I DID NOT write a story after that first meeting. A fancy logo for an infant company didn’t qualify as news, no matter who had commissioned it, no matter who had designed it. (Besides, back then the Wall Street Journal never published photographs; in fact, it never printed anything in color. So even if I had wanted to write about Steve’s shiny new bauble, its subtle and impractical beauty would have been doubly lost on the Journal’s readers, who cared little for design at the time.)
Not writing a feature was the first salvo in the twenty-five-yearlong negotiation that marked our relationship. As with most journalist/source relationships, there was one main reason Steve and I wanted to connect: we each had something the other needed. I could deliver the front page of the Wall Street Journal and, later, the cover of Fortune magazine; he had a story that my readers wanted, and that I wanted to tell better and earlier than any other journalist. He usually wanted me to write about a new product of his; my readers wanted to know about him as much as the product—if not more. He wanted to point out all the glories of the product and the genius and beauty of its creation; I wanted to get behind the scenes, and to cover the competitive ups and downs of his company. This was the subtext of most of our interactions: a transaction in which we each hoped to cajole the other into some sort of advantageous deal. With Steve, this could be like a card game where one day I’d feel we were partners playing bridge and the next I’d feel like a sucker holding eight-high in poker. More often than not, he made me feel like he had the edge—whether or not that was true.
Despite the fact that the Journal didn’t publish anything at the time, Steve told Cathy Cook, a Silicon Valley vet then working for Allison Thomas, that the interview went fine and that he thought I was “okay.” From time to time, he would have Cathy invite me over to NeXT for updates. There wasn’t much worth covering, frankly, at least in the eyes of the Journal—I didn’t write my first big piece about NeXT until 1988, when Steve finally unveiled the company’s first computer workstation. But the visits were always intriguing and invigorating.
One time he called me in to crow about persuading Ross Perot to invest $20 million in NeXT. On the face of it, they were the oddest couple: Perot, the crew-cut, buttoned-down, uber-patriotic, navy veteran bankrolling a former hippie who still preferred to go barefoot, was a vegetarian, and didn’t believe in using deodorant. And yet I now knew Steve well enough to understand that he and Perot, whom I’d interviewed a few times, were actually kindred spirits: both were idiosyncratic, idealistic autodidacts. I told him that he absolutely had to visit Perot in his office at Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in Dallas, if for no other reason than to see his over-the-top collection of histrionic eagle sculptures and the colonnade of U.S. flags lining the headquarters driveway. Steve laughed, and rolled his eyes in amusement: “Been there, done that.” He asked if I thought he was crazy for liking Perot. “How could anyone not like Perot at least a little after meeting him?” I replied. “He’s funny.” Steve cackled in agreement, and then added, “Seriously, I think there’s a lot I can learn from him.”
Over time, our similar ages became a bridge more than a barrier. Steve and I had navigated similar adolescent rites of passage. I could say the same thing about Bill Gates, whom I also covered extensively, but he wasn’t the product of a working-class upbringing or public schools as Steve and I were. All three of us had dodged the bullet of serving in Vietnam because the military draft was abolished by the time we had turned eighteen. Yet Steve and I, more than Bill, were true products of the antiwar, peace and love, tune in/turn on generation. We were music nuts and gaga for gadgets, and we weren’t afraid to experiment with outlandish new ideas or experiences. Steve had been adopted as a child, and we did occasionally talk about what that had been like, but that aspect of his upbringing never seemed nearly as big an influence on his intellectual and cultural development as was the larger social and political milieu—and the high-tech sandbox—in which we came of age.
In those early years, Steve had an important reason to cultivate our relationship. In the ever-shifting computer world of the late 1980s, building breathless anticipation for his Next Big Thing was crucial to attracting potential customers and investors, and Steve would need plenty of the latter, given that NeXT would take nearly five years to produce a working computer. Throughout his life, Steve had a keen sense of the tactical value of press coverage; this was just one part of what Regis McKenna, perhaps his most important early mentor, calls “Steve’s natural gift for marketing. Even when he was twenty-two years old he had the intuition,” McKenna elaborated. “He understood what was great about Sony, about Intel. He wanted that kind of image for what he was going to create.”
Knowing that Apple was also among the companies I covered for the Journal, and later for Fortune, Steve would call up at seemingly random moments over the coming years to offer me “intelligence” that he’d heard from former colleagues who were still there, or simply to share his opinions on the interminable executive soap opera at his old company in Cupertino. Over time I learned that he was a reliable source about the mess that Apple became in the early 1990s—and I also came to realize that there was nothing random about those calls. Steve always had an ulterior motive: sometimes he was hoping to glean something about a competitor; sometimes he had a product he wanted me to check out; sometimes he wanted to chastise me for something I’d written. In the latter case, he could also play the withholding game; once, in the late 1990s, after his return to the company he had cofounded, I sent him a note to say that I thought it was about time for me to write another Apple story for Fortune. I had been out of touch for several months because I’d had open-heart surgery—he had called me at the hospital to wish me well—but now I was ready to jump on another piece. His email reply was simple: “Brent,” he wrote, “as I recall, you wrote a rather mean story about me and Apple last summer. I remember this hurting my feelings. Why did you write such a nasty story?” But a few months later he relented, and cooperated for another cover feature about the company.
Ours was a long, complicated, and mostly rewarding relationship. When I would run into Steve at industry events, he would introduce me as his friend, which was flattering, odd, true, and yet not true all at the same time. During the brief time when he had an office in Palo Alto near Fortune’s bureau, I would run into him around town now and then, and we’d stop to chat about all kinds of things. Once, I helped him shop for his wife Laurene’s birthday present. I visited his home many times, always for one work reason or another, but with an informality that I’ve never encountered from another CEO. And yet there was never a minute where the basic terms of our relationship weren’t clear: I was the reporter, he was the source and subject. He enjoyed some of my stories—others, like the one that prompted that email, infuriated him. My independence and his hoarding of information created the borders of our relationship.