Apple CEO Tim Cook offered Steve Jobs his liver, new book reveals

Stuff.co.nz March 14 2015

Reuters

BEST BUDS: Apple CEO Tim Cook, left, with the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook was so close to the late Steve Jobs that he offered him a portion of his liver in the Apple co-founder's dying days.

The gesture is revealed in Becoming Steve Jobs, a book due out March 24 by technology reporter Brent Schlender and Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli, an extract of which was published after it was unintentionally leaked online.

After getting a blood test and finding out that his rare blood type was the same as Jobs', Cook began doing research and discovered that it was possible to transfer a portion of a living person's liver to someone in need of a transplant, the book reveals.

But when Cook approached Jobs about it in January 2009, a little over two years before his death, he refused a transplant, Cook tells the authors.
"He cut me off at the legs, almost before the words were out of my mouth," Cook said.
"'No,' he said. 'I'll never let you do that. I'll never do that.'
"Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the 13 years I knew him, and this was one of them."

The book also reveals that Jobs' close friend, Walt Disney Company chief executive Bob Iger, talked about buying Yahoo with Jobs.


The late Apple founder is also quoted in the book as once having said, "I just don't like television. Apple will never make a TV again", which is in stark contrast to what Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography from 2011 said. In Isaacson's book, Jobs is described as saying he had finally "cracked" the code to making a simple television, setting off rumours of a new TV.