The biography of the legendary Apple chief Steve Jobs, which will be released Monday in the U.S., is the portrait of a complex man, who always refused to meet his biological father and did not hesitate to criticize President Barack Obama at their first meeting. “When I searched for my biological mother, obviously I was looking for my biological father. I learned little about him and I didn’t like what I heard”, Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson in an interview broadcast Thursday by CBS.
Adopted at birth by a couple of modest Californian residents, Jobs eventually found his father, discovering that he already had the occasion to shake hands with him: an American born in Syria and named Abdulfattah Janda, who called himself John, had a Mediterranean restaurant in Silicon Valley, where Jobs has often dined. “I remember I met with the owner of the restaurant, who was originally from Syria. I shook his hand, he shook, also, my hand”, he said.
Jobs himself said that he asked his step-sister, with whom he had good relations, not to disclose the identity of his father: “I became rich and I’m afraid that he will blackmail me or alert the media ” he justified himself, according to a statement from the book published by the Huffington Post.
Steve Jobs has proved to be critical to Barack Obama, whom he refused an invitation to dinner because he wanted the American president to call in person, according to the Huffington Post. “You will only have one mandate”, said Jobs at the beginning of his first meeting with Obama. The reason for his critics, according to Huffington Post, was the following: the administration should be more sympathetic to business and take China as example, where it is easier to build factories “without unnecessary rules or costs”.
In addition, Steve Jobs said that he was disappointed that President Obama “does not want to offend anyone”, writes New York Times. Steve Jobs would have proposed to contribute to the re-election campaign of President Obama. In 2008, he had offered his help but “got mad, saying that Obama’s strategist David Axelrod did not show enough respect”.
Apple co-founder, father of four children, would have criticized in front of Obama the U.S. educational system “handicapped by rules imposed by the unions”, writes Isaacson. Jobs estimated that “as long as the teachers’ unions will not be abolished, there is virtually no hope of reforming the education system”.
Bill Gates, Microsoft founder was successively partner and competitor of Jobs, was not exempt from criticism, according to extracts from the biography cited by the news website: “Bill is fundamentally unimaginative and did not invent anything ever, so my opinion is that he is more at ease now in philanthropy than technology. He was only shamefully stealing the ideas of others”.
But Google gets the harshest comments. Steve Jobs would have told Isaacson, according to the New York Times, that he is willing to spend “up to the last breath” and to devote all Apple liquidity to fix the “damage” that Google has brought by stealing iPhone patents for its operating system Android. The patent battle takes place in the court between Apple and manufacturers who use Android.