Steve Jobs’s last words, as recorded in his official biography

Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2015. Its note that Apple achieved the largest market capitalisation ever reached in business history is a 2015 statement; that record has since been surpassed several times.

After this article we are going to let Steve Jobs rest (unless something new and interesting comes up). It is clear that Jobs’s final words, the ones spoken before his last breath, will be known only to his wife and those closest to him, and we are not morbid enough to want to know them.

Even so, those last words of Steve Jobs were not the ones that went around social media with millions of views. In the end we learned that his last words before his final breath, in the presence of his sister, were simply: “Oh wow.”

Steve Jobs’s last words as recorded in his official biography

Once again (and for the last time) we are going to draw on Steve Jobs’s official biography, because its author, Walter Isaacson, got Jobs to open up to him in a way he had never done with anyone else. Isaacson was with him at his hardest moments, when his illness was already taking him and he no longer had the energy even to stay awake.

But in the end it was Isaacson who had the chance to hear and write down Steve Jobs’s last words, and he closed the biography not with the words of a biographer but with those of Jobs himself.

When Isaacson asked Jobs why he had chosen him to write his biography, promising that he would not even read it and giving the writer absolute freedom to include whatever he wanted, Jobs replied that he knew many people would talk about him after his death, and many of the things they said would not be true, so he wanted someone to research “both sides of the truth”.

Jobs also did not want the biography to look like a commissioned book, and that is one of the reasons why he does not come out of his own biography looking good. But at least both sides are heard.

What was the first thing Jobs thought when he was diagnosed with cancer?

In Jobs’s own words: “When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made a deal with God, or with whoever it was. The only thing I asked was to be allowed to live long enough to see my son Reed graduate.”

According to Isaacson, Jobs spent a great deal of time in his last days reflecting on what his legacy would be, and in his own words he set out some of his ideas about business:

My passion was always to build a great, lasting company where people were motivated enough to create spectacular products. Everything else was secondary, although obviously it was great to make big profits, because big profits are what allow you to invest in creating more products. But the main motivation was the products, not the profits…

…Some people say, “Give people what they want,” but that was not my approach. Our job was to work out what they were going to want before they knew it themselves. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That is why I never relied on market research. Our success was built on reading pages that had not yet been written…

…Bill Gates always liked to present himself as a product man, but he wasn’t. He was a businessman. For him, beating other companies mattered more than making great products. He ended up as the richest man in the world. If that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it was never my goal, and I wonder whether it was really Bill Gates’s goal…

*On this point, it is true that Bill Gates became the richest man in the world, but Steve Jobs managed to build the most valuable company in the world, with the largest stock market capitalisation ever reached in business history. And if that was Jobs’s goal, then he achieved it.

…I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when all they really want is to start a company so they can sell it to the highest bidder, or take it public, collect the big gains and move on to something else. They are not willing to build a real company, which is the hardest work in this field. That is how you build a company that still stands for the same values one or two generations later. You have to build a company to last, not just to make money…

On his character

…I don’t think I have been inconsiderate towards others, but if something stinks, I tell people so to their face. My job was to be honest…

…That is the culture I tried to create at Apple, where we could all be brutally frank and honest with one another. We had some arguments where we were at each other’s throats, but they were some of the best times I have had, and the times when the company really moved forward…

…Maybe there is a better alternative, like an English gentlemen’s club where we all wear suits and ties and speak a private language of velvety code words, but I don’t know that alternative, because I come from a middle-class family in California…

On death

…I believe in God about 50 per cent. For most of my life I have felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye. I like to think that something survives after you die.

It is strange to think that you can accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and that it simply disappears, so I want to believe that something survives. (He fell silent for a moment, then went on.) But on the other hand, maybe it is like an on-off switch: click! And you’re gone.

Maybe that is why I never liked putting on-off switches on Apple devices.

See also: How Apple’s products got their “i”

See also: The 3 values every company should have, according to Steve Jobs’s mentor

Featured image: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.