That unpleasantness out of the way, the speaker was able to return to the subject of what he would create. Otherwise, it could sell off its current properties and take its people with it, maybe to someplace nearby, like Mountain View. When Wang asked what benefit would come to Cupertino from this massive enterprise, the speaker had a slight edge to his voice as he explained, as if to a child, that it would enable the company to stay in the California township. “It’s a pretty amazing building,” he told them. Unlike other corporate campuses, which he found “pretty boring,” this would feature as its centerpiece a master structure, shaped like a circle, that would hold 12,000 employees.
To consolidate his employees, he wanted to create a new campus, a verdant landscape where the border between nature and building would be blurred. His company, he said, had “grown like a weed.” His workforce had increased significantly over a decade, coming to fill more than 100 buildings as workers created one blockbuster product after another. He began to speak, tentative at first before clicking into the conversational yet hypnotically compelling tone he used in keynotes. When it was his turn to address the council, he walked to the podium. He moved with obvious difficulty, wearing the same outfit he had been seen in the day before when he’d introduced new products to the world-which is to say, the same outfit that anyone had ever seen him wear. He was, as all of them knew, in dire health.īefore the start of the meeting, Kris Wang, a Cupertino councilmember, looked out the window at the back of the room and saw him walking toward the building. Earlier in the year the man had expressed his intention to attend a meeting in order to propose a new series of buildings along the city’s northern border, but he hadn’t felt up to it at the time. He had not been on the agenda, but his presence wasn’t a total surprise. On June 7, 2011, a local businessman addressed a meeting of the Cupertino City Council. Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothershipīy Steven Levy | photographs by Dan Winters
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