Apple co-Founder and former chief executive Steve Jobs vowed to devote his life and all of Apple’s cash to destroying Google’s Android operating system, which he believed to be an outright ripoff of Apple’s iPhone platform. Pulling quotes from an advance copy of Steve Jobs’s authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, The Associated Press reports that Jobs was furious in January 2010 when HTC launched a phone that appeared to copy many key features from the iPhone. Read on for more.
“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,” Jobs said, according to Isaacson’s book. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
Jobs would later meet with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt to discuss settling the lawsuit. That meeting, according to the book, did not go well. “I don’t want your money,” Jobs is said to have told Schmidt. “If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”
Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook has made clear his intention to continue running Apple as Jobs did, and it appears a major part of his legacy is the fight against Google’s actions with Android, which Jabs said amount to “grand theft.”
