Steve Jobs Was Ready to ‘Go Thermonuclear War’ to ‘Destroy Android’ for Copying iOS

With the official Steve Jobs biography set to go on sale this upcoming Monday, more and more excerpts from the book have been revealed, almost to the point of acting as spoilers. Walter Isaacson will appear this Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes to talk about the book and Steve Jobs.

The Associated Press has obtained a copy of the biography and reveals Steve Jobs was extremely irate when Android offerings had started to offer features from iOS. Jobs felt Google had committed ‘grand theft’ with the direction Android was going in its stealing of ideas from iOS:

“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. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

In dealing with Google’s Eric Schmidt over the issue, Jobs told him Apple wasn’t interested in settling:

“I don’t want your money. 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.”

Steve Jobs on his Biological Father

CNET posts some further details about how Jobs had actually met his biological father, but both men did not know they were related. How he felt about his father:

“When I was looking for my biological mother, obviously, you know, I was looking for my biological father at the same time, and I learned a little bit about him and I didn’t like what I learned,” Jobs told Isaacson in an interview. “I asked her to not tell him that we ever met…not tell him anything about me.”

Expect more excerpts to be revealed this weekend and leading up to Monday’s release of the biography.

Click here to order the Steve Jobs biography from Amazon.ca.

[AP, CNET]

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