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made the mistake of telling GassĆ©e,ā Jobs wryly conceded years later.
That evening Appleās general counsel Al Eisenstat had a small barbecue at his home for Sculley, GassĆ©e, and their wives. When GassĆ©e told Eisenstat what Jobs was plotting, he recommended that GassĆ©e inform Sculley. āSteve was trying to raise a cabal and have a coup to get rid of John,ā GassĆ©e recalled. āIn the den of Al Eisenstatās house, I put my index finger lightly on Johnās breastbone and said, āIf you leave tomorrow for China, you could be ousted. Steveās plotting to get rid of you.āā
Friday, May 24: Sculley canceled his trip and decided to confront Jobs at the executive staff meeting on Friday morning. Jobs arrived late, and he saw that his usual seat next to Sculley, who sat at the head of the table, was taken. He sat instead at the far end. He was dressed in a well-tailored suit and looked energized.
Sculley looked pale. He announced that he was dispensing with the agenda to confront the issue on everyoneās mind. āItās come to my attention that youād like to throw me out of the company,ā he said, looking directly at Jobs. āIād like to ask you if thatās true.ā
Jobs was not expecting this. But he was never shy about indulging in brutal honesty. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed Sculley with his unblinking stare. āI think youāre bad for Apple, and I think youāre the wrong person to run the company,ā he replied, coldly and slowly. āYou really should leave this company. You donāt know how to operate and never have.ā He accused Sculley of not understanding the product development process, and then he added a self-centered swipe: āI wanted you here to help me grow, and youāve been ineffective in helping me.ā
As the rest of the room sat frozen, Sculley finally lost his temper. A childhood stutter that had not afflicted
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him for twenty years started to return. āI donāt trust you, and I wonāt tolerate a lack of trust,ā he stammered.
When Jobs claimed that he would be better than Sculley at running the company, Sculley took a gamble.
He decided to poll the room on that question. āHe pulled off this clever maneuver,ā Jobs recalled, still smarting thirty-five years later. āIt was at the executive committee meeting, and he said, āItās me or Steve, who do you vote for?ā He set the whole thing up so that youād kind of have to be an idiot to vote for me.ā
Suddenly the frozen onlookers began to squirm.
Del Yocam had to go first. He said he loved Jobs, wanted him to continue to play some role in the company, but he worked up the nerve to conclude, with Jobs staring at him, that he ārespectedā Sculley and would support him to run the company. Eisenstat faced Jobs directly and said much the same thing: He liked Jobs but was supporting Sculley. Regis McKenna, who sat in on senior staff meetings as an outside consultant, was more direct. He looked at Jobs and told him he was not yet ready to run the company, something he had told him before. Others sided with Sculley as well. For Bill Campbell, it was particularly tough. He was fond of Jobs and didnāt particularly like Sculley. His voice quavered a bit as he told Jobs he had decided to support Sculley, and he urged the two of them to work it out and find some role for Jobs to play in the company.
āYou canāt let Steve leave this company,ā he told Sculley.
Jobs looked shattered. āI guess I know where things stand,ā he said, and bolted out of the room. No one followed.
He went back to his office, gathered his longtime loyalists on the Macintosh staff, and started to cry. He would have to leave Apple, he said. As he started to walk out the door, Debi Coleman restrained him. She
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and the others urged him to settle down and not do anything hasty. He should take the weekend to regroup.
Perhaps there was a way to prevent the company from being torn apart.
Sculley was devastated by his victory. Like a wounded warrior, he retreated to Eisenstatās office and asked the corporate counsel to go for a ride. When they got into Eisenstatās Porsche, Sculley lamented, āI donāt know whether I can go through with this.ā When Eisenstat asked what he meant, Sculley responded, āI think Iām going to resign.ā
āYou canāt,ā Eisenstat protested. āApple will fall apart.ā
āIām going to resign,ā Sculley declared. āI donāt think Iām right for the company.ā
āI think youāre copping out,ā Eisenstat replied.
āYouāve got to stand up to him.ā Then he drove Sculley home.
Sculleyās wife was surprised to see him back in the middle of the day. āIāve failed,ā he said to her forlornly.
She was a volatile woman who had never liked Jobs or appreciated her husbandās infatuation with him. So when she heard what had happened, she jumped into her car and sped over to Jobsās office. Informed that he had gone to the Good Earth restaurant, she marched over there and confronted him in the parking lot as he was coming out with loyalists on his Macintosh team.
