Steve Jobs was an amazing visionary -- here are some fascinating things you didn't already know about him.
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The Leadership Guy
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Just when you thought you already knew all about Steve Jobs, a series of leaks from the upcoming biography Becoming Steve Jobs provides a glimpse into some things about this fascinating tech visionary that no one outside of his inner circle was aware of.
Specifically...
1. Steve Jobs considered buying Yahoo.
With Google's dominance in search, Steve Jobs wanted to find some way for Apple to get a strong foothold into this lucrative business. He and Bob Iger--the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, who became a close personal friend--talked about many different things, one being the search business. Talking about his discussions with Jobs, Iger says, "We would stand at a whiteboard brainstorming. We talked about buying companies. We talked about buying Yahoo together."
2. Steve Jobs turned down Tim Cook's offer to donate his liver for a transplant.
In January 2009--a little less than three years before his death in October 2011--Jobs announced that he would take a six-month leave of absence to focus on fighting off the pancreatic cancer that had ravaged his body. He needed a liver transplant, but this was complicated by the fact that he had a rare blood type. As it turned out, current Apple CEO Tim Cook has the same rare blood type, and he offered to give Jobs a part of his own liver to save his life. According to Cook, Jobs refused. Said Cook, "He cut me off at the legs, almost before the words were out of my mouth. No, I'll never let you do that. I'll never do that." Cook continued, "Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the 13 years I knew him, and this was one of them."
3. Steve Jobs was against developing an Apple television.
In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson claims that Jobs had big plans for Apple's entry into the television market. According to Isaacson, Jobs wanted to "do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones." However, according to Becoming Steve Jobs, this was not the case at all. In fact, the authors quote Apple chief designer Jony Ive as saying that Jobs told him, "I just don't like television. Apple will never make a TV again."
