Tim Cook Recalls Steve Jobs' Last Days at Apple, Offering Him a Liver, Becoming CEO

Tim Cook reveals new details about Steve Jobs' final days at Apple and why Jobs wouldn't let him try to save his life in Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, a book by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli.

Fast Company, a site at which Tetzeli is an editor, posted an excerpt from the book in which Tim Cook offers a more personal look at Jobs and the circumstances surrounding his death.

Cook describes how Jobs' began to deteriorate physically and how his concern led him to investigate if he could offer part of his own liver to the Apple co-founder.


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Cook decided to undergo a battery of tests that determine if someone is healthy enough to be a living donor. "I thought he was going to die," Cook explains. He went to a hospital far from the Bay Area, since he didn’t want to be recognized. The day after he returned from the trip, he went to visit Steve. Sitting alone with him in the bedroom of the Palo Alto house, Tim began to offer his liver to Steve. "I really wanted him to do it," he remembers. "He cut me off at the legs, almost before the words were out of my mouth. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll never let you do that. I’ll never do that!’ 

"Somebody that’s selfish," Cook continues, "doesn’t reply like that. I mean, here’s a guy, he’s dying, he’s very close to death because of his liver issue, 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 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.
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Cook continues to talk about what Jobs did with his final days at Apple - creating Apple U, designing the company's new headquarters, and preparing the company for his absence. He also recounts when Jobs asked him to be the CEO of Apple.

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On August 11, a Sunday, Steve called Tim Cook and asked him to come over to the house. "He said, ‘I want to talk to you about something,’ " remembers Cook. "This was when he was home all the time, and I asked when, and he said, ‘Now.’ So I came right over. He told me he had decided that I should be CEO. I thought then that he thought he was going to live a lot longer when he said this, because we got into a whole level of discussion about what would it mean for me to be CEO with him as a chairman. I asked him, ‘What do you really not want to do that you’re doing?’


"It was an interesting conversation," Cook says, with a wistful laugh. "He says, ‘You make all the decisions.’ I go, ‘Wait. Let me ask you a question.’ I tried to pick something that would incite him. So I said, ‘You mean that if I review an ad and I like it, it should just run without your okay?’ And he laughed and said, ‘Well, I hope you’d at least ask me!’ I asked him two or three times, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ because I saw him getting better at that point in time. I went over there often during the week, and sometimes on the weekends. Every time I saw him he seemed to be getting better. He felt that way as well. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way."
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Hit the link below for the full excerpt. It's a highly suggested read. The book, Becoming Steve Jobs, can be pre-ordered from here. It will be released on March 24th.

Notably, Cook says that he disliked the very popular biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. "I thought the Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short."

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