Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

In 1975 Steven Jobs was a (literally) smelly hippie, fresh from a religious pilgrimage to India, working as a low-level technician at Atari. He was an arrogant, destructive presence who pissed off everyone except Atari’s CEO, Nolan Bushnell, who was impressed with Jobs’s wide-ranging intellect and saved him from being fired. Bushnell wanted to turn Pong, the legendary two-player game that launched the video game revolution, into a single-player version that would eventually be called Breakout (older readers will surely remember). Back in the day, a new game required hardware as well as software, with the former being more important. Bushnell announced a $700 prize for anyone who could design a hardware-software combo that would power the game, with a $1,000 bonus for every chip that was saved in manufacturing the circuit (chips used to be expensive). Jobs convinced his eventual Apple cofounder, Steve “Woz” Wozniak, to take on the project, stipulating it had to be done in four days to fit his social schedule (he had to go pick apples at a utopian commune). Woz worked like hell, with Jobs doing the manual labor of testing the designed circuits, and they made the deadline. Jobs, however, never told Woz about the bonuses, having mentioned only the base prize. He gave Woz $350, shortchanging his collaborator, who had made the entire thing possible, and used the stolen cash to finance his lifestyle. Steve Jobs was all smoldering ambition, ruthless will to power, and narcissistic...