Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Excerpt

Childhood Abandoned and Chosen

The Adoption

When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later.



Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn’t know howto swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman.



Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life.



Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman.



Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a “repo man,” picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process.



There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child.



Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including realestate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter’s relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria.



Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother, he later said, was a “traditional Muslim woman” who was a “conservative, obedient housewife.” Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American University in Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science.



In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early 1955, Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into the care of a kindly doctor who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions.



Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was born—on February 24, 1955— the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new baby Steven Paul Jobs.



When Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not even graduated from high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled into the Jobs household. Eventually Joanne relented, with the stipulation that the couple promise—indeed sign a pledge—to fund a savings account to pay for the boy’s college education. There was another reason that Joanne was balky about signing the adoption papers. Her father was about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon after. She held out hope, she would later tell family members, sometimes tearing up at the memory, that once they were married, she could get their baby boy back.



Arthur Schieble died in August 1955, after the adoption was finalized. Just after Christmas that year, Joanne and Abdulfattah were married in St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in Green Bay. He got his PhD in international politics the next year, and then they had another child, a girl named Mona. After she and Jandali divorced in 1962, Joanne embarked on a dreamy and peripatetic life that her daughter, who grew up to become the acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would capture in her book Anywhere but Here. Because Steve’s adoption had been closed, it would be twenty years before they would all find each other.



Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. “My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.”



Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. “I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.” Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,” he said. “It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.”



Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass,” and it helps to explain some of his behavior. “He who is abandoned is an abandoner,” she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. “The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,” he said. “That goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.”



Jobs dismissed this. “There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,” he insisted. “Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.” He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents or implied that they were not his “real” parents. “They were my parents 1,000%,” he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: “They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.”



Silicon Valley



The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs. The finance company where Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he could not afford to live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less expensive town just to the south.



There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. “Steve, this is your workbench now,” he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage. Jobs remembered being impressed by his father’s focus on craftsmanship. “I thought my dad’s sense of design was pretty good,” he said, “because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.”



Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

His father continued to refurbish and resell used cars, and he festooned the garage with pictures of his favorites. He would point out the detailing of the design to his son: the lines, the vents, the chrome, the trim of the seats. After work each day, he would change into his dungarees and retreat to the garage, often with Steve tagging along. “I figured I could get him nailed down with a little mechanical ability, but he really wasn’t interested in getting his hands dirty,” Paul later recalled. “He never really cared too much about mechanical things.”



“I wasn’t that into fixing cars,” Jobs admitted. “But I was eager to hang out with my dad.” Even as he was growing more aware that he had been adopted, he was becoming more attached to his father. One day when he was about eight, he discovered a photograph of his father from his time in the Coast Guard. “He’s in the engine room, and he’s got his shirt off and looks like James Dean. It was one of those Oh wow moments for a kid. Wow, oooh, my parents were actually once very young and really good-looking.”



Through cars, his father gave Steve his first exposure to electronics. “My dad did not have a deep understanding of electronics, but he’d encountered it a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.” Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts. “Every weekend, there’d be a junkyard trip. We’d be looking for a generator, a carburetor, all sorts of components.” He remembered watching his father negotiate at the counter. “He was a good bargainer, because he knew better than the guys at the counter what the parts should cost.” This helped fulfill the pledge his parents made when he was adopted. “My college fund came from my dad paying $50 for a Ford Falcon or some other beat-up car that didn’t run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it for $250—and not telling the IRS.”



The Jobses’ house and the others in their neighborhood were built by the real estate developer Joseph Eichler, whose company spawned more than eleven thousand homes in various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American “everyman,” Eichler built inexpensive houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors, and lots of sliding glass doors. “Eichler did a great thing,” Jobs said on one of our walks around the neighborhood. “His houses were smart and cheap and good. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower income people. They had awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors. You put carpet on them, and we had nice toasty floors when we were kids.”



Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. “It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.” Across the street from the Jobs family lived a man who had become successful as a real estate agent. “He wasn’t that bright,” Jobs recalled, “but he seemed to be making a fortune. So my dad thought, ‘I can do that.’ He worked so hard, I remember. He took these night classes, passed the license test, and got into real estate. Then the bottom fell out of the market.” As a result, the family found itself financially strapped for a year or so while Steve was in elementary school. His mother took a job as a bookkeeper for Varian Associates, a company that made scientific instruments, and they took out a second mortgage. One day his fourth-grade teacher asked him, “What is it you don’t understand about the universe?” Jobs replied, “I don’t understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke.” He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick style that may have made him a better salesman. “You had to suck up to people to sell real estate, and he wasn’t good at that and it wasn’t in his nature. I admired him for that.” Paul Jobs went back to being a mechanic.



His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son later praised more than emulated. He was also resolute. Jobs described one example:



Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a single guy, beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my parents worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared out of her wits, and he came over drunk, and my dad stood him down—saying “She’s here, but you’re not coming in.” He stood right there. We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of those engineers who had messed-up lives.



What made the neighborhood different from the thousands of other spindly-tree subdivisions across America was that even the ne’er-do-wells tended to be engineers. “When we moved here, there were apricot and plum orchards on all of these corners,” Jobs recalled. “But it was beginning to boom because of military investment.” He soaked up the history of the valley and developed a yearning to play his own role. Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. The film was dropped in canisters and returned to the NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from where Jobs lived. “The first computer terminal I ever saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,” he said. “I fell totally in love with it.”



Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during the 1950s. The Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine launched ballistic missiles, was founded in 1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time Jobs moved to the area four years later, it employed twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away, Westinghouse built facilities that produced tubes and electrical transformers for the missile systems. “You had all these military companies on the cutting edge,” he recalled. “It was mysterious and high-tech and made living here very exciting.” In the wake of the defense industries there arose a booming economy based on technology. Its roots stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his new wife moved into a house in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the 1950s, Hewlett- Packard was a fast-growing company making technical instruments.



Fortunately there was a place nearby for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, where Clara Jobs worked. “Terman came up with this great idea that did more than anything to cause the tech industry to grow up here,” Jobs said. By the time Jobs was ten, HP had nine thousand employees and was the blue-chip company where every engineer seeking financial stability wanted to work.



The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But Shockley became increasingly erratic and abandoned his silicon transistor project, which led eight of his engineers—most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore—to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor. That company grew to twelve thousand employees, but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle to become CEO. He took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called Integrated Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated to Intel. Their third employee was Andrew Grove, who later would grow the company by shifting its focus from memory chips to microprocessors. Within a few years there would be more than fifty companies in the area making semiconductors.



The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products.



The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled “Silicon Valley USA.” The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once connected California’s twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital investment in the United States each year. “Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place,” Jobs said. “That made me want to be a part of it.”



Like most kids, he became infused with the passions of the grownups around him. “Most of the dads in the neighborhood did really neat stuff, like photovoltaics and batteries and radar,” Jobs recalled. “I grew up in awe of that stuff and asking people about it.” The most important of these neighbors, Larry Lang, lived seven doors away. “He was my model of what an HP engineer was supposed to be: a big ham radio operator, hard-core electronics guy,” Jobs recalled. “He would bring me stuff to play with.” As we walked up to Lang’s old house, Jobs pointed to the driveway. “He took a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker, and he put it on this driveway. He had me talk into the carbon mike and it amplified out of the speaker.” Jobs had been taught by his father that microphones always required an electronic amplifier. “So I raced home, and I told my dad that he was wrong.”



