As one of Jobs’s old friends tells Isaacson: “The one question I’d truly love Steve to answer is, ‘Why are you sometimes so mean?’ ”
If there was one trauma that persisted throughout much of his life, and which seems somehow connected to his extreme behavior, it was the effect of his adoption.
In one of the many revelations about the complex life and personality of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson says that Jobs - who was adopted - unknowingly met his biological father.
At the age of 6 or 7, Jobs told the girl who lived across the street that he was adopted and she asked if that meant his “real parents didn’t want you.”
His adoptive parents, whom Jobs seemed to revere, explained that they had picked him out. But through much of his life, Jobs appeared to have been on an ill-defined spiritual quest — including a seven-month trip to India, extreme diets and primal-scream therapy. And the quest at times seemed to relate to his adoption, his friends told Isaacson.
“The primal scream and the mucusless diets, he was trying to cleanse himself and get deeper into his frustration about his birth,” a friend, Greg Calhoun, said.
‘Two accidental friends’
Jobs was as obsessive and difficult to deal with in his romantic relationships as he was about his work, according to Isaacson. In the book, Jobs singles out the three women who had the greatest impact on him: folk singer Joan Baez, computer consultant Tina Redse and former Goldman Sachs trader Laurene Powell.
“There were only two women in my life that I was truly in love with, Tina and Laurene,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I thought I was in love with Joan Baez, but I really just liked her a lot.”
Jobs met Baez in 1982 through her sister, who was seeking charity donations of computers. Jobs was 27; she was 41.
He described it as a serious relationship between “two accidental friends who became lovers,” but a college friend surmises in the book that one of the only reasons Jobs went out with her was that she had once been involved with one of Jobs’s greatest idols, Bob Dylan.
Jobs’s relationship with Washington is not a major element in the book, but he had moments when he offered testy political opinions. He said he was disappointed in Obama because “he is reluctant to offend people.” Jobs smiled and added, “Yes, that’s not a problem I ever had.”
Questions about religion seemed to weigh on Jobs throughout his life. He said that he spent years studying Zen Buddhism and that he thinks “different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”
Later, he told Isaacson, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God.”
“I like to think that something survives after you die,” Jobs said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”
Jobs then fell silent for what Isaacson describes as a “very long time,” before continuing.
“But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch. . . . Click! And you’re gone.”
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