Tim Cook Offered Steve Jobs Part of His Liver

As Steve Jobs got sicker, in need of a liver transplant, the man who would replace him at Apple—Tim Cook—offered up part of his own liver. The story comes via Fast Company's excerpt of Becoming Steve Jobs, a biography by Brent Schlender and Fast Company Executive Editor Rick Tetzeli out March 24: Cook, upset by his boss's condition, started doing research and found out that "living-donor transplants," in which a person donates part of his liver, are possible—and have a high success rate. The partial liver ultimately grows to a working size, while the donor's liver grows back to its normal size. Cook went through a number of tests to see if such a transplant would work for him and Jobs, but when he went to Jobs' house to offer in January 2009, Cook says, "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.'"

Cook continues, "I said, 'Steve, I'm perfectly healthy, I've been checked out. Here's the medical report." But Jobs "kind of popped up in bed and said [no]. 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."

• Another excerpt from the book reveals that Jobs was close to Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger during the end of his life and spoke to him as many as four times a week. "We would stand at a whiteboard brainstorming," Iger says. "We talked about buying companies. We talked about buying Yahoo together."
• And a third excerpt reveals that in 1997, Jobs said, "I just don't like television. Apple will never make a TV again."
• On Cult of Mac, Luke Dormehl writes that the biography also reveals Cook was no fan of Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs. He says he thought the book did Jobs "a tremendous disservice" and "focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Jobs was] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn't capture the person."

More inner workings of a tech guru: Click to read Mark Zuckerberg's standard hiring question. (More Steve Jobs stories.)