Steve Jobs Knew He Was Driving Everyone Crazy. So He Called Del Yocam.

“Steve Jobs always respected me,” Del Yocam said. “He never yelled at me. Never was unkind to me. We’d argue a lot, because we were both passionate. But he would admit mistakes to me.”

Ten years at Apple, and Del Yocam is one of the only people who can say that.

For Apple’s 50th anniversary, RR Auction is offering something Yocam has sat on for over thirty years: his own typed notes and letters from 1991, tracking six months of Jobs trying to talk him into running NeXT. Yocam was Apple’s first COO, ran the Apple II group, and later ran Apple Pacific. He was also, it turns out, one of the only people who ever saw Jobs cry.

The Nights No One Else Saw

It happened twice, at least that Yocam will tell. The first time, early on, at an Apple offsite at Carmel Valley Lodge. Jobs asked Yocam to stick around after everyone else left, started talking about acid, about a trip to India where he’d nearly died, and got more and more emotional as the night went on. “He completely broke down,” Yocam said. “I went over and put my arms around him. He cried himself out and fell asleep on the bed. Then I fell asleep.”

The second time was bigger, and everything had been riding on it. The Macintosh had launched to huge fanfare in January 1984, then stalled hard, and by early 1985 Apple was sitting on a warehouse of unsold Macs and its first quarterly loss ever. John Sculley, the CEO Jobs himself had hired away from Pepsi, walked into an April board meeting and gave an ultimatum: strip Jobs of the Mac division, or he’d quit. The board sided with Sculley. Jobs spent the next month trying to claw it back, even plotting to force Sculley out while he was overseas, and it collapsed on him too. By the end of May, it was over.

He walked out of that final meeting in front of thirty or forty Apple employees standing in the hallway. He didn’t go to his office. He walked straight to Yocam and cried until there was nothing left.

That’s not the Jobs most people know. Ask Yocam what made him the one Jobs walked toward, and he doesn’t talk about the boardroom at all.

“Around my kids, at my house, he was a normal human being,” Yocam said. “Kind. Open. That’s the Steve most people never got to meet.” He paused before adding, “I don’t know, it was a very special relationship.”

The Real Reason Jobs Wanted Him at NeXT

Jobs called out of the blue in 1991. Yocam had been out of Apple for two years by then, working as an independent consultant and sitting on Adobe’s board, not exactly waiting by the phone. But for six months the two picked the friendship right back up, dinners, long walks around NeXT, Jobs working every angle. Yocam’s own notes catch him mid-pitch, calling the product “dynamite,” floating the presidency, the board, both. He even interviewed the whole NeXT executive staff, who all but told him outright why Jobs really wanted him there. “They needed me to run interference with Steve,” Yocam said. “He was driving them crazy.”

Then it got messy, on paper and in real time. November 18: Yocam writes to accept, “I continue to look forward to being President and COO of NeXT.” Six days later, Jobs calls it off, telling Yocam that NeXT needed someone stronger in sales and marketing. The next day, Yocam writes back and takes a board seat instead, 50,000 shares. Whiplash, in his own handwriting.

What Jobs Said When the Cameras Weren’t Running

The notes aren’t just about the job. They catch Jobs saying things about Apple he’d never say on the record, that the company was “willing to be number 2 to IBM,” that without him it would produce “few products of substance, if any.” Told this decades later, Yocam didn’t flinch. “What he wanted became what we wanted. It was an extension of himself. So it was no surprise to me how many more products came once he went back.”

Thirty Years Later

Yocam never chased the spotlight Jobs and Sculley got, and says so plainly. “I was never out for attention. To me, I was doing my job.” Thirty years later, he’s ready to let the notes speak for him instead.

Del Yocam’s archive of NeXT recruitment notes and letters, Lot #4030, is part of Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution: The Apple 50th Anniversary Auction Part Two at RR Auction, running through August 20.