(Timeskip — four years)
Tranquility, 2001.
By the time I was ten, the story the rest of the country told itself about the last four years went roughly like this: the dot-com bubble had swelled on cheap capital and bad math, Nasdaq had ridden the mania up past five thousand in March of that year, and now it was in the middle of coming apart at the seams, taking a decade of paper fortunes down with it. Pets.com was a punchline. Webvan was a punchline. A hundred companies that had never once turned a profit were discovering, all at the same time, that "burn rate" is a metaphor with teeth.
Apple wasn't supposed to be a survivor of any of it. In September of 1997, when Jobs came back — not as CEO yet, just "iCEO," a title that told you everything about how little confidence the board actually had — the company was weeks from a cash crisis serious enough that people inside Cupertino were quietly updating resumes.
Michael Dell had said publicly, that same year, that if he were running Apple he'd shut it down and give the money back to shareholders. The stock, split-adjusted for everything that would happen to it over the following decades, was trading at a price that looked like a typo.
I'd bought in anyway, that same year, with a President's check and a rounding error's worth of my own money, on the theory that I already knew what the rest of the market didn't: that the iMac was going to work in 1998, that "digital hub" wasn't just a slogan Jobs was testing on focus groups but an actual strategy for tying a computer to a growing constellation of consumer devices, and that four years later, in October of 2001, a small white device with a scroll wheel and a five-gigabyte hard drive was going to redefine what "portable" meant for an entire industry that hadn't asked for the redefinition.
By 2001 my original position had returned better than twenty-three hundred percent. That number should have been the headline. It wasn't, because by then I'd stopped being an investor Apple didn't know about and started being one they'd hired.
The consulting offer came through a lawyer, which felt appropriately absurd — a ten-year-old being represented by counsel in a negotiation with one of the most scrutinized companies on Earth — but Jobs himself called the house directly once the paperwork stalled on a clause neither side wanted to blink on first.
"You want five percent," he said, no greeting, like we were already mid-conversation. That was his way, I'd learn. Preamble was for people who hadn't already made up their minds.
"I want five percent if it works," I said. "If it doesn't, you get my code and I get nothing. That's not me being generous, Steve. That's me being confident."
There was a pause on the line, the specific kind that meant he was recalculating who he thought he was talking to. "Confidence is cheap. Everybody in this valley's got confidence. I've got a filing cabinet full of dead confidence."
"Then don't take my confidence. Take the return. Look at where the stock was in September of '97 and look at where it closed last week. I called that trade before I could ride a bike without training wheels. I'm not asking you to trust a kid. I'm asking you to trust the only person who's been right about this company for four straight years running."
Another pause, shorter this time. "You talk like someone twice your age."
"I read like someone twice my age. The talking's just practice."
He laughed — the real thing, not a courtesy — and the clause got signed inside the week. Five percent, contingent, mine if the work moved the needle and reverted to a straight consulting fee if it didn't. I never once needed the fallback.
What I actually did for Apple over the next several years was less glamorous than the number made it sound. I sat in rooms and told people things they mostly already suspected and hadn't yet found the nerve to act on — that touch input was going to matter more than styluses, that the phone market was about to get eaten by whoever married a real computer's software to a device that fit in a pocket, that the "special edition" model of scarcity Nintendo had been running for years on toy shelves would work just as well on consumer electronics if you let people believe the object in their hand meant something beyond its specs.
None of that was prophecy. It was arithmetic dressed up as intuition — the same arithmetic I'd been running since I was old enough to hold a pencil, just compressed, the way everything about me was compressed, into a decade instead of a career.
By September of that year my stake had climbed past twelve percent between the consulting equity and the positions Skye kept quietly accumulating on the open market, each purchase small enough, spread across enough shell accounts, that no single filing ever raised the question a ten-year-old's involvement should have raised. The world knew, eventually, that Sam Witwicky was "involved" with Apple. It would be a while yet before the world understood what involved actually meant, in dollars.
I wasn't hiding the money to enjoy it. I was hiding it because seven years still stood between me and a yellow car that already knew my address, and every dollar that stayed quiet a little longer was a dollar Sector Seven couldn't subpoena, freeze, or "nationalize for the public interest" the moment they worked out what I actually was.
Steve never asked why a kid needed that kind of discretion. I got the sense, over the years I knew him, that he understood obsession well enough not to interrogate someone else's reasons for it.