“No, it needs an amplifier,” his father assured him. When Steve protested otherwise, his father said he was crazy. “It can’t work without an amplifier. There’s some trick.”

“I kept saying no to my dad, telling him he had to see it, and finally he actually walked down with me and saw it. And he said, ‘Well I’ll be a bat out of hell.’ ”



Jobs recalled the incident vividly because it was his first realization that his father did not know everything. Then a more disconcerting discovery began to dawn on him: He was smarter than his parents. He had always admired his father’s competence and savvy. “He was not an educated man, but I had always thought he was pretty damn smart. He didn’t read much, but he could do a lot. Almost everything mechanical, he could figure it out.” Yet the carbon microphone incident, Jobs said, began a jarring process of realizing that he was in fact more clever and quick than his parents. “It was a very big moment that’s burned into my mind. When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never forget that moment.” This discovery, he later told friends, along with the fact that he was adopted, made him feel apart—detached and separate—from both his family and the world.



Another layer of awareness occurred soon after. Not only did he discover that he was brighter than his parents, but he discovered that they knew this. Paul and Clara Jobs were loving parents, and they were willing to adapt their lives to suit a son who was very smart—and also willful. They would go to great lengths to accommodate him. And soon Steve discovered this fact as well. “Both my parents got me. They felt a lot of responsibility once they sensed that I was special. They found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in better schools. They were willing to defer to my needs.”



So he grew up not only with a sense of having once been abandoned, but also with a sense that he was special. In his own mind, that was more important in the formation of his personality.



School



Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. “I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble.” It also soon became clear that Jobs, by both nature and nurture, was not disposed to accept authority. “I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”



His school, Monta Loma Elementary, was a series of low-slung 1950s buildings four blocks from his house. He countered his boredom by playing pranks. “I had a good friend named Rick Ferrentino, and we’d get into all sorts of trouble,” he recalled. “Like we made little posters announcing ‘Bring Your Pet to School Day.’ It was crazy, with dogs chasing cats all over, and the teachers were beside themselves.” Another time they convinced some kids to tell them the combination numbers for their bike locks. “Then we went outside and switched all of the locks, and nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late that night to straighten things out.” When he was in third grade, the pranks became a bit more dangerous. “One time we set off an explosive under the chair of our teacher, Mrs. Thurman. We gave her a nervous twitch.”



Not surprisingly, he was sent home two or three times before he finished third grade. By then, however, his father had begun to treat him as special, and in his calm but firm manner he made it clear that he expected the school to do the same. “Look, it’s not his fault,” Paul Jobs told the teachers, his son recalled. “If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault.” His parents never punished him for his transgressions at school. “My father’s father was an alcoholic and whipped him with a belt, but I’m not sure if I ever got spanked.” Both of his parents, he added, “knew the school was at fault for trying to make me memorize stupid stuff rather than stimulating me.” He was already starting to show the admixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and detachment, that would mark him for the rest of his life.



When it came time for him to go into fourth grade, the school decided it was best to put Jobs and Ferrentino into separate classes. The teacher for the advanced class was a spunky woman named Imogene Hill, known as “Teddy,” and she became, Jobs said, “one of the saints of my life.” After watching him for a couple of weeks, she figured that the best way to handle him was to bribe him. “After school one day, she gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this.’ And I thought, ‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these giant lollipops that seemed as big as the world. And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it mostly right, I will give you this and five dollars.’ And I handed it back within two days.” After a few months, he no longer required the bribes. “I just wanted to learn and to please her.”



She reciprocated by getting him a hobby kit for grinding a lens and making a camera. “I learned more from her than any other teacher, and if it hadn’t been for her I’m sure I would have gone to jail.” It reinforced, once again, the idea that he was special. “In my class, it was just me she cared about. She saw something in me.”



It was not merely intelligence that she saw. Years later she liked to show off a picture of that year’s class on Hawaii Day. Jobs had shown up without the suggested Hawaiian shirt, but in the picture he is front and center wearing one. He had, literally, been able to talk the shirt off another kid’s back.



Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill had Jobs tested. “I scored at the high school sophomore level,” he recalled. Now that it was clear, not only to himself and his parents but also to his teachers, that he was intellectually special, the school made the remarkable proposal that he skip two grades and go right into seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep him challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more sensibly, to have him skip only one grade.



The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself with kids a year older. Worse yet, the sixth grade was in a different school, Crittenden Middle. It was only eight blocks from Monta Loma Elementary, but in many ways it was a world apart, located in a neighborhood filled with ethnic gangs. “Fights were a daily occurrence; as were shakedowns in bathrooms,” wrote the Silicon Valley journalist Michael S. Malone. “Knives were regularly brought to school as a show of macho.” Around the time that Jobs arrived, a group of students were jailed for a gang rape, and the bus of a neighboring school was destroyed after its team beat Crittenden’s in a wrestling match.



Jobs was often bullied, and in the middle of seventh grade he gave his parents an ultimatum. “I insisted they put me in a different school,” he recalled. Financially this was a tough demand. His parents were barely making ends meet, but by this point there was little doubt that they would eventually bend to his will. “When they resisted, I told them I would just quit going to school if I had to go back to Crittenden. So they researched where the best schools were and scraped together every dime and bought a house for $21,000 in a nicer district.” The move was only three miles to the south, to a former apricot orchard in Los Altos that had been turned into a subdivision of cookiecutter tract homes. Their house, at 2066 Crist Drive, was one story with three bedrooms and an all-important attached garage with a rolldown door facing the street. There Paul Jobs could tinker with cars and his son with electronics.



Its other significant attribute was that it was just over the line inside what was then the Cupertino-Sunnyvale School District, one of the safest and best in the valley. “When I moved here, these corners were still orchards,” Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house. “The guy who lived right there taught me how to be a good organic gardener and to compost. He grew everything to perfection. I never had better food in my life. That’s when I began to appreciate organic fruits and vegetables.”



Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”



The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”



Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?”



“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”



Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”



Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising. His son was fascinated by the need for perfection. “Lasers require precision alignment,” Jobs said. “The really sophisticated ones, for airborne applications or medical, had very precise features. They would tell my dad something like, ‘This is what we want, and we want it out of one piece of metal so that the coefficients of expansion are all the same.’ And he had to figure out how to do it.” Most pieces had to be made from scratch, which meant that Paul had to create custom tools and dies. His son was impressed, but he rarely went to the machine shop. “It would have been fun if he had gotten to teach me how to use a mill and lathe. But unfortunately I never went, because I was more interested in electronics.”



One summer Paul took Steve to Wisconsin to visit the family’s dairy farm. Rural life did not appeal to Steve, but one image stuck with him. He saw a calf being born, and he was amazed when the tiny animal struggled up within minutes and began to walk. “It was not something she had learned, but it was instead hardwired into her,” he recalled. “A human baby couldn’t do that. I found it remarkable, even though no one else did.” He put it in hardware-software terms: “It was as if something in the animal’s body and in its brain had been engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.”



