Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Siberia

Overview

The boardroom on April 11, 1985, became the stage for a brutal reckoning. John Sculley, the man Steve Jobs had personally recruited from PepsiCo just two years earlier, delivered an ultimatum to Apple's board: back his decision to remove Steve from operational power, or find yourselves a new CEO. What followed was a grueling day-and-a-half of confrontations that would fracture the company's soul.

The irony stung. Steve had brought John in specifically to provide "adult supervision" for the billion-dollar company he'd built from his parents' garage. Their early relationship had been warm, almost conspiratorial—long private dinners, shared strategic visions, a sense of alignment that seemed almost supernatural. But Apple's fortunes had soured, and with them, the partnership. The Macintosh, Steve's brainchild launched to thunderous acclaim just over a year earlier, was floundering. At $2,495 in 1984 dollars, it offered simplicity but sacrificed power—no hard drive, severely limited functionality. Once the early adopters were satiated, customers fled back to the cheaper Apple II.

As inventory piled up and budgets spiraled, Steve became impossible to manage. He'd told an executive, "I am the board." The actual board disagreed, dressing down both men. Now, John wanted Steve stripped of all decision-making authority. Steve reminded them Apple was his baby, his beating heart. But when the board voted, they chose John. Steve left the room in tears.

The Fracturing

Behind the dramatic boardroom showdown lay a year of escalating tensions that had infected every corner of Apple. The company's market share had stagnated while IBM and its cheaper "clone" competitors captured nearly half the personal computer market. Things got so dire that Steve and John had entered secret talks to sell the company to General Electric—talks that fell through but introduced Steve to H. Ross Perot, a connection that would matter later.

Steve's solution was the Macintosh Office, an upgraded Mac for corporate customers. John saw the plan as delusional—the Mac's architecture simply couldn't handle corporate demands. Even Apple's own engineers agreed the project exceeded their capabilities. But the "reality distortion field" that Steve projected made him fearless. He pushed ahead anyway.

The resulting Super Bowl commercial, "Lemmings," was meant to replicate the triumph of the iconic 1984 ad. Instead, eighty-four thousand fans at Stanford Stadium watched in uncomfortable silence as blindfolded office workers marched off a cliff. The product launched three days later to muted press and weak sales. Its technical centerpiece, Apple's file server, wasn't even ready to ship.

Internal chaos followed. Steve's acolytes accused John of lacking vision and turning Apple into a boring bureaucracy. John's supporters stormed Human Resources to complain about Steve overstepping. John moved to centralize leadership under himself, hanging a pyramid graphic on his office door with himself at the top. Steve refused to accept a demotion to one of three coequal product executives.

The Coup That Wasn't

In March 1985, with tensions at a breaking point, Apple's HR chief Jay Elliot arranged a meeting between the two men. Rain poured outside. Inside, John screamed at Steve for undermining his authority and blamed him for the Mac Division's poor sales. Steve screamed back, then dropped his stinger: he regretted ever hiring John as CEO. Then Steve burst into tears. "I knew at that moment that Sculley had him," Jay said, "because Sculley would go to the board and say, 'This guy is out of control.'"

John proposed a new plan: transfer Steve to a completely powerless unit tasked with dreaming up far-off ideas. The board, exhausted by the chaos, backed John. Steve kept his chairman title but lost his operational role—a crushing blow. "Why did John do this to me?" he sobbed to John's own assistant. "He betrayed me."

John then went to Paris to recruit Jean-Louis Gassée, the charismatic head of Apple France, as Steve's replacement. Jean-Louis was everything Steve wasn't: debonair, diplomatic, wearing leather jackets and diamond earrings. He'd been a door-to-door salesman of sex elixirs before pivoting to tech. And he'd written that Steve was "that handsome and tragic character out of some novel, that visionary monster." When Steve discovered the arrangement, he was furious.

Desperate, Steve crafted a desperate plan. After Apple secured rights to sell computers in China, he accepted an invitation to speak at the Great Hall of the People, then invited John along. When John signed on, Steve bailed, leaving John to travel alone. With John out of the country, Steve planned to go to the board and demand he be made CEO. Then he foolishly revealed the plot to Jean-Louis.

