Steve Jobs Losing His Zen

Steve Jobs might have been a vegetarian Buddhist. But that doesn't mean that he wasn't capable of losing his zen. According to an upcoming biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson—ironically already stolen by The New York Times—he reacted to the January 2010 unveiling of the HTC smartphone lineup with white fury. Calling it "a great theft," Jobs supposedly proclaimed, "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong… I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

And he wasn't kidding: Apple filed a lawsuit against HTC, alleging that it violates as many as 20 patents. He also filed a parallel complaint with the International Trade Commission to block imports of devices that violated the patents. What's more, meeting with then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a man who for years sat on Apple's board before Android made that no longer possible, Jobs told Schmidt that money wasn't going to make it right. "I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it," Jobs reportedly said. "I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want."

Jobs' tactics may or may not have been justified under Western IP law, but they were definitely uncool under Eastern Buddhist law, which considers anger and vengeance as bad karma that, in his case, might well guarantee his rebirth as a pin-striped, brief-case carrying, beef-eating company man.