In ninth grade Jobs went to Homestead High, which had a sprawling campus of two-story cinderblock buildings painted pink that served two thousand students. “It was designed by a famous prison architect,” Jobs recalled. “They wanted to make it indestructible.” He had developed a love of walking, and he walked the fifteen blocks to school by himself each day.



He had few friends his own age, but he got to know some seniors who were immersed in the counterculture of the late 1960s. It was a time when the geek and hippie worlds were beginning to show some overlap. “My friends were the really smart kids,” he said. “I was interested in math and science and electronics. They were too, and also into LSD and the whole counterculture trip.”



His pranks by then typically involved electronics. At one point he wired his house with speakers. But since speakers can also be used as microphones, he built a control room in his closet, where he could listen in on what was happening in other rooms. One night, when he had his headphones on and was listening in on his parents’ bedroom, his father caught him and angrily demanded that he dismantle the system. He spent many evenings visiting the garage of Larry Lang, the engineer who lived down the street from his old house. Lang eventually gave Jobs the carbon microphone that had fascinated him, and he turned him on to Heathkits, those assemble-it-yourself kits for making ham radios and other electronic gear that were beloved by the soldering set back then. “Heathkits came with all the boards and parts color-coded, but the manual also explained the theory of how it operated,” Jobs recalled. “It made you realize you could build and understand anything. Once you built a couple of radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say, ‘I can build that as well,’ even if you didn’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and the Heathkits made me believe I could build anything.”



Lang also got him into the Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club, a group of fifteen or so students who met in the company cafeteria on Tuesday nights. “They would get an engineer from one of the labs to come and talk about what he was working on,” Jobs recalled. “My dad would drive me there. I was in heaven. HP was a pioneer of light emitting diodes. So we talked about what to do with them.” Because his father now worked for a laser company, that topic particularly interested him. One night he cornered one of HP’s laser engineers after a talk and got a tour of the holography lab. But the most lasting impression came from seeing the small computers the company was developing.



“I saw my first desktop computer there. It was called the 9100A, and it was a glorified calculator but also really the first desktop computer. It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a beauty of a thing. I fell in love with it.”



The kids in the Explorers Club were encouraged to do projects, and Jobs decided to build a frequency counter, which measures the number of pulses per second in an electronic signal. He needed some parts that HP made, so he picked up the phone and called the CEO. “Back then, people didn’t have unlisted numbers. So I looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto and called him at home. And he answered and chatted with me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters.” Jobs worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. “My dad would drive me in the morning and pick me up in the evening.”



His work mainly consisted of “just putting nuts and bolts on things” on an assembly line. There was some resentment among his fellow line workers toward the pushy kid who had talked his way in by calling the CEO. “I remember telling one of the supervisors, ‘I love this stuff, I love this stuff,’ and then I asked him what he liked to do best. And he said, ‘To fuck, to fuck.’ ” Jobs had an easier time ingratiating himself with the engineers who worked one floor above. “They served doughnuts and coffee every morning at ten. So I’d go upstairs and hang out with them.”



Jobs liked to work. He also had a newspaper route—his father would drive him when it was raining—and during his sophomore year spent weekends and the summer as a stock clerk at a cavernous electronics store, Haltek. It was to electronics what his father’s junkyards were to auto parts: a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard. “Out in the back, near the bay, they had a fenced-in area with things like Polaris submarine interiors that had been ripped and sold for salvage,” he recalled. “All the controls and buttons were right there. The colors were military greens and grays, but they had these switches and bulb covers of amber and red. There were these big old lever switches that, when you flipped them, it was awesome, like you were blowing up Chicago.”



At the wooden counters up front, laden with thick catalogues in tattered binders, people would haggle for switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest memory chips. His father used to do that for auto parts, and he succeeded because he knew the value of each better than the clerks. Jobs followed suit. He developed a knowledge of electronic parts that was honed by his love of negotiating and turning a profit. He would go to electronic flea markets, such as the San Jose swap meet, haggle for a used circuit board that contained some valuable chips or components, and then sell those to his manager at Haltek. Jobs was able to get his first car, with his father’s help, when he was fifteen. It was a two-tone Nash Metropolitan that his father had fitted out with an MG engine. Jobs didn’t really like it, but he did not want to tell his father that, or miss out on the chance to have his own car. “In retrospect, a Nash Metropolitan might seem like the most wickedly cool car,” he later said. “But at the time it was the most uncool car in the world. Still, it was a car, so that was great.” Within a year he had saved up enough from his various jobs that he could trade up to a red Fiat 850 coupe with an Abarth engine. “My dad helped me buy and inspect it. The satisfaction of getting paid and saving up for something, that was very exciting.”



That same summer, between his sophomore and junior years at Homestead, Jobs began smoking marijuana. “I got stoned for the first time that summer. I was fifteen, and then began using pot regularly.” At one point his father found some dope in his son’s Fiat. “What’s this?” he asked. Jobs coolly replied, “That’s marijuana.” It was one of the few times in his life that he faced his father’s anger. “That was the only real fight I ever got in with my dad,” he said. But his father again bent to his will. “He wanted me to promise that I’d never use pot again, but I wouldn’t promise.” In fact by his senior year he was also dabbling in LSD and hash as well as exploring the mind-bending effects of sleep deprivation. “I was starting to get stoned a bit more. We would also drop acid occasionally, usually in fields or in cars.”



He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed in electronics and those who were into literature and creative endeavors. “I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology—Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear.” His other favorites included Moby-Dick and the poems of Dylan Thomas. I asked him why he related to King Lear and Captain Ahab, two of the most willful and driven characters in literature, but he didn’t respond to the connection I was making, so I let it drop. “When I was a senior I had this phenomenal AP English class. The teacher was this guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway. He took a bunch of us snowshoeing in Yosemite.” One course that Jobs took would become part of Silicon Valley lore: the electronics class taught by John McCollum, a former Navy pilot who had a showman’s flair for exciting his students with such tricks as firing up a Tesla coil. His little stockroom, to which he would lend the key to pet students, was crammed with transistors and other components he had scored.



McCollum’s classroom was in a shed-like building on the edge of the campus, next to the parking lot. “This is where it was,” Jobs recalled as he peered in the window, “and here, next door, is where the auto shop class used to be.” The juxtaposition highlighted the shift from the interests of his father’s generation. “Mr. McCollum felt that electronics class was the new auto shop.”



McCollum believed in military discipline and respect for authority. Jobs didn’t. His aversion to authority was something he no longer tried to hide, and he affected an attitude that combined wiry and weird intensity with aloof rebelliousness. McCollum later said, “He was usually off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class.” He never trusted Jobs with a key to the stockroom. One day Jobs needed a part that was not available, so he made a collect call to the manufacturer, Burroughs in Detroit, and said he was designing a new product and wanted to test out the part. It arrived by air freight a few days later. When McCollum asked how he had gotten it, Jobs described—with defiant pride—the collect call and the tale he had told. “I was furious,” McCollum said. “That was not the way I wanted my students to behave.” Jobs’s response was, “I don’t have the money for the phone call. They’ve got plenty of money.”



