assured them, compete with Apple. In fact, he’d be happy to have Apple be a ground-floor investor in the new venture.

In the coming days, all hell would break loose. The employees he wanted were hardly “low-level,” Sculley would say. Board members would call Steve a liar in the press. Once again, national magazines like Newsweek would put him on the cover. Steve would resign. And Apple would sue him.

But none of that mattered. He was gone. Now his great work could really begin. He was ready to go create the Next Big Thing. Again.

Chapter 4

What’s Next?

In the balmy autumn days that followed his departure from Apple, Steve and his renegades gathered at his house in bucolic Woodside, a horsey community west of I-280 and nestled in a valley whose western slope swoops up to the coastal range of low mountains that protect Silicon Valley from the Pacific. The house, which he’d bought in 1984, was perhaps the most extravagant, albeit typically peculiar, nod to his rock-star status. It had been built by another controversial innovator, Daniel C. Jackling. In the early 1900s, Jackling had pioneered open-pit mining, the highly efficient yet disastrously polluting method for reaping low-grade copper that is still used throughout the world. Like Steve, Jackling made a bundle developing his idea, and the Woodside house, designed in Spanish Colonial style, was his personal monument. The rambling 17,000-square-foot structure had fourteen bedrooms, custom-made wrought-iron lamps, and a pipe organ that had been expanded to seventy-one ear-shattering pipes. Charles Lindbergh and Lillian Gish had been feted there at parties that flowed forth from the enormous ballroom. The driveway leading to the mansion showed off its ample landscaped grounds, which had fallen into some disrepair. Some of Steve’s indulgences—a BMW motorcycle and a gray Porsche 911—were parked out front. On the inside it didn’t feel much like a home at all. Steve hadn’t gotten around to buying much furniture. Strewn about the house were a mattress, a lamp, some Ansel Adams prints. He’d bought a monstrously big house, but had settled in without bothering to make it a home.

The apostolic high-tech renegades from Apple—Rich Page, a hardware engineer and Apple fellow; Bud Tribble, a leading software programmer; George Crow, another hardware specialist; Dan’l Lewin, who had led Apple’s efforts to sell Macs to universities and colleges; and Susan Barnes, the Mac financial manager—converged here with their rock-star leader every few days to plot the next revolution. From the very start, the world was peeking in through the windows. For the Newsweek cover story on Steve’s departure from Apple, the magazine photographed the six of them outside his house, awkwardly sitting on the lawn in their “business” clothes. (Dan’l Lewin, the chiseled Princeton grad who would lead the sales team, was even wearing a tie.) “It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 employees couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans,” Steve told the reporter. His humility, of course, was utterly disingenuous.

When he resigned, Steve had told the Apple board that his new company, dubbed NeXT, would not attack any important Apple markets. That was nonsense. His stated target—the higher education market—was in fact very important to Apple, and he had stolen away Lewin, the company’s key sales link to the academic world. But Steve had his eyes on even more than that one narrow slice of Apple’s potential market. As Steve saw things, he had created the first two signature moments of the personal computing era: the Apple II and the Mac. (There had, of course, been another signature moment: the release of the IBM PC in 1981. But Steve discounted that milestone, since he couldn’t imagine a world in which most people would choose to buy machines that were so much harder to use than the ones he created.) Now it was time for a third shift, and he naturally would be the one to drive the change. He would show those bureaucrats who had mismanaged Apple a thing or two about real leadership and innovation.

Steve believed that he now had everything he needed to succeed as a world-class CEO. He had been involved in every aspect of Apple’s business over the previous eight years. He was a quick study, a savant who could envision revolutionary products and inspire the close group of folks who designed and made them, and he was an instinctive marketer. In Steve’s eyes, no one could say the same for Sculley and his “market-driven” tactics. “I think the question everyone is asking about Apple is this,” Steve told me during one of our first interviews. “Does the environment to create the next Macintosh still exist at Apple? Would they know it if they found it?” His new company, called NeXT, would surely grow to be even bigger than Apple, for the sole reason that he had higher expectations for it. “The world doesn’t need another $100 million computing company,” he announced, scoffing at the thought that he might produce something so trivial.

He was convinced that he really was the only person who could create from scratch the amazing blockbuster products that would give rise to the industry’s next great company. So were his renegades. “I had had plenty of experience with the downside of Steve,” remembers Lewin, the last of the five Apple exiles to sign up. “I definitely thought about the risk of going to work for him and leaving my job at Apple. But I worried that if I didn’t go to NeXT, I would have always said, ‘Dammit, I should have gone along for the ride.’ ” Says another early staffer, who signed on in 1986: “You would have had to be an idiot not to believe that Steve was going to create the next big thing. Everyone believed that.”

Little did they know that in due time, NeXT would turn out to be the full, unfortunate blooming of Steve Jobs’s worst tendencies at Apple. Yes, Steve had been a product visionary and a great spokesman for the company and the industry he had helped create. But he was hardly poised to be a great chief executive. In many ways, he wasn’t even a grown-up yet.