How Apple came to like an unauthorized Steve Jobs biography

Was he a jerk or wasn’t he?

For a tech genius who shook up the world of pop culture, the world of pop culture sure is obsessed with knowing who the real Steve Jobs was.

"It’s somewhat bewildering that the predominate debate about the guy who may be the most significant businessman of the last fifty years…maybe a hundred years-- is whether he was a nice guy or not," says Rick Tetzeli, co-author of the new book “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader.” Tetzeli says, “Steve had Apple, he had his family and he had a real close circle of colleagues and friends. If you were outside that group-- the further you were outside that group the less he cared what you thought of him.”

Brent Schlender, who co-wrote the book with Tetzeli bounced in and out of that inner circle. Schlender became friendly with Jobs over the more than two decades he covered technology for The Wall Street Journal and Fortune. Schlender says Jobs was a “work in progress his whole life."  Schlender and Tetzeli speak to Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief, Andy Serwer, in the video above.

According to the Schlender-Tetzeli biography, Jobs wanted people to be of service to Apple and he didn’t care about manners in many ways. He was focused on what was important to him.  “When I look at it," Tetzeli says, "I look at somebody who prioritized things more severely than most of us do and that resulted in this kind of behavior we’ve heard so much about.”

“Becoming Steve Jobs" is not the first biography of the former Apple chief. Biographer Walter Isaacson—who has written on the lives of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Henry Kissinger—wrote an authorized biography of Steve Jobs in 2011. "Steve Jobs" was published less than a month after Jobs' death. For the book, Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than 40 times before he died and spoke to more than 100 people close to him. But when the book came out, many close to Jobs felt it painted the man in too harsh a light.  Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the Isaacson biography did a "tremendous disservice" to the Steve Jobs legacy.

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There is also a new documentary by Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney. The film, which also features Yahoo's Serwer, is being called a "blistering takedown" of Jobs. Gibney has said Apple wanted nothing to do with the film. "When we reached out to them, they were somewhat hostile," he told Variety. "They are brutal. People love their products, but they can be a ruthless company," he said.

But the Schlender and Tetzeli book, which started out as unauthorized, is now being praised by Apple. “That was an evolutionary process,” says Schlender. “When we started out writing this book, we got absolutely no help from Apple. We basically had the door slammed in our face multiple times.” Schlendler had known the people for more than two decades and he says they were being adamant about not working with the pair. “But over time, I think they saw our perseverance, that we were patiently doing a lot of reporting trying to fill out a different kind of story than what was shown in the authorized biography. “

Schlender calls the Isaacson book “a fine piece of work."  He says, "It was an enormous accomplishment for Walter to put that together under duress basically, that quickly. And to get up to speed on Steve as a person and to try to understand his business and his accomplishments. That’s hard.”

And maybe that’s why we all keep going back to that question—Was he a nice guy? And why do we care?  The authors say it's because Apple is so well loved and has become so much a part of our everyday lives, it's hard to believe a visionary like Jobs could be difficult.  “Apple is portrayed as this thing where we’re all creative, we’re all doing great things. Its image is of a company that allows us to be creative and nice and yet he was so tough,” says Tetzeli.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article appeared with Brent Schlender's name misspelled as Brent Schendler.  This piece has been updated.

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