Steve Jobs believed that Google had committed "wholesale theft" of Apple's ideas with its Android smartphone operating system, reveals Jobs' new biography, which went on sale Monday amid stellar advance sales.
According to Walter Issacson's biography, simply titled "Steve Jobs," Jobs's belief that Google's developers had stolen Apple's ideas motivated his urge in his final months to "destroy" Android.
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to," Jobs told his biographer, "and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong."
"I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty."
Jobs granted Isaacson more than three dozen interviews a two-year period for the authorized biography. But Isaacson says he never saw Jobs angrier than when he talked about Android.
Jobs saw the alleged theft as a flagrant betrayal, since he had been a mentor to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Google's CEO Eric Schmidt had once sat on Apple's board of directors.
Isaacson's book is not the first to tell Jobs' story, but Isaacson was the only biographer to be given unprecedented access to Jobs and 100 of those who once knew him.
Their last interview was weeks before Jobs died, on Oct. 5.
Isaacson told CBS's "60 Minutes" this weekend that when Jobs invited him to write his biography seven years ago, he thought the request "presumptuous and premature," since Jobs was still a young man.
What Isaacson didn't know at the time was that Jobs had been diagnosed months earlier with pancreatic cancer and was about to undergo surgery that he had already delayed for the better part of a year.
The book was originally called "iSteve" and scheduled to come out in March. The release date was moved up to November. Then, after Jobs' death, it was moved to Monday.
Isaacson told "60 Minutes" that he found Jobs to be at times "petulant" and "brittle."
"He could be very, very mean to people at times. Whether it was to a waitress in a restaurant, or to a guy who had stayed up all night coding, he could really go at them and say, 'You're doing this all wrong, it's horrible," Isaacson said.
"… And you'd say, 'Why did you do that? Why weren't you nicer?' And he'd say, 'I really want to be with people who demand perfection. And this is who I am.'"
The book also reveals that Jobs never knew his biological father, who once ran a restaurant in Silicon Valley, but did meet him. Jobs didn't realize who he was until years later and even then, never revealed to his father that he was his son.
"I was in that restaurant once or twice and I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria," Jobs said on tape. "And it was most certainly [my father]. And I shook his hand and he shook my hand. And that's all."
