By RACHEL METZ, BARBARA ORTUTAY and JORDAN ROBERTSON
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — A new biography portrays Steve Jobs as a skeptic all his life — giving up religion because he was troubled by starving children, calling executives who took over Apple “corrupt” and delaying cancer surgery in favor of cleansings and herbal medicine.
“Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, to be published Monday, also says Jobs came up with the company’s name while he was on a diet of fruits and vegetables, and as a teenager perfected staring at people without blinking.
The Associated Press purchased a copy of the book Thursday.
The book delves into Jobs’ decision to delay surgery for nine months after learning in October 2003 that he had a neuroendocrine tumor — a relatively rare type of pancreatic cancer that grows more slowly and is therefore more treatable.
Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He went to a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproved approaches before having surgery in 2004.
Isaacson, quoting Jobs, writes in the book: ” ‘I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,’ he told me years later with a hint of regret.”
Jobs died Oct. 5, at age 56, after a battle with cancer.
The book also provides insight into the unraveling of Jobs’ relationship with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and an Apple board member from 2006 to 2009.
Schmidt had quit Apple’s board as Google and Apple went head to head in smartphones, Apple with its iPhone and Google with its Android software.
Isaacson wrote that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the touch and other popular features of the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google’s actions amounted to “grand theft.”
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
The biography, for which Jobs granted more than three dozen interviews, is also a look into the thoughts of a man who was famously secret, guarding details of his life as he did Apple’s products, and generating plenty of psychoanalysis from a distance.
The book says Jobs gave up Christianity at age 13 when he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine.
He asked whether his Sunday school pastor knew what would happen to them.
Jobs never went back to church, though he did study Zen Buddhism later.
Jobs calls the crop of executives brought in to run Apple after his ouster in 1985 “corrupt people” with “corrupt values” who cared only about making money. Jobs himself is described as caring far more about product than profit.
Jobs returned to the company in 1997. After that, he introduced the candy-colored iMac computer, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and turned Apple into the most valuable company in America by market value for a time.
The book says that, while some Apple board members were happy that Hewlett-Packard gave up trying to compete with Apple’s iPad, Jobs did not think it was cause for celebration.
“Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands,” Jobs told Isaacson. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed.”
“I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple,” he added.
Advance sales of the book have topped best-seller lists. Much of the biography adds to what was already known, or speculated, about Jobs. While Isaacson is not the first to tell Jobs’ story, he had unprecedented access. Their last interview was weeks before Jobs died.
Jobs reveals in the book that he didn’t want to go to college, and the only school he applied to was Reed, a costly private college in Portland.
Once accepted, his parents tried to talk him out of attending Reed, but he told them he wouldn’t go to college if they didn’t let him go there.
Jobs wound up attending but dropped out after less than a year and never went back.
Jobs told Isaacson that he tried various diets, including one of fruits and vegetables.
On the naming of Apple, he said he was “on one of my fruitarian diets.” He said he had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”
Jobs’ eye for simple, clean design was evident early. The case of the Apple II computer had originally included a Plexiglas cover, metal straps and a roll-top door. Jobs, though, wanted something elegant that would make Apple stand out.
He told Isaacson he was struck by Cuisinart food processors while browsing at a department store and decided he wanted a case made of molded plastic.
He called Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, his “spiritual partner” at Apple. He told Isaacson that Ive had “more operation power” at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself — that there’s no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, says Jobs, is “the way I set it up.”
Jobs was never a typical CEO. Apple’s first president, Mike Scott, was hired mainly to manage Jobs, then 22.
One of his first projects, according to the book, was getting Jobs to bathe more often. It didn’t work.
Jobs’ dabbling in LSD and other aspects of 1960s counterculture has been well documented. In the book, Jobs says LSD “reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
He also revealed that one of his favorite bands was the Beatles and that he wished to get the band on iTunes, Apple’s revolutionary online music store, before he died. The Beatles’ music went on sale on iTunes in late 2010.
The book was originally called “iSteve” and scheduled to come out in March. The release date was moved up to November, then, after Jobs’ death, to Monday. It is published by Simon & Schuster and will sell for $35.
Isaacson will appear tonight (Sunday) on “60 Minutes.” CBS News, which airs the program, released excerpts of the book Thursday.