Jobs took McCollum’s class for only one year, rather than the three that it was offered. For one of his projects, he made a device with a photocell that would switch on a circuit when exposed to light, something any high school science student could have done. He was far more interested in playing with lasers, something he learned from his father. With a few friends, he created light shows for parties by bouncing lasers off mirrors that were attached to the speakers of his stereo system.









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華爾街黑石雙雄

《商界名家》2007年07月

　不少人將名播天下的美國企業——黑石看成是一家投資公司，其實不然。在華爾街，同樣以黑石命名的金融公司有兩家：史蒂夫· 施瓦茨曼(Stephen A. Schwarzman)領軍的黑石集團(Black Stone)和勞倫斯·芬克執舵的貝萊德公司(BlackRock)。前者是高居世界王者位置的私募基金公司，後者則是全球最大的上市資産管理企業。

　　一個公司孕育兩大巨頭

　從哈佛畢業的施瓦茨曼僅在一家小公司幹了兩個月後就跳槽到當時華爾街著名的投資銀行--雷曼兄弟公司。在這裏，施瓦茨曼31歲時就升任爲公司的合夥人，成爲當時雷曼兄弟高管中最年輕的合夥人之一。

　如果不出意外，施瓦茨曼在公司中完全還有進一步提升的可能，因為，當時擔任雷曼兄弟董事長兼首席執行官的皮特·彼得森(Peter G. Peterson)不僅對施瓦茨曼非常賞識， 而且二人在工作和生活中還建立了十分不錯的私人友誼。然而，雷曼兄弟不久之後爆發的蕭牆之亂打斷了施瓦茨曼的商業人生軌跡。離開雷曼兄弟時，施瓦茨曼慶幸自己的銀行賬戶上已經積累起了20萬美元，他和彼得森合資成立一家小型併購公司。由於彼得森和施瓦茨曼的姓氏分別嵌著德文中“黑色”和希臘文中“石頭”的 詞義，爲了表示對兩人祖籍的一種紀念，他們就將自己的新公司取名爲“黑石”。

　在施瓦茨曼看來，自己主張成立併購公司不是沒有道理的，在華爾街，當時以雷諾·納比斯科公司槓桿收購案爲代表的收購狂潮一浪高過一浪，並且那些戰略買家幾乎都賺得盆滿缽盈，施瓦茨曼無疑也想創造以小博大的奇蹟。然而，就憑黑石這一無人能知的名字，又有誰會輕易把動輒數千萬美元的大單交給一個無名 之輩呢？在開張幾個月僅僅接收了一小單生意後，施瓦茨曼決定借雞生蛋，創立私募基金。

　在當時私募基金被首席執行官和董事會視爲旁門左道的華爾街，像黑石這樣的新基金公司想要打開局面並不是件容易的事。倔強的施瓦茨曼只能硬著頭皮 一家接著一家地敲開他自己認為可能投錢的客戶的大門，但其間卻吃了無數次的閉門羹。“被我們視爲最可能點頭的19家客戶，一個個拒絕我們，總共有488個 潛在投資人拒絕我們。”史蒂夫·施瓦茨曼回憶說。蒼天不負有心人，被史蒂夫·施瓦茨曼的坦誠和抱負所打動，美國保險及證券巨頭保德信公司決定嘗試性投下1 億美元，正是這筆錢讓後來者看到了黑石的潛力。不久之後，通用電氣總裁傑克·韋爾奇也入夥了。黑石集團的第一隻基金吸引了32 個投資人，包括大都會人壽、通用電氣、日本日興證券等。

　目前，黑石已經擁有52 個合夥人和750名雇員，每年有超過850億美元的多元化收入，集團旗下47家公司若結合起來可以逼近《財富》500強的前20名，成為當今華爾街增長勢 頭最迅猛的金融王國。當然，令施瓦茨曼感到最愜意的是，自己再也不會爲尋找1000萬美元投資而四處奔波，相反，那些攜帶幾億美元的投資者會主動找上門來。

　成就了黑石的同時也成就了自己。有人說施瓦茨曼單從迴圈的基本投資報酬中每年就可以把5,000萬美元搬回家，他的個人財富據預計已經超過30億 美元。不久前，《財富》雜誌評出了2006年度最有權力的31位風雲人物，施瓦茨曼榜上有名。由於他控制著華爾街最熱門的公司，《財富》雜誌將其響亮地譽 爲“華爾街新一代領軍人物”。

　　創立貝萊德(BlackRock)的勞倫斯·芬克命運多舛

　與施瓦茨曼順利創業相比，勞倫斯·芬克(Lawrence Fink)就顯得有些大起大落，並最終脫穎于施瓦茨曼的黑石集團。

　　加利福尼亞大學MBA畢業後，經一位教授的推薦，芬克進入了當時作為華爾街老牌的第一波士頓銀行，幹起了當時許多人並不願意幹的房地産抵押債券交易員。當時的房地産抵押債券剛剛誕生，經營市場非常狹小，但許多保險公司和銀行出於規避風險的需要都試圖減少手中持有的抵押債權。看準機會的芬克大膽向公司請纓，要求組織一支特別團隊定向研究和開發市場。一個星期之後，由芬克團隊發明的房地産抵押貸款債權憑證(CMO)業務面世，這種將債券的本金與利息拆解後重組，形成更多樣化、流動性更佳的債券商品，剛好契合當時退休基金經理人的投資需要，並在3年不到的時間發展成爲美國房貸債券市場的主流商品。 而當時芬克服務的第一波士頓銀行也因爲此項業務的開拓有了近百萬美元的進賬，這在當時無疑是一個天文數字。

　嶄露頭角的芬克得到上司的極大賞識，進入第一波士頓的第二年，芬克就被調到了固定收益證券部門，負責當時非常新興的分期貸款抵押債券 (MBS)。而就在短短的五年時間裏，芬克就把這個産品變成了第一波士頓的拳頭産品，並爲公司創造460萬美元的營收，其中有一個季度竟創造了130萬美元的盈利記錄。而在此之前，第一波士頓銀行沒有出現第二人。一時間，芬克成了第一波士頓的超級賺錢機器，並被破例提升成爲第一波士頓歷史上最年輕的合夥人，當時他只有28歲。

　作爲一種特殊獎勵，第一波士頓銀行除了為芬克留出合夥人的位置之外，公司董事會還給芬克放了一段出外旅遊的長假。但天有不測風雲，等到芬克 的快樂旅行結束，命運女神就跟他開了一個幾乎讓他致命的玩笑。1986年，芬克領導的債券部門在一樁高風險交易中押上大注，但由於受美國政府金融政策全面收縮的影響，結果慘賠100萬美元。一夜間，資本市場上的小金童失去了頭上的耀眼光環，第一波士頓也很快對芬克作出了解職的決定。

　一次偶然的機會，失業後的芬克看到一則後來決定他人生命運的招聘廣告。第二天，他就敲開風險投資商黑石集團(Black Stone)的大門。當時的黑石集團成立不到兩年，是一家註冊資本僅40萬美元的小型並購公司，其創始人彼得森和施瓦茨曼也急需在華爾街搜羅到一些頂尖金融人才，而芬克的不請自至自然讓他們喜出望外。

