By Peter Burrows - Oct 21, 2011 7:10 AM GMT+0700
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A makeshift shrine to commemorate Steve Jobs, co-founder and former chief executive officer of Apple Inc., sits outside the company's store in Beijing on Oct. 6, 2011. Photographer: Adam Dean/Bloomberg
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Tom Giles talks about an authorized biography of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs to be released Oct. 24. Jobs, who died on Oct. 5, had secret treatments for pancreatic cancer while telling people he was cured, his biographer Walter Isaacson told CBS News's "60 Minutes," according to excerpts released today. Giles speaks with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West." (Video excerpts courtesy of CBS News. Source: Bloomberg)
Apple Inc. (AAPL) Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs had secret treatments for pancreatic cancer while telling people he was cured, his biographer told CBS News.
Jobs, who died on Oct. 5, regretted the decision to initially refuse surgery for pancreatic cancer, Walter Isaacson, who wrote an authorized biography, told CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” according to interview excerpts released today.
“He said, ‘I didn’t want my body to be opened ... I didn’t want to be violated in that way.’ He’s regretful about it,” Isaacson said. “I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking ... We talked about this a lot.”
Jobs had a slow-growing form of pancreatic cancer and put off surgery for nine months while he sought out spiritual and dietary therapies against the advice of his wife, Isaacson said. Once he had the surgery he told his employees about it while playing down the seriousness of his condition, CBS said.
“I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments,” Jobs wrote in an Aug. 1, 2004, e-mail from his hospital bed to employees of Cupertino, California-based Apple. He said then that he was cured after having successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas.
Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment. The interview, conducted by correspondent Steve Kroft, will be broadcast on Oct. 23. The network posted a 1 minute, 25 second- long excerpt. Simon & Schuster, the book publisher also owned by New York-based CBS, will release “Steve Jobs” on Oct. 24.
Disclosure’s Timing
Jobs probably should have disclosed to shareholders that he had cancer when it was first diagnosed, said Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. From a governance perspective, how he decided to treat the illness was up to him, Elson said.
“He probably should have disclosed it, and everyone would have assumed he would do everything he could to keep himself alive,” said Elson. “The question is whether he misled people because he himself was misled, or did he do it on purpose. I tend to give wide latitude on these things. No one wants to believe they’re dying.”
The biographer said that Jobs, who was adopted, met the man who turned out to be his biological father without knowing who he was.
Jobs found his biological mother and sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, according to Isaacson. Simpson then identified their father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, who managed a coffee shop.
Jobs’s Father
Jandali told Simpson he wished she had met him earlier, when he ran a bigger Mediterranean restaurant in Silicon Valley. She hadn’t told him Jobs was his son.
“Everyone used to come there,” Jandali told Simpson, according to Isaacson. “Even Steve Jobs used to eat here. Yeah, he was a great tipper.”
“60 Minutes” will broadcast a voice recording of Isaacson interviewing Jobs about his decision to ask Simpson to keep his identity private.
“When I was looking for my biological mother, obviously, you know, I was looking for my biological father at the same time, and I learned a little bit about him and I didn’t like what I learned,” Jobs said. “I asked her to not tell him that we ever met ... not tell him anything about me.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Burrows in San Francisco at pburrows@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net; Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
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