Tim Cook

Chapter 1: The Death of Steve Jobs On Sunday, August 11, 2011, Tim Cook got a call that would change his life. When he picked up the phone, Steve Jobs was on the other end, asking him to come to his home in Palo Alto. At the time, Jobs was convalescing from treatment for pancreatic cancer and a recent liver transplant. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2003, and after initially resisting treatment, he had undergone several increasingly invasive procedures to fight the disease ravaging his body. Cook, surprised by the call, asked when he should come over, and when Jobs replied, "Now," Cook knew it was important. He set off immediately to Jobs's home. When he arrived, Jobs told Cook that he wanted him to take over as CEO of Apple. The plan was for Jobs to step down as CEO, go into semiretirement, and become the chairman of Apple's board. Even though Jobs was very sick, both men believed-or at least pretended-that he would be around for a while yet. Though he had been diagnosed several years before, he had lived for many years with the disease, refusing to slow down or step back from Apple. In fact, only a few months earlier, in the spring of 2011, he had told his biographer Walter Isaacson, "There'll be more; I'll get to the next lily pad; I'll outrun the cancer." Always determined, Jobs refused to back down or admit that his illness was serious. And at that time, he truly believed he would survive it. For both men, Jobs's new appointment as chairman wasn't an honorary title or something to keep the shareholders happy; it was a real, honest-to-goodness job that would allow him to oversee and steer Apple's future direction. As David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times and Yahoo, wrote, "You can bet that as chairman, Mr. Jobs will still be the godfather. He'll still be pulling plenty of strings, feeding his vision to his carefully built team, and weighing in on the company's compass headings." Jobs had already left Apple once-and now that he'd made it into one of the most innovative companies in the world, he wasn't about to do so again. As Jobs and Cook discussed CEO succession on that momentous day in August, Cook brought up Steve's "godfather" role. The pair chatted about how they'd work together in their new positions, not realizing quite how close to death Steve actually was. "I thought . . . he was going to live a lot longer," said Cook, reflecting back on the conversation. "We got into a whole level of discussion about what would it mean for me to be CEO with him as chairman," he recalled. When Jobs said, "You make all the decisions," Cook suspected something was wrong. Jobs would never have handed over the reins willingly. So Cook "tried to pick something that would incite him," asking questions like, "You mean that if I review an ad, and I like it, it should just run without your okay?" Jobs laughed and said, "Well, I hope you'd at least ask me!" Cook "asked him two or three times, 'Are you sure you want me to do this?'" He was prepared for Jobs to step back in if need be, because he "saw him getting better at that point in time." Jobs's reply to the question about the ad was revealing. He was famously meddlesome in nature, one of the main reasons why Cook assumed he would continue to oversee Apple, even if Cook was now officially in charge of running the day-to-day-though he had largely been doing this for several years already in his role as COO, while Jobs was still CEO. And despite stepping away from all formal responsibility, Jobs did remain very much a part of the company. Cook kept him involved, going "over [to his house] often during the week, and sometimes on the weekends. Every time I saw him he seemed to be getting better. He felt that way as well." Both Jobs and Apple's PR team continued to deny that he was in ill health-no one would admit that he was close to death. But, "unfortunately, it didn't work out that way," Cook said, and Jobs's death stunned th