"Steve, it's not your company," Jean-Louis replied. "It's our company." That night, he told John everything.

Exile

The next morning, John canceled his China trip and ambushed Steve at the board meeting. When Steve arrived, thinking John was thousands of miles away, John confronted him. "It's come to my attention that you'd like to throw me out of the company," he said. Steve admitted it. The board asked around the room. Four of six senior leaders sided with John. Steve flopped his head down on the table, deflated. "Well," he said, voice trembling, "I guess I know where things stand." He stood and left. No one followed.

One week later, Steve was formally exiled to a small building across the street from Apple's main campus. They nicknamed it "Siberia." Only his assistant and a security guard came with him. Corporate reports stopped flowing. Coworkers stopped calling. "It was amazing to see how ostracized he was in the Valley," recalled a former financial controller. "It was really cruel."

With nothing to do, Steve went to the office for a few hours each day, then stopped going altogether. "There was nobody really there to miss me," he later said. At night, he sat outside his home and looked up at the stars. Every waking moment of his adult life had been spent building Apple. Now he had no real friends, no other life to turn to. He decided to disappear for a while, to step away and think.

"Suddenly, he was gone," Jay remembered. "Nobody knew where the hell he was. And they didn't know when he would come back."

Key Takeaways

• The partnership between Steve Jobs and John Sculley collapsed from mutual trust into bitter rivalry as Apple's market position deteriorated
• Steve's "reality distortion field" made him fearless and visionary but also unmanageable, alienating both his CEO and the board
• The failed product launches of the Macintosh and Macintosh Office exposed the gap between Steve's grand visions and market realities
• Steve's attempt to orchestrate a coup backfired spectacularly when he confided in the wrong person, leading to his complete exile from Apple
• The isolation that followed was devastating—Steve had built his entire identity around Apple and had no personal life to fall back on

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Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Into the Wilderness

Overview

The summer of 1985 was, by Steve Jobs's own admission, like getting the wind knocked out of you—the kind of blow where the only way to start breathing again is to relax and let your body remember how. And so he did, filling his days with reading, long woodland walks, and travel. He wandered through Tuscany with his girlfriend Tina Redse, drawing inspiration from the gray-blue sandstone of Florence's sidewalks (a detail he'd later import into Apple's retail stores). He even flirted with the idea of becoming an American expatriate in Paris, reading literature at cafés and studying master painters at museums. Tina wanted to run away with him, to "crawl through that black chasm of your broken world and emerge, anonymous and new." But Steve couldn't stay idle for long. He visited the Soviet Union to discuss a Macintosh factory, then returned to California pondering a run for the Senate—until he realized he couldn't decide whether to be a Democrat or a Republican. "I've got too much hair left for politics," he quipped.

The New Regime at Apple

Back at Apple, the scars of Steve's ouster were raw. Jean-Louis Gassée had been promoted to VP of product development, wielding more influence over Apple's products than Steve ever had in his final days. The tension between the two men was palpable and petty. Steve still parked in the handicapped space; Jean-Louis bought a silver Mercedes nearly identical to Steve's, complete with vanity plates reading OPEN MAC. That license plate wasn't just a jab—it represented a fundamental philosophical shift. Jean-Louis, with CEO John Sculley's backing, wanted to make the Mac more expandable, adding slots for third-party cards and ports for peripherals. Steve had always resisted such changes, believing that controlling every aspect of the system produced a more elegant user experience. But that closed architecture came at a cost. IBM's cheaper, more customizable PCs were devouring Apple's market share. As Sculley conceded, many companies were "so true-blue IBM that they're just not going to want to work with us."

The Education Market and the 3M Machine

In his quiet solitude, Steve began listing his favorite projects from the past decade. A pattern emerged: he felt drawn to education. One project stood out—the Apple University Consortium, a program offering universities discounted Macs in exchange for professors developing Apple's software library. The program was the brainchild of Dan'l Lewin, a charismatic salesman with an improbable background: his father and uncles were professional wrestlers who kept an African lion and a chimpanzee roaming their home. Dan'l had built the Consortium from scratch, landing deals with twenty-four universities including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. As he traveled, he kept hearing the same demand from professors: they wanted 3M machines—workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and enough processing power to handle a million instructions per second. The leading laboratories had released a handful of these machines, but they were prohibitively expensive. Researchers were desperate for a commercial 3M machine priced under $10,000.