　來到黑石集團的第二年，芬克憑藉著自己在債券行業浸淫多年的獨到眼光向公司提出了成立金融管理公司的建議，並在得到同意後迅速策劃出一整套行之有效的營銷方案，芬克也被任命爲新公司的董事長(註:1988年, 成立Blackstone Financial Management). 1992, Blackstone Financial Management公司正式從黑石集團分離，芬克帶著八位合夥人開始單幹，後來芬克將公司命名爲貝萊德 (BlackRock)。關於貝萊德從黑石集團最終脫離的原因，華爾街流傳著這樣一種版本，即芬克和貝萊德公司其他合夥人不喜歡黑石集團對他們的業務說三道四，黑石公司一再強調它的董事會完全獨立運作。


　不過，無論外界如何評價，事實證明芬克當時抉擇的正確性。自獨立運營至今，貝萊德公司已經連續18年保持驚人的增長。貝萊德從最初的八位創始人發展到一家擁有1,500多名員工、管理資産1兆美元的超級資産管理公司。而在35歲時，芬克就被《華爾街日報》選爲“商界明日之星。”

　　個人魅力空前絕後

　黑石的員工都尊稱施瓦茨曼爲“精神教父”，而能夠得到這樣一個集體封號，施瓦茨曼當然知道其中的別樣滋味。在黑石成立的很長一段時間裏，施瓦茨曼與其他曾經的合夥人並不總是那麽容易找到默契，有人調侃說曾經因為與施瓦茨曼産生口角而與“黑石”分道揚鑣的合夥人可以組成一支華爾街的“明星棒球 隊”，其中也囊括了許多業界“顯赫’人物的名字。有一個曾經目睹其中一次”分手“場景的人回憶：”當時雙方吼聲連連、咒駡不斷，那真是我平生在華爾街所見 最厲害的一次爭吵。“然而，正如”黑石“從上世紀80年代一路走來經歷了不少風雨一樣，施瓦茨曼也從昔日的幼稚與莽撞中一步步逐漸成長爲了一名成熟的企業家。

　因此，當美國《財富》雜誌記者單刀直入向施瓦茨曼問起那些與前合夥人發生口角的歷史時，施瓦茨曼也毫不隱晦地說：”那是很久以前的事了，好多年 了。但從那時候起，我真的已經變成熟了很多。“的確，今天的施瓦茨曼總是以謙謙君子的形象出現在衆人面前，每當遇到可能與合夥人發生爭執的事情，施瓦茨曼一定會以笑臉相陪，甚至他還會將那些工作中發生過不愉快的合作者請到自己在曼哈頓區公園大街上的豪宅或者佛羅里達州棕櫚灘的海濱別墅度周末，讓金髮美貌的第二任妻子爲同事們親自下廚做菜。“黑石需要一種團隊共用精神”，施瓦茨曼這樣解釋自己的變化。

　除了從不缺席周一的例會外，施瓦茨曼還是每一個會議發言者的忠實聽衆。一個為與會者十分熟悉的場景是，每當會議分組表決時，施瓦茨曼就會靜靜坐 在一旁，如果要插話或者不贊成某一看法，此時的施瓦茨曼從不提高嗓門，而是以其泰然甚至迷人的談吐讓人折服。“要是我生氣，那顯而易見，”施瓦茨曼說， “我不必說太多。”

　其實，施瓦茨曼的領袖才能和人格魅力並不僅僅表現在公司內部，其在業界的良好口碑也是衆人皆曉，由此施瓦茨曼也爲自己贏得了“非主流世界大師” 的雅號。在黑石集團的早期，整個投行和基金持有人都推崇敵意並購策略，但就是從這時起，施瓦茨曼爲黑石定下了一條基本準則：不做敵意收購。史蒂夫·施瓦茨 曼認爲：“敵意收購往往是一個把收購成本無限制提高的過程，入侵者要應對可能出現的毒丸計劃、黃金降落傘或者白衣騎士，而被侵略者為求自保，往往啓動槓桿 收購，這直接導致了企業債務猛增。我們認爲，和每一筆收購生意中的關聯公司保持友善的關係相當重要，甚至我們可以放棄某些已經付出了艱辛的努力。”正是在過去22年中一貫秉持非敵意收購這一標誌性策略，黑石成爲了一個連對手都願意與之打交道的公司。

　收購飛思卡爾(freescale)半導體公司可以說是施瓦茨曼收購策略的一次完美演繹。飛思卡爾是曾經隸屬摩托羅拉的晶片生産商，此前，摩托羅拉在分拆其晶片業務過程中將一部分股權出售給KKR。同行是冤家。面對著黑石抛出的收購邀約，KKR在當初總是處處下絆使拐。為了既不影響收購進程又不違背自己的行爲準則，施瓦茨曼無數次地敲開KKR總裁亨利·克雷維斯辦公室的大門，而就在 這兩位國際級私募基金大佬友善與寬鬆的交談中，黑石集團最終以176億美元的適中價格將飛思卡爾攬入懷中。

　無論是在華爾街還是在貝萊德公司內部，勞倫斯·芬克的睿智和勤勉亦被傳爲美談。華爾街的同行認為他擁有最敏銳的頭腦。美林公司首席執行官奧尼爾如此描述他：“他的眼睛中閃現著靈光，思維敏捷，富有天賦。雖然這種天賦不同于鋼琴家馬友友，但他能洞悉任何資本市場上的奇異現象。”不過，每每聽到這些好聽的話，芬克總是噗嗤一笑，因爲他不相信自己長著與別人不一樣的腦袋，而對於自己的踏實和勤奮，芬克則毫不謙虛地笑納。

　　除了每天早晨6點準時來到辦公室提前開始工作外，從不缺席周一的例會也是芬克爲自己確定的雷打不動的規矩，即便是在遙遠的法國公寓中度假，抑或在倫敦、東京出差公幹，他都會通過視頻鏡頭參加會議。會議通常從上午8 點半開始，一直持續到將近下午下班，整個會議都是由芬克親自主持。通常，貝萊德公司的合夥人會圍坐在大圓桌周圍，後面坐的是會議遲到者以及級別稍低的投資經理。芬克爲會議制定的規則是，與會者講話都必須單刀直入，切中問題的要害，決不能兜圈子。而每到例會的那天，芬克就會讓秘書提前爲自己訂好外賣午餐。

　　在貝萊德，員工們被鼓勵穿著商業休閒裝，但芬克仍然每天習慣繫著領帶工作，他說這樣能夠隨時以嚴整的形象出現在客戶面前。如今在芬克的客戶名單裏，你可以輕鬆地找到例如微軟公司、波音公司、福特汽車或者加州公衆退休福利系統這樣的名字。《華爾街日報》記者蘇珊普蓮據此寫道：“通過和這些客戶的緊 密聯繫，勞倫斯·芬克成爲華爾街的幕後推手之一，也無意中構成了華爾街‘權力午餐’風景線的一角。”

