A money making machine. Beautiful but soulless products. The right spirit is missing, the secret ingredient that put something extra into everything that no one else had. Jay Elliot, Apple’s first-hour employee and Steve Jobs mentor, goes down hard: the company led by Tim Cook is no longer “wild and anarchic. It seems so, but it’s actually like wild geese, which actually fly. In training. Instead, eagles aren’t. “Steve Jobs’s Apple was an eagle that dominated the market, even though revenue levels at the founder’s death in October 2011 were only a fraction of current products since company led by Tim Cook.
And the products the company is preparing to launch, from augmented reality glasses to the electric car, would have been killed in the cradle by Steve Jobs. «He was an artist, not a business man: a Leonardo da Vinci with 21st century technology. He visualized the future of people and modeled it with innovative but useful, as well as beautiful objects ».
Elliot is almost eighty years old, a life spent in large companies and then in the last two decades at the helm of startups and innovative companies “but small, where there is still a certain kind of spirit”. He has no money problems, he must not leave any legacy, he must not defend any position: when he speaks he simply says what he thinks. He is preparing a docuseries on Apple, he has written various books that also tell about his relationship with Steve Jobs. The most famous among us, “Steve Jobs, the man who invented the future” has just come out in paperback after breaking all sales records. More than him, only the official biography written by Walter Isaacson. “A bad book – Elliot dismisses it, outspoken – put together in a hurry to capitalize on the death of a genius”. Aaron Sorkin’s film? “Worse than going at night”, and smiles.
Elliot’s relationship with Jobs dates back to the early 1980s. Jobs was little more than a 25-year-old millionaire, he had created Apple and was putting the finishing touches on the Macintosh, the computer that was being developed in a building isolated from the main campus and on whose roof a Jolly Rogers, the pirate flag flew. Jobs, exiled within his own company (at the time led by John Sculley, a man of order and former vice president of Pepsi Cola) and then fired, had already ended up on the front pages of magazines around the world, had bought an apartment in New York in the building where John Lennon lived, he went out with Joan Baez. Elliot, fifteen years older, was a successful IBM executive. One day Jobs meets him by chance in a restaurant and approaches him: “I need you. I want you to come and work for me,” he says. Elliot recalls the episode with a smile: “He was a kid but he had a serious, determined face. I tell him no. He asks me what I need to change my mind. I answer him: a Porsche. A week later the doorbell rings. I open: it is a gentleman in a suit and tie who gives me the keys to a shiny new Porsche parked at the end of my driveway. The following Monday I sign the contract “.
The relationship between the two men is that between a young leader and his mentor and adviser: Elliot was in charge of managing the staff, but it also had a calming effect on Jobs, who was intemperate and pawing: “Jobs’s outbursts were legendary – says Elliot – but when I was there he calmed down instantly. After a while the others noticed it too and started calling me to all the meetings with Jobs: it was the only way to survive his anger. “
Elliot’s trajectory is particular: grown up on a farm in Northern California, when Silicon Valley and computers were not yet talked about, he saw the birth of information technology as a business and transformed from an industrial activity for giants like IBM to personal innovation created by hippies and flower children who went on pilgrimage to India and tried psychedelic drugs. “That Apple was a real company, but it was also a different company, which has nothing to do with Apple today: Tim Cook is a lovable person but he is an engineer whose job is to build a giant financial machine to do money. And it is succeeding. But he doesn’t make the products that Steve Jobs would have wanted: at that point Microsoft’s number one, Satya Nadella, is better. Bill Gates chose him very well and he is imbuing that company with a soul. Or Tesla and his number one, Elon Musk ».
The creator of the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, on the other hand, according to Elliot today, in this era of Covid and pandemics, would have focused on health issues: “The devices that measure people’s health and helping them feel good is something Jobs would have liked to do. They can change people’s lives, especially now. Furthermore, Jobs would have opposed Facebook, because his business has become immoral, as has Google’s: taking people’s data and using it to make money ».
Instead, today’s world, made up of fake news and vicious information circuits on social media, would have been as alien to Jobs as it is to Elliot. Which concludes: «Jobs’s Apple was” real “: the passion for music, after that of information technology, was genuine and for this reason it transformed the world. Making a car, on the other hand, does not make sense: it is an extension of what already exists. Jobs would have created something new and relevant, precisely in the health sector, which must become more efficient and convenient for everyone ». Maybe with a tool to defend against viruses like “One More Thing” at the end of one of his keynotes. “Why not,” says Elliot.
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