Steve Jobs doesn’t live here anymore. If he ever did.
In January, the ailing CEO of Apple announced he was taking a leave
of absence from his company to deal with “health issues.” This week,
the maestro of Mac was at his home in San Francisco, e-mailing his
staff and apparently back in charge of the company he founded.
What happened in the interim is quite the mystery. In April, Greg
Akers posted an item on the Flyer‘s website about rumors that
Jobs was living in Memphis for “health reasons.” A week or so later, I
heard from a reliable source that Jobs was living on Morningside Place
in Midtown, recovering from surgery. I hear lots of rumors, and my
thought was that even if it were true, Jobs, who suffers from
pancreatic cancer, didn’t need a bunch of people driving around in
front of his house. Nor was it likely anyone would talk about it for
the record.
Then, last Saturday, in a story using almost entirely anonymous
“sources,” The Wall Street Journal reported that Jobs had gotten
a liver transplant in Tennessee. Various blogs posted satellite
pictures of a house on Morningside Place where Jobs supposedly lived
while in Memphis. They reported that security cameras had been placed
in the trees and that a guard was stationed in the driveway. On Sunday,
curiosity got the better of me. I walked up the drive and snapped a
couple of pictures. There was no security, and the place looked
empty.
Reports then emerged that the house in question had been sold in
March to a Memphis LLC with the address of the law firm Burch Porter
& Johnson. Jobs’ principal lawyer in San Francisco once worked at
BP&J. Was that the connection? No one’s talking — not the
realtors, not the state of Tennessee (which owned the house), not even
the neighbors.
The speculation is that Jobs came to Tennessee for a transplant,
because the waiting list for an organ is much shorter here than the
national average. If so, he did nothing illegal. There is no residency
requirement in Tennessee to get on the waiting list. But it does
suggest that Jobs had the resources to game the system in his
favor.
So, was he living here while he recuperated? We may never know. And
that may be the biggest mystery of all: How one of the men primarily
responsible for all of us being interconnected on the great global grid
managed to disappear off the face of the earth (or at least to Memphis) for five months.
Bruce VanWyngarden