　嚴謹行爲和領袖魅力使芬克成爲了金融精英追求的模範。美國財政部副部長彼得·費希爾離職後自動投到貝萊德公司門下並出任貝萊德在亞洲市場的負責人，所有貝萊德公司初創期的合夥人至今無一人要求撤資脫離，貝萊德公司的人員流動率遠遠低於行業平均水平。

　其實，芬克的攝人魅力遠不只表現在員工面前的言談舉止，而讓他最感到自豪的是自己在華爾街非常順暢與和諧的人脈關係。紐約證券交易所董事長格拉索遭遇彈劾後，芬克被華爾街所有的金融公司推舉為替交易所挑選繼任者的負責人，並最終不負眾望，將優秀的職業經理人約翰· 里德扶上馬背。當全球頂級獵頭公司——史賓沙管理顧問公司總裁托馬斯·內夫為摩根士丹利四處尋找新的CEO並親自致電芬克讓他考慮出任時，芬克不僅委婉謝 絕，而且還為前大摩首席執行官麥晉桁能夠返回原職頻繁地穿針引線，並最終促成了麥氏的光復。

　　擴張手法不一而足

　喬納森·格雷是黑石集團房地産業務的高級執行董事——施瓦茨曼最爲欣賞的一名愛將，這位今年只有38歲就已經被華爾街描述為最聰明的房地産行業投資者，今天仍清楚地記得一天下班前被叫到CEO辦公室秘密口授作戰命令的情形：施瓦茨曼端坐在棕色的大擡椅上，手上夾著的雪茄冒出輕煙，神情嚴肅地對格雷說自己決定競購美國最大商業物業集團——權益寫字樓投資信託公司(EOP)，要求格雷在三天之內拿出競購書。行動出乎所有人的意料之外，2007年2月 9日，EOP順利地裝進了黑石的口袋。

　一個星期後，施瓦茨曼用自己六十歲生日的豪華大宴來慶祝黑石的勝利——收購金額達390億美元的全球有史以來最大的一宗槓桿收購交易。

　所有當天參加生日慶典的金融界名流們一致讀懂了施瓦茨曼的心機——這位華爾街最具野心的CEO不會滿足過去10年內私募基金偏安資本市場一角的沈悶生態，並將刮起一陣又一陣的槓桿投資與收購風暴。

　22年來，施瓦茨曼已經將黑石打造成了私募基金、房地産和企業債務管理等綜合性金融品牌。資料表明，單單在房地産業務和私募基金業務兩個部門，黑石集團過去5年的每年投資收益率都保持在30%以上，如此豐厚的投資收益自然刺激了很多新的投資人急於入夥。單單在2006 年，黑石集團就新募集了156 億美元，成爲全球最大的收購基金。目前黑石集團正在募集一筆規模爲200億美元的收購基金、一隻規模爲100億美元的房地産基金，商業銀行也樂於提供4倍資産的貸款，黑石集團手中可運用的資金高達1250億美元。

　已經上膛的子彈隨時準備擊中目標。就在日前，黑石宣佈計劃以155億美元收購著名的杜莎夫人蠟像館的母公司杜莎集團。該收購將與黑石集團本身擁有的默林集團及加達雲霄樂園進行合併，若能順利完成，黑石將成為全球僅次於迪斯尼的第二大旅遊景點營運商。

　無獨有偶，黑石在近期盯上了克萊斯勒公司，並正與戴姆勒—克萊斯勒集團就收購或結成某種形式的聯盟進行積極的磋商。施瓦茨曼將這些即將上桌的盤中大餐稱為“太空體驗”，其語中之意表明黑石應當登上一個更高的高度。

　　好事古難全。施瓦茨曼最不滿自己的恐怕還是黑石集團在亞洲尤其是在中國市場的無所作為。雖然黑石兩年前就在印度孟買設立其在亞洲的第一個辦事處，也於去年在香港設立負責對沖基金運作的機構，但至今卻沒有任何起色。因此，在施瓦茨曼的直接操盤下，黑石集團最近出高價聘請了前香港特區政府財政司司長梁錦松出任黑石高級執行董事兼大中華區主席職務。

　“重大的外商直接投資對中國內地經濟的持續增長意義重大，黑石希望能積極地參與這一進程。”施瓦茨曼說這話時，其眼中流溢出的淡藍色目光已經飄向了大洋西岸的那塊神奇土地。

　通過併購實現與出色的股票基金管理公司合作以擴大黑石公司的規模，是剛剛過去的一年中芬克重點思考的問題。聞到腥味的摩根士丹利CEO麥晉桁提前向芬克抛出繡球。當時摩根士丹利提出兩套方案：收購或者將基金部門與貝萊德公司合併；成立的新公司由摩根士丹利控制。而且論麥晉桁與芬克之間不錯的私交 關係，摩根士丹利相信這樁買賣定成無疑。不過，幾乎在麥晉桁向芬克開出並購要約的同時，美林的CEO斯坦尼·奧尼爾也主動提出與芬克合併業務的要求。

　如果從貝萊德公司未來股票投資業務和國際業務的發展來看，美林證券在和摩根士丹利的競爭中並不具有壓倒性優勢。但芬克的最終決定就是出人意外，選擇與奧尼爾的合作和拒絕麥晉桁的要求。

　可能到現在麥晉桁並不明白自己在與奧尼爾的競爭中失利的真正原因。與摩根士丹利提出的併購方案不同，美林向貝萊德提出的併購條件是，以占新貝萊德 60%資産的美林資産管理部，換取新貝萊德49.8%的股份並且簽訂3年後降低股權的條款。這就意味著美林只是新貝萊德的參股股東之一，並沒有摩根士丹利一再強調要掌握新公司控股權的霸氣，而這恰恰是芬克最爲反感的地方。“與美林合併的貝萊德並不是美林的子公司”，這個後來芬克向媒體不斷強調的觀點無疑是要外界知道：貝萊德是貝萊德自己的公司，是芬克和合夥人的公司，不由其他利益集團控制。

　作出決定的芬克在2006年9月快速實現與美林的合作。貝萊德在這場交易中實施一個近乎完美的“一石三鳥”計劃：一方面削減了PNC公司對貝萊德公司的控制權，使其股份由原來的70%下降到35%(1995年PNC以62%股權入股貝萊德公司)，而且一旦董事會判決PNC對新貝萊德不利，它就必須全部出賣所持有的貝萊德股份；同時，美林證券雖向新公司投入60%的資産，但卻只得到了49.8%的股份。此外，新公司將在貝萊德的名下運行，芬克出任新公司 的董事長兼首席執行官。勞倫斯·芬克終於擺脫了強權股東的威脅，他的投資理念也將在新貝萊德得到最完美的展現。合併後的貝萊德公司也從美國第三大債券管理公司 躍升爲全球最大的公開上市資産管理公司，資産管理規模接近1兆美元。

　 之所以芬克急切與美林這樣的華爾街金融巨頭牽手合作，完全出於他對貝萊德在金融市場中競爭狀況分析的直接結果。黑石的兩位老對手——西部資産管理有限公司和太平洋資産管理公司已經分別與花旗集團、德國安聯集團展開資産管理業務的深度合作，但貝萊德卻被《商業周刊》嘲弄爲“沈默的巨人”，這讓芬克聽上去十分地不快。