Despite the Consortium's success—moving nearly fifty thousand Macs while retail sales stalled—John Sculley still demanded layoffs. He asked Dan'l to cut his sixty-person team down to ten, defending the decision by comparing Apple's education division to Frito-Lay's marketing department. Dan'l was appalled. "Two thirds of Apple's business was in education," he recalled. Why clamp down on a key, growing market? Steve, still searching for purpose, couldn't shake the 3M idea.

The Meeting That Changed Everything

Steve later told a story about meeting Nobel laureate Paul Berg at a Stanford luncheon, where the biochemist explained how researchers desperately needed affordable computers to model DNA experiments. The tale was elegantly packaged—Steve knew that name-dropping Nobel Prize winners carried weight. But the real story was messier. When Rich Page, Apple's star hardware engineer, called Steve distraught that Jean-Louis had canceled the BigMac project (Steve's planned 3M successor to the Mac), something clicked. Rich wasn't the only one feeling exiled. Dan'l saw Jean-Louis's reign as a regime purge: "The king is dead. Long live the king!" While Steve's loyalists were put out to pasture, the new court swept in.

Building the Mutiny

Steve decided to start a new company to build the 3M machine researchers actually needed. He began recruiting his inner circle. Rich Page accepted immediately, still furious about the BigMac cancellation. Susan Barnes, Apple's controller of the Macintosh Division, agreed to join even though it meant forfeiting her annual bonus. Bud Tribble, Susan's partner and a key architect of the Mac's user interface, signed on too. George Crow, the analog engineer who designed the Mac's video system, didn't even wait to be recruited—he called Steve directly. "Are you planning to do anything?" George asked. "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I am," Steve replied.

Dan'l was the final piece. Steve called him while he was in the shower, asking him to come over for a walk. As they strolled through Woodside, Steve laid out his vision: a new computer company focused on universities, the market Dan'l knew best. Dan'l had conditions—his wife was recovering from surgery, and he wasn't about to gamble their future on Steve's latest inspiration. But when Steve revealed that Bud Tribble would run software, Dan'l's resistance cracked. He respected Bud's technical brilliance and trusted his judgment. That sealed the deal.

On Thursday, September 12, Steve planned to resign from Apple. The five cofounders would follow the next day. As the reality set in, Dan'l, Susan, Bud, Rich, and George realized they had just hatched a mutiny. There was no turning back. If they had made the wrong choice, it could devastate their careers and upend their lives.

Key Takeaways

• Steve's summer of reflection revealed a deep pull toward education and creating tools for scientists and researchers
• The 3M machine concept—a powerful workstation under $10,000—became the foundation for his next venture
• Jean-Louis Gassée's promotion and the cancellation of the BigMac project forced Steve's loyalists to choose sides
• Steve's recruitment strategy targeted people who shared his vision and were disillusioned with Apple's new direction under Sculley and Jean-Louis
• The founding of what would become NeXT was driven more by personal loyalty and shared frustration than by a single "epiphany" moment

Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Jumping Ship

Overview

In September 1985, Steve Jobs walked away from Apple—and took five of its most valuable employees with him. It’s a story of betrayal, bruised egos, and the birth of a new venture that began not with a polished business plan but with a vague vision, a handful of loyalists, and a living room full of uncertainty.

The Boardroom Gambit

In September 1985, Steve approached Apple’s board with a proposal he framed as generous: he’d leave to build a computer for universities, wouldn’t compete, and would only take a few “low-level” employees. He even offered Apple first dibs on distribution rights. The board saw through the spin. Mike Markkula, Apple’s original investor, bristled at the idea of losing anyone. Steve’s assurance that these were people “you won’t miss” turned out to be a deliberate understatement meant to smooth his exit. They agreed to consider a 10 percent stake in his new company, but Steve left the meeting without committing—he needed to get his team out first.

