So I say, of course, “How old is Reed?”

He tells me that Reed is fourteen, and will be graduating in four years. He says, “Frankly, they tell me I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of living five years.”

“Are you telling me this for any other reason than wanting to get it off your chest?” I asked.

He says, “I’m telling you because I’m giving you a chance to back out of the deal.”

So I look at my watch, and we’ve got thirty minutes. In thirty minutes we’re going to make this announcement. We’ve got television crews, we’ve got the board votes, we’ve got investment bankers. The wheels are turning. And I’m thinking, We’re in this post Sarbanes-Oxley world, and Enron, and fiduciary responsibility, and he is going to be our largest shareholder, and I’m now being asked to bury a secret. He told me only two people know this. Laurene and his doctor. He told me, “My kids don’t know. Not even the Apple board knows. Nobody knows, and you can’t tell anybody.”

Basically, thanks.

I have to make a decision sitting on this bench with him whether I can even go through with this deal. I don’t even know. So I took a chance, and I said, “You’re our largest shareholder, but I don’t think that makes this matter. You’re not material to this deal. We’re buying Pixar, we’re not buying you. We’re going to hype the fact that you become the largest shareholder, but that’s not how you value the deal. You value the deal on the assets of Pixar.”

So we announce the deal.

The two men walked back into the building, the one that Catmull and Lasseter would name the Steve Jobs Building after his death. Iger had just sworn himself to secrecy, but he felt he had to tell Braverman. He felt he needed a second opinion. Braverman quickly agreed that Disney could go ahead with the deal. Steve went off to find Lasseter and Catmull and brought them into his office. He put his arms around the two of them. As Catmull explains, “He looked at us and said, ‘Are you guys good with this? If you say no, I’ll send them away right now.’ And we both said we were okay, and Steve just started weeping. We just held each other for the longest time. He loved this company.”

After Steve and Iger signed all the papers, the four men walked out into the atrium to tell the staff. Rumor of a deal had leaked out the day before, but the employees were nonetheless shocked when Steve confirmed that Pixar was in fact being sold to Disney. “The problem was that Ed and I had gone through this three-month journey of getting to know Bob Iger, doing our due diligence, and eventually realizing this was the right decision to do,” Lasseter recalls. “But everybody else in the company was in the same place we had been when Steve first mentioned the idea to us, of ‘How can you do this?’ Standing up in front of them in that moment was very hard. This gasp went through the crowd, like, ‘Oh my God.’ I’ll never forget [A Bug’s Life producer] Katherine Sarafian sitting down right in the front, just weeping when Steve said it.”

IGER TOLD TWO other people about Steve’s cancer. That night he told his wife, the television journalist Willow Bay. A day later he let Zenia Mucha, Disney’s communications chief, in on the secret. Steve’s cancer recurrence wasn’t publicly revealed until 2009, when he finally had to take another medical leave from Apple to get a liver transplant. “In that three-year period,” says Iger, “I always knew exactly what was going on with Steve medically. He and I would talk all the time, and since I kept things secret he confided in me. I knew about the trips to Rotterdam, or Amsterdam, and heard about the radioactive receptors that would attach themselves to cancerous cells.”

Before the deal had been announced, Steve had talked to Laurene about revealing his secret to Iger. They both felt that it was the right thing to do, given the magnitude of the sale. Their discussions had revolved around a single question: Could Steve really trust Iger to keep the secret? Steve told her they could. “I love that guy,” he told Laurene.

Chapter 15

The Whole Widget

Taking care of Catmull, Lasseter, and their staff was a deeply satisfying resolution to what had turned into one of the great joys of his life—the Pixar adventure that had started as such a curious whim. But it was also just one small element of the most productive period of Steve’s life, which happened to be the four years immediately following his return from abdominal surgery in the fall of 2004.

During these years, Steve’s cancer didn’t overshadow Apple’s daily operations. The board of directors discussed succession plans, but most members did not know that the cancer had spread past his pancreas. Steve’s occasional tiredness seemed reasonable, both for a man who had turned fifty in 2005 and for someone who had had cancer. He would take a few days off here and there to see his doctors and get treatments, but he worked from home a fair amount anyway, so that wasn’t alarming. Of course, Steve’s colleagues continued to worry that the cancer would recur, and looked for signs that it had come back. But there was nothing unusual to see until the summer of 2008, when Steve abruptly seemed to be losing weight in alarming fashion.

What the world did see was an effective and visionary leader at the height of his powers. These were complicated years for Apple, but Steve handled almost every challenge in exactly the manner he wanted. He had fallen into leadership at such a young age, but he was comfortable in that role now, and justifiably sure of his capacity to guide Apple’s tens of thousands of employees to the goals he set for them. During these years, he would ensure the company’s continued success in personal computers by engineering a deft switch to a new kind of microprocessor; ruthlessly and successfully managing some major transitions in his executive team; and optimizing and building upon the efficiency and ambition of the company’s product development “treadmill,” as Tim Cook describes it. This is also when he delivered what is likely to be remembered as the most notable product of his life, the iPhone, and then improved even that by pivoting once again into a strategy he personally had not wanted to pursue, thereby transforming the application software business in an almost Gatesian fashion.

These are the years when he got almost everything right. They are also the years that show most completely how he had changed, and that manifest the prolifically creative person and the genuine business genius he had become. “I am who I am,” Steve liked to say. This was most true during the last seven years of his life.

AFTER HIS FORAY into music, Steve knew that even he had underestimated the potential of a digital hub of Apple products linked to a computer. As the world of computers subsumed the world of consumer electronics, Apple steadily improved the experience of enjoying and managing music, photos, and videos on personal electronic devices, making the various technologies coherent in a way that no other company came close to matching. Apple promised to provide a simple and yet magical (to use one of Steve’s favorite adjectives) encounter with technology at every stage, as opposed to the disjointed and geeky mess that served mainly to confuse consumers when they tried to coordinate products from different companies. Purchasing music or computers from Apple online was almost too easy, while shopping in the company’s gleaming glass emporiums, staffed with all those smart young men and women and the whiz kids at the Genius Bar, could be a form of entertainment in itself. Apple was even starting to do a pretty good job of tying it all together via Wi-Fi, although this was the trickiest link in the continuum. Steve embraced the marketing adage that every single moment a consumer encounters a brand—whether as a buyer, a user, a store visitor, a passerby seeing a billboard, or someone simply watching an ad on TV—is an experience that adds either credits or debits to the brand’s “account” in his imagination. The “Apple experience” was an unprecedented merger of marketing and technology excellence that made customers want to come back for more.