　更要緊的是，貝萊德在投資組合上一向偏重於固定收益産品，甚至過度偏向債券。相對於固定收益産品3,210億美元的規模，貝萊德只有440億股票投資規模。 利率和債券價格往往反方向波動，中長期債券對利率的變化更爲敏感。過去兩年中，美國聯邦儲備委員會17次加息，國際市場上能源和貴金屬價格飛漲，原材料短缺現象也將長期持續下去。這種局面極有可能引致美國國內的中長期利率上漲，而與此緊密相關的中長期國債的價格優勢就會被無情擠掉。對於十分注重風險的芬克而言，如此潛藏的危機不能不是一塊心病。而尋求與股票基金管理公司的合作，就可以在快速提升貝萊德股票投資比例的過程中達到分散債券投資風險的直接目的。

　進一步分析可知，與貝萊德公司在美國國內的債券市場頤指氣使完全不同，其在國際市場上的影響程度就顯得有點力不從心。特別是貝萊德公司原本擅長的債券投資市場在遠東尤其是中國的發展緩慢，成熟的資本市場又很難找到極大的利潤空間。所以芬克一直都在考慮，借助併購國際知名企業，以得到更大的國際市場平台以及國際營銷網路。

　而一個外界可能並不注意的細節是，與美林合併後的新貝萊德在美國本土提供服務時以貝萊德的名稱出現，但在海外市場則使用美林品牌。對此芬克的解釋是，“我期待擴展我們在股票領域的版圖，完美應該變得更加國際化。就像玩跳背遊戲一樣，我們現在確實花了很大的代價，但是過了六七年之後，我們的收益就將成倍猛漲。”目前，新貝萊德4500名員工中，1/3以上調整到在美國以外的地區工作，分別設立於美國、英國、日本和澳大利亞的投資中心，為來自50多個國家的客戶提供服務。新的陣容凸現了芬克進入國際金融零售市場的勃勃野心。

大宇神話的崩壞

《環球時報》 ( 2006-06-07 第13版)

　　這是一個擁有無比輝煌經歷的家族，不到20年將一間5個人的小公司打造成韓國第二大企業﹔這個家族曾創造出600多億美元的總資產，卻也創下了韓國歷史上金額最大的商業破產案；這個家族同樣難逃命運的怪圈，被視為民族英雄的父親最終淪為經濟罪犯，才華橫溢的兒子被飛來橫禍奪去性命……當韓國前大宇集團會長金宇中在法庭上黯然接受10年監禁、20多萬億韓元（約1000韓元合１美元）罰金的現實時，也親手終結了自己創造的“神話”。大宇家族，以其大起大落的戲劇人生在韓國經濟史上書寫了難以磨滅的一筆。這個家族的過去、現在和未來永遠都是韓國人關心的話題。

　　締造“大宇神話”

　　金宇中是韓國經濟走向世界最關鍵的人物之一，曾被譽為韓國“世界經營”的先導者，給整整一代韓國人帶來過勇氣和希望。

　　1936年12月，金宇中出生於韓國大邱市一個書香門第，父親是位中學校長，曾兼任大學 教授，母親也受過高等教育。朝鮮戰爭的爆發摧毀了這個原本平靜的小康之家。父親在戰亂中死去，養家糊口的重擔落在了14歲的金宇中身上。他賣過自製冷飲、蘿蔔，後來又找到一份報童的工作，少年金宇中的商業天賦也隨之顯現出來。與大多數報童不同，他沒有選擇人流量大的市場，卻跑到偏遠的聚集著北方難民的市場賣報，因為渴望得到故鄉消息的人更愛看報。賣一份報收一份錢幾乎是全世界報童的唯一賣報模式，金宇中卻認為這樣做太浪費時間，為了搶先賣出報紙，他每天取到報紙後，就迅速發給面熟的老顧客，發完才回過頭來逐個收錢。就這樣，金宇中成了大邱無人不曉的報童。

　　20歲那年，金宇中遇到了生命中的貴人。鄰居金容順是漢城實業株式會社的社長，他很早就看準金宇中的才華。在金容順的資助下，金宇中從延世大學商經學院經濟系畢業，然後順理成章地進入漢城實業株式會社工作，並到東南亞國家深造。1967年，金宇中與朋友合夥創辦了自己的“大宇實業株式會社”。起初，公司僅有5個職員、不到1萬美元。但7年之內，他就使大宇的資本比創業時增加了800倍。此後，他陸續涉足重工業、建築、電子、金融、化學、汽車、造船等領域，把大宇建成一個綜合性大企業集團。到1986年，大宇已擁有27個子集團，8.5萬名員工，67個海外分支機構，成為僅次於現代集團的韓國第二大財團，並躋身世界500強企業。

　　即使在以工作狂聞名的韓國人中，金宇中也算得上是“超級工作狂”。據說，在工作的30多年裡，金宇中總共隻休息過兩天──一天是參加女兒的婚禮，另一天則是參加兒子的葬禮。他每天5點起床，深夜12點才睡覺。為提高工作效率，他規定在工作時間內不准召開任何會議，所有工作會議都在每天早晨6點准時召集，這個由他親自主持的會議被稱為“黎明會議”。大宇的飛速發展，正是源於金宇中這種勤奮和敢於開拓冒險的精神。

　　仍被視為“英雄”

　　然而，讓大宇帝國倒塌的，也是金宇中的冒險。從1993年起，大宇集團舉債在110個國家雇用了32萬名雇員，將攤子鋪到了幾乎所有產品行業，甚至種植利潤很低的釀酒的葡萄。然而，就在金宇中的世界經營之夢全面展開卻還未收益時，亞洲金融危機爆發了，大宇的債務危機隨之全面爆發。1999年，負債800億美元的大宇宣佈破產。金宇中則在某一天毫無徵兆地出走國外。一個輝煌的企業帝國就這樣灰飛煙滅。直到2005年，他才結束6年逃亡生涯，回國自首以換取心靈的安寧。

　　金宇中出逃後，政府向他發出了全球通緝令，警方調查也陸續揭露他一手導演的韓國頭號財務黑幕。有人為他算了筆賬：涉案金額99萬億韓元,相當於韓國2001年的財政預算。如果按1萬韓元1張將這些紙幣一字排開，能繞地球40圈﹔按4820萬人口計算,每個韓國人能分到205萬韓元！7年來，如何評價金宇中一直是韓國人爭論的話題，捧之貶之都有，金宇中的人氣也依然很高。在去年韓國MBC電視台“誰是經濟領域首屈一指的英雄”的網上調查中，金宇中排名第四。

　　女人重振輝煌

　　與韓國財閥夫人“大門不出，二門不邁”的傳統形象不同，金宇中的夫人鄭禧子是韓國經濟界公認的“女中豪傑”。她性格直爽，甚至有些火暴。她自己也承認，丈夫安靜沉默，自己卻是“有話憋不住的直桶子”。她曾私下表示，當“財閥夫人”並非其初衷，她不願意“隨時被媒體盜走私生活”。但邂逅金宇中後，本來在哈佛大學攻讀東方美術史的她，毅然為了愛人中途歸國。