The Five Who Left

The next morning, Steve handed CEO John Sculley a typed list of resignations. The names: Rich Page, Dan’l Lewin, Bud Tribble, Susan Barnes, and George Crow. None were low-level. Susan was the Mac Division’s financial controller. Rich had access to cross-company projects. Bud helped shape the Mac’s interface. George saved the Mac launch by designing a last-minute floppy drive. Dan’l had built Apple’s education sales into its most profitable arm. John panicked—not just over the talent drain, but over the proprietary knowledge walking out the door. When the five submitted their resignations, security escorted them out like criminals.

The Aftermath at the Jackling House

Gathered at Steve’s mansion, the team faced a sobering question: now what? They had no name, no product, no plan—only a notion of building computers for universities. Steve’s confidence wavered. He wondered aloud if he was washed up, an impostor. Meanwhile, Apple board members leaked attacks to the Wall Street Journal, and Steve fired back in Newsweek, accusing Apple’s new leadership of stifling innovation. Reporters camped outside his house. “I’m not bitter,” he insisted unconvincingly.

Money and a Name

Steve sold $21.4 million of Apple stock at near–historic lows, investing $7 million of his own into the venture. To name the company, he initially proposed “Two” (his second company). A friend, designer Tom Suiter, heard Bill Gates use the word “next” repeatedly at a CD-ROM conference. Tom wrote it down twenty-five times. Steve loved it. On September 19, 1985, he registered Next Inc. with the state of California.

The Lawsuit

Four days later, Apple filed suit against Steve and Rich Page, accusing them of stealing proprietary information. Steve was still a board member at the time, making the suit both a legal and personal breach. But the team spotted a flaw: Next had no hardware yet—nothing to steal. Still, Apple’s lawyers were relentless. One call ended with Steve telling his confidante Susan, “They said they’re going to have me arrested!”

Key Takeaways

• Steve’s departure was neither graceful nor low-key; he misled the board about the caliber of employees he was poaching, creating lasting animosity.
• The five defectors were not just bodies—they were architects of Apple’s most critical products and revenue streams.
• The aftermath was emotionally volatile: Steve doubted his own relevance while Apple publicly vilified him.
• The name “Next” came from a rival’s speech, a twist of fate that Steve embraced without irony.
• Apple’s lawsuit was a strategic gamble to intimidate, but it underestimated Next’s bare-bones status—no hardware, no theft possible.

Chapter 4: Chapter 4: The Crucible of Dreams and Depositions

Overview

In October 1985, Steve Jobs and his fledgling Next team received a certified letter from Apple’s lawyers demanding a belated exit interview and confirmation of eight trade secrets—starting with the canceled BigMac prototype. Dan’l Lewin refused, suspecting the list was a prelude to a lawsuit. And it was. Apple’s legal onslaught threatened to strangle Next not by the strength of their case, but by the sheer weight of legal fees and endless depositions. Steve turned to Gary Moore, an IP litigator whose firm had never represented Apple, making them the designated opposition. Gary saw the strategy clearly: Apple didn’t have a real case, but they could bury the start-up in paperwork. The legal test, he explained, came from milkmen—you won if you found customers through public directories, lost if you stole the old boss’s customer list. Apple wanted to paint Dan’l as the milkman who stole the list on Steve’s orders, but Dan’l had a secret weapon: Charlie Warlick’s Directory of Computing Facilities in Higher Education, a public reference book that was essentially the yellow pages of academic computing. Legally, Next was on solid ground, but one verbal stumble in a deposition could give Apple’s weak case teeth.

The deposition battles began in December. Steve kept his composure, walking into Brown & Bain’s office with Zen-like calm, refusing to let Apple’s lawyers provoke him. Rich Page faced them next, and the objections piled up so thick that Judge Peter Stone drove to the deposition himself. With long hair, muttonchops, and a curled mustache, he watched the drama with bemusement, even asking Rich, “Unix—is that hardware or software?” Over three weeks, the other founders endured their turns. Apple’s lawyers tried to pin Dan’l on stealing a distribution list; Dan’l dropped Warlick’s directory on the table and said, “Here’s my Rolodex. Call Charlie if you want a copy.” That killed the milkman theory, but Apple kept pushing, producing over six thousand pages of documents while complaining Next provided “virtually nothing.” After five weeks, Judge Stone tossed out whole portions of Apple’s case for being too broad.

