Walter Isaacson Quote
That spring Larry Ellison saw Amelio at a party and introduced him to the technology journalist Gina Smith, who asked how Apple was doing. You know, Gina, Apple is like a ship, Amelio answered. That ship is loaded with treasure, but there’s a hole in the ship. And my job is to get everyone to row in the same direction. Smith looked perplexed and asked, Yeah, but what about the hole? From then on, Ellison and Jobs joked about the parable of the ship. When Larry relayed this story to me, we were in this sushi place, and I literally fell off my chair laughing, Jobs recalled. He was just such a buffoon, and he took himself so seriously. He insisted that everyone call him Dr. Amelio. That’s always a warning sign.
That spring Larry Ellison saw Amelio at a party and introduced him to the technology journalist Gina Smith, who asked how Apple was doing. You know, Gina, Apple is like a ship, Amelio answered. That ship is loaded with treasure, but there’s a hole in the ship. And my job is to get everyone to row in the same direction. Smith looked perplexed and asked, Yeah, but what about the hole? From then on, Ellison and Jobs joked about the parable of the ship. When Larry relayed this story to me, we were in this sushi place, and I literally fell off my chair laughing, Jobs recalled. He was just such a buffoon, and he took himself so seriously. He insisted that everyone call him Dr. Amelio. That’s always a warning sign.
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About Walter Isaacson
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.