Yet Jobs also said that he wanted a biographer to make sure that his kids had some sense of who he was, and to be able to explain the choices he’d made. And that’s what’s so odd, and disappointing, about this book: Isaacson conducted more than 40 interviews with Jobs, but the CEO seemed unwilling to reflect on his life with any real depth. Even when he was dying, Jobs wasn’t in the mood to analyze his strengths, his weaknesses, his victories, or his mistakes.
He embodied so many contradictions—he was enamored of anti-materialist, Buddhist philosophy yet became the most successful materialist of his day; he celebrated freewheeling hacker culture yet locked down everything he made—but Jobs doesn’t care to explain, or even address, many of them. Key questions go unanswered; for instance, Jobs doesn’t say what he learned during his exile from Apple that allowed him to be so spectacularly successful when he returned in the mid-1990s. He also doesn’t explain his penchant for corporate secrecy—why did hiding his innovations become such a huge part of his marketing plan? And how did he develop his signature product-unveiling presentation style? He doesn’t say.
When friends and colleagues offer theories about Jobs—several say that both his genius and his cruelty stem from the fact that he was put up for adoption by his biological parents—Jobs dismisses them. He can’t explain even the smallest of his quirks. Why did he refuse to have a license plate on his car? He admits that his initial reason, privacy, became moot in the age of Google Maps. So in the end he didn’t have a plate “because I don’t.” Illuminating!
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