Meanwhile, the team realized Apple’s lawsuit was making them seem bigger than they were. Steve sensed an opening to win the public story, so he called filmmaker John Nathan and let him embed with Next for a PBS documentary—disobeying his lawyer’s advice. At the same time, the team scattered like corporate anthropologists, haunting electronics shops and visiting universities. At Harvard, computer science professor Harry Lewis laid out the numbers: software was clumsy, faculty didn’t want clunky interfaces, and the price had to be under $3,000. At Brown, Andy van Dam called courseware “the Wright brothers stage” and said the machine must come in under $2,500 at volume. At Stanford, Michael Carter told them professors needed tools as easy to use as MacPaint, and student machines had to be below $2,000. A 3M machine—one million pixels, one million instructions per second, one megabyte of memory—had been higher ed’s holy grail, and universities believed Steve could deliver.

In December 1985, the Next team—now including five new hires from Apple—caravanned to Pebble Beach for their first retreat. Steve stood before them in his crisp white shirt, red suspenders, and black turtleneck, declaring, “More important than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company.” Over two days, they debated two parameters: the machine had to cost no more than $3,000 and launch by spring 1987 to hit university summer acquisitions. Joanna Hoffman warned that Steve’s reality distortion field could lead to flawed design decisions, but Steve insisted they needed to plant a stake. Miss the window, and credibility would erode. The debate ended with an eighteen-month timeline to build an entire computer and operating system from scratch. Great artists ship.

Building the team and culture was a delicate dance. Steve set a high bar: “Zero is better than a negative.” He sought brilliance and breadth—champion swimmers, musicians, surfers. In interviews, he’d ask, “Are you the best hardware designer in your field?” If the candidate said no, Steve replied, “Then I’d rather talk to them!” The initial dynamic was a circle, everyone facing each other, but soon each cofounder turned outward to build their wedge. Steve managed everything, from logo colors to factory robot angles, often clashing with his team. Susan Barnes reminded him that “your assets have feet.” The culture was intellectually contentious—you had to push back, to “evangelize and convince all the smart people.” When Next veterans moved to other companies, new colleagues told them to dial it back. In late 1985, Steve and Susan went to George Lucas’s ranch to evaluate the Lucasfilm Computer Division—later Pixar. Lucas, cash-strapped from a divorce, threatened to fire the entire team. Steve found his approach revolting and bought the company for $5 million, a sixth of the original ask. He set terms that respected Ed Catmull’s authority while building an anti-Lucas model: loyal, permanent people. “We have to be loyal to each other,” Steve told Ed. Pixar worked with technology Steve didn’t understand, and he was forced to trust his team.

Though the lawsuit still loomed, the team left Pebble Beach renewed. Early 1986, Next moved to its first real office in Stanford Research Park. Apple began to weary of the siege. Steve, Rich, and their lawyers met with Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat every five or six weeks. By the fifth month, Al complained that one set of depositions had blown past his entire annual budget. The lawsuit cost over $20 million. “You could stop,” Steve told him. Four months in, Apple proposed a settlement that would dictate the kind of computer Next could build—high-performance, premium machines. For Steve, it was perfect: exactly what he’d started Next to do. The terms included a chip at 20 MHz or faster, at least 4 MB of RAM, a high-resolution display, no floppy disk format, and a monitor that couldn’t sit on top of the computer. Gary called it an “eyewash”—a way for Apple to claim they’d gotten something. On January 17, 1986, Apple and Next settled. No admission of wrongdoing, but the Next team knew who had won. Al’s quiet rebuke— “Shame on us” —hung in the air, a rare moment of humility from a company that had tried to crush Steve’s vision. The legal threat that was supposed to consume his time and resources had collapsed, leaving him with a clear path forward. The crucible of dreams and depositions had forged not bitterness, but liberation.

Key Takeaways

• Apple’s attempt to control Steve through litigation failed, granting him unexpected freedom.
• The phrase “Shame on us” from Al marked a turning point, acknowledging the overreach.
• Steve could now pursue his original computer design without external constraints.
• The legal battle, intended as a weapon, became a catalyst for independence.