Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
As then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs lay bedridden and in desperate need of a liver transplant due to a gastroenterological condition that was a side effect of cancer in January 2009, he was offered one by Tim Cook, the man who would take over his company – and refused it.
The revelation, Fast Company explains, comes in a new book entitled Becoming Steve Jobs. The book was written by veteran technology reporter Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, the executive editor of the website, and is scheduled to be released by Crown Business on March 24.
Liver let die
A published excerpt of the book reveals that Cook, who frequently visited Jobs at home while the latter was recovering, learned that the two of them shared the same rare blood type. He also found out that it was possible to transfer part of a living person’s liver to someone in need of a transplant, and that the procedure had a fairly high success rate for both donor and recipient.
Since the liver is a regenerative organ, the transplanted portion will grow to a functional size and the portion surrendered by the donor will grow back, Fast Company explained. After undergoing a series of tests to make sure that the operation was feasible, Cook visited Jobs again to make the offer. Jobs turned him down, stating that he would “never” let Cook do something like that.
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“Somebody that’s selfish doesn’t reply like that,” Cook said in the book. “I mean, here’s a guy, he’s dying… and here’s someone healthy offering a way out. I said, ‘Steve, I’m perfectly healthy, I’ve been checked out. Here’s the medical report. I can do this and I’m not putting myself at risk, I’ll be fine.’ And he doesn’t think about it.”
“It was not, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ It was not, ‘I’ll think about it.’ It was not, ‘Oh, the condition I’m in . . .’ It was, ‘No, I’m not doing that!’” he added. “He kind of popped up in bed and said that. And this was during a time when things were just terrible. Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the 13 years I knew him, and this was one of them.”
Another attempt
Jobs did go on to have a liver transplant in March of that year, BBC News explained. He would step down as the chief executive of Apple in August 2011 and died at the age of 56 weeks later. The book also reveals that Jobs had considered purchasing Yahoo as a way to get Apple involved in the search market, and claims that he had little interest in developing a television series.
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In 1997, Apple designer Jony Ive was working on a pair of pet projects, including the 20th Anniversary Macintosh. It was Ive’s “pride and joy,” Fast Company said, and the book called it “a striking piece of out-of-the-box industrial design thinking” that “placed the guts of a top-of-the-line laptop inside a svelte and slightly curved vertical slab.” Jobs, however, was less kind, ultimately pulling the plug on the project after it sold just 12,000 units.
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