āSteve, can I talk to you?ā she said. His jaw dropped. āDo you have any idea what a privilege it has been even to know someone as fine as John Sculley?ā
she demanded. He averted his gaze. āCanāt you look me in the eyes when Iām talking to you?ā she asked. But when Jobs did soāgiving her his practiced, unblinking stareāshe recoiled. āNever mind, donāt look at me,ā she said. āWhen I look into most peopleās eyes, I see a soul.
When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an
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empty hole, a dead zone.ā Then she walked away.
Saturday, May 25: Mike Murray drove to Jobsās house in Woodside to offer some advice: He should consider accepting the role of being a new product visionary, starting AppleLabs, and getting away from headquarters. Jobs seemed willing to consider it. But first he would have to restore peace with Sculley. So he picked up the telephone and surprised Sculley with an olive branch. Could they meet the following afternoon, Jobs asked, and take a walk together in the hills above Stanford University. They had walked there in the past, in happier times, and maybe on such a walk they could work things out.
Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didnāt matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.
If Jobs was prepping for conciliation, it didnāt show in the choice of movie he wanted to see with Murray that night. He picked Patton, the epic of the never-surrender general. But he had lent his copy of the tape to his father, who had once ferried troops for the general, so he drove to his childhood home with Murray to retrieve it. His parents werenāt there, and he didnāt have a key. They walked around the back, checked for unlocked doors or windows, and finally gave up. The video store didnāt have a copy of Patton in stock, so in the end he had to settle for watching the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinterās Betrayal.
Sunday, May 26: As planned, Jobs and Sculley met in back of the Stanford campus on Sunday afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling hills and horse pastures. Jobs reiterated his plea that he should have an operational role at Apple. This time Sculley stood firm. It wonāt work, he kept saying. Sculley
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urged him to take the role of being a product visionary with a lab of his own, but Jobs rejected this as making him into a mere āfigurehead.ā Defying all connection to reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley give up control of the entire company to him. āWhy donāt you become chairman and Iāll become president and chief executive officer?ā he suggested. Sculley was struck by how earnest he seemed.
āSteve, that doesnāt make any sense,ā Sculley replied. Jobs then proposed that they split the duties of running the company, with him handling the product side and Sculley handling marketing and business. But the board had not only emboldened Sculley, it had ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. āOne person has got to run the company,ā he replied. āIāve got the support and you donāt.ā
On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike Markkulaās house. He wasnāt there, so Jobs left a message asking him to come to dinner the following evening. He would also invite the core of loyalists from his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could persuade Markkula of the folly of siding with Sculley.
Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm. The Macintosh team loyalistsāDebi Coleman, Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Bellevilleāgot to Jobsās Woodside home an hour before the scheduled dinner so they could plot strategy. Sitting on the patio as the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should accept Sculleyās offer to be a product visionary and help start up AppleLabs. Of all the inner circle, Coleman was the most willing to be realistic. In the new organization plan, Sculley had tapped her to run the manufacturing division because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple and not just to Jobs. Some of the others were more hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.
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When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen with one proviso: Jobs had to keep quiet. āI seriously wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not watch Jobs enlist them in a rebellion,ā he recalled. As it turned cooler, they went inside the sparsely furnished mansion and sat by a fireplace. Instead of letting it turn into a gripe session, Markkula made them focus on very specific management issues, such as what had caused the problem in producing the FileServer software and why the Macintosh distribution system had not responded well to the change in demand. When they were finished, Markkula bluntly declined to back Jobs. āI said I wouldnāt support his plan, and that was the end of that,ā Markkula recalled. āSculley was the boss. They were mad and emotional and putting together a revolt, but thatās not how you do things.ā
Tuesday, May 28: His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobsās office on Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out.
Then he drove to Markkulaās house, where he gave a presentation of his reorganization plans. Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave Sculley his blessing. When he got back to his office, Sculley called the other members of the board, just to make sure he still had their backing. He did.
At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given final approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week.
GassĆ©e would take over control of Jobsās beloved Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no other division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay on with the title of board chairman and be a product visionary with no operational duties. But by this point,
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even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no longer on the table.
It finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the reality. He broke down in tears and started making phone callsāto Bill Campbell, Jay Elliot, Mike Murray, and others. Murrayās wife, Joyce, was on an overseas call when Jobs phoned, and the operator broke in saying it was an emergency.
It better be important, she told the operator. āIt is,ā she heard Jobs say. When her husband got on the phone, Jobs was crying. āItās over,ā he said. Then he hung up.