Becoming Steve Jobs: Jony Ive was almost fired, Disney CEO Iger knew about Jobs’ pancreatic cancer

Steve Jobs with the iPhone in 2007. Reuters

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By tech2 News Staff /  21 Mar 2015 , 16:30

The new biography by Brent Schlender (who had interviewed Jobs frequently) and Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli titled “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader”, will be out on March 24.

According to the new book, Disney CEO Bob Iger was among the first people to learn about Steve Jobs’ pancreatic cancer in 2006, reveals FastCompany.  Iger learnt about Jobs’ illness just 30 minutes before the $7.4 billion deal between Pixar and Disney was sealed on January 24, 2006.

“My cancer is back. I’m telling you because I’m giving you a chance to back out of the deal,” Jobs told Iger. he decided not to tell anyone about it, except Disney’s VP Alan Braverman, and the deal went through.

The books also talks about how Jony Ive was almost fired. “He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me,” Ive told the book’s authors. The reason was the products that were being shipped at that time weren’t good.

However, the report adds, “You know Jony. He’s kind of a cherub. I liked him right away. And I could tell after that first meeting that [former Apple CEO Gil Amelio] had wasted his talent,” Jobs later told Schlender.

The book also talks about how musician Neil Young tried to make peace with Jobs. “In Young’s worldview, analog recorded music is unequivocally the best, and the shift from records to CDs to compressed audio files has led to inferior sound fidelity. And he certainly wasn’t shy when it came to speaking his mind about the iPod and iTunes,” adds the report.

However, Jobs took the criticism quite seriously. “Young tried to quash the beef by offering him a set of remastered vinyl editions of every album in his catalog,” Schlender reportedlywrites in the book.