　　在大宇集團輝煌之時，鄭禧子擔任集團骨幹企業“大宇開發公司”董事長，同時兼任韓國希爾頓飯店董事長，與丈夫一起馳騁在生意場上。她從女性特有的視角，為丈夫提出過不少好建議，使大宇在企業界創造出不少“第一”，如“大宇一家人”概念，向海外派駐員工時鼓勵夫婦同行並大幅提高配偶補貼等。金宇中獨自出走國外後，鄭禧子一度難以承受打擊，健康狀況迅速惡化，數次住院接受手術。有一些拍賣公司想借大宇破敗之機漁利，屢屢打電話詢問鄭禧子，是否准備拍賣收藏的藝術品。鄭禧子都明確地拒絕了，因為那些都是“金會長喜歡的藝術品”。

　　獨自生活的鄭禧子開始調整自己的狀態。她學習鋼琴，因為“這是可以一個人玩的活動”，試著與年輕時代的好友相聚，從友情中尋找慰藉。於是，這個堅強的女性很快恢復了過來，並在商界重新找到了自己的位置。目前，她擁有韓國幾家著名的高爾夫球場，以及頗具實力的“比爾高麗公司”，成了家族沒落後的頂樑柱。

　　家族充滿悲劇

　　和韓國其他幾大財閥家族一樣，大宇家族也沒有擺脫悲劇色彩。金宇中夫婦膝下共有3男1女，如今卻隻有１個兒子願意涉足家族事業。

　　1990年，他們最鐘愛、看重的長子金善宰在美國波士頓大學留學期間遭遇車禍去世，年僅23歲。更令金宇中夫婦難以釋懷的是，金善宰是到機場送母親回國後駕車返回住所的路上遭遇不幸的。為紀念兒子，鄭禧子建立了“大宇財團基金”以及“善宰美術館”。38歲的次子金善協平日裡沉默寡言，卻與已故兄長很談得來，在感情上非常依戀哥哥。善宰去世後數年，他都無法從悲傷的情緒中解脫出來。但在大宇發生變故後，善協不得不打起精神，擔負起重振家族的責任。兩三年前，他開始涉足高爾夫球場和酒店的管理。韓國大財閥間有相互聯姻的傳統，金善協娶的是另一大財團錦湖產業已故會長朴定求的愛女，他的婚姻也成了重振大宇的希望之一。幼子金善容今年32歲。人們隻知道他畢業於母親的母校哈佛大學經濟系，早年還曾在越南經過商。不過現在，他為了准備博士論文已經停止了一切商業活動。

　　與兒子們相比，金宇中的獨女、今年42歲的金善貞就是家族的另類了。她從小就不願意生活在父親的光環下，想要“建立自己的天地”。盡管她繼承了父親在利水化學公司市價20億韓元的巨額股份，並嫁給利水集團的總裁，但她從未從商。專攻美術的她曾遵從母親的意願擔任“善宰美術館”副館長，但強烈的個性使她不甘心受母親擺布，最終還是選擇徹底離開大宇。如今，頗有造詣的金善貞是韓國美術學院的教授，並在業餘時間擔任韓國一些重要海外展覽活動的獨立策劃人，在圈內頗有名氣。

　　沒有人統計過如今的大宇家族還有多少家產，但不少韓國媒體說“瘦死的駱駝比馬大”，大宇家族仍擁有數千億韓元，包括鄭禧子的財產、兩個兒子名下的房地產及女兒所持的利水化學公司股份。此外，金家在美國波士頓有一所豪宅，在法國尼斯市有一塊不小的葡萄田，家裡還收藏有不少價值連城的藝術品。

大宇集團創辦人--金宇中返國歸案

《商界名家》 2005年09月號

文/ 特約記者 孟一凡

　　他締造了大宇的神話，最終，他卻親手把它打破；他曾被看成民族英雄，最終，他卻成了經濟罪犯；他說過“榮譽的喪失意味著社會生命的死亡”，最終，他卻選擇了一種不名譽的方式離開——逃亡。現在，他帶著滿身傷痛、滿心疲乏回來了……

　　6月14日淩晨2時30分，在越南河內飛往韓國的韓亞航空734次班機上，一位鬚髮皆白、面容憔悴的老人拒絕了乘務員送來的機餐，“我想去漢城喝一碗骨頭湯。”他說。這位老人便是大宇集團前總裁金宇中——韓國曾經的半神半人級人物，他正要結束他5年零8個月的海外逃亡生活，回到韓國，回到風暴的中心。

　　與5年前出走時的悄無聲息不同，金宇中的歸來驚動了整個韓國，幾十名記者專程從韓國飛到河內去報導他回國的消息，金宇中登機時，記者們爲搶佔有利的拍攝位置，艙內甚至發生了騷亂。

　　飛機降落後，金宇中被直接帶往拘留所，一個月後，他又從拘留所被帶往醫院。重病纏身 的金宇中說自己是只“正在死去的狐狸”，面對這樣一個風燭殘年的老人，人們有太多感慨、太多疑問——大宇倒閉的背後有多少秘密？他爲什麽要逃亡，現在他油燈將盡，爲什麽又要回來面對反對者的尖銳批評和檢察官的嚴厲審訊？等待他的將會是什麽，總統大赦還是終身監禁？

　　大宇分崩離析的背後

　　在回國的飛機上，金宇中曾對韓國KBS電視臺的記者說：“我願意揭開大宇倒閉背後的所有秘密。”而事實上，早在2年前，流亡的金宇中就曾接受《財富》雜誌的專訪，講述“大宇崩潰背後的政治陰謀以及管理失誤”。

　　在那次訪問中，頹靡的金宇中顯得有些神情恍惚。一方面，他極力爲自己申辯：“也許最多5 年，人們將會明白，我並沒有犯錯誤,時間能證明一切。”另一方面，他又承認自己犯了致命的錯誤：“我最大的錯誤是過於野心勃勃，尤其是在汽車行業，我努力 乙太快的速度做太多的事情。”

　　金宇中是有自知之明的，很小的時候，冒險與激進的因數在他身上就已經表露無遺——

　　金宇中14歲的時候，父親在戰亂中死去，那之後，養家糊口的重擔便落在了金宇中的身上，報童是他的第一份工作。與大多數報童不同，金宇中沒有選擇人流量大、離報社近的西門市場賣報，反而選擇了偏遠的防川市場，因爲在那裏，渴望得到故鄉消 息的北方難民比當地人更愛看報。賣一份報收一份錢幾乎是全世界報童的唯一模式，金宇中卻認爲這樣做太浪費時間，爲了搶先一步賣出報紙，他想出了先看報後收 錢的辦法——每天取到報紙後，他就跑到防川市場把報紙迅速發給面熟的老顧客，發完才回過頭來逐個收錢。憑藉這個手段，金宇中成了大邱有名的報童，繼而成爲 10名賣報領班之一。

　　同樣得益於冒險，金宇中在1年的時間裏，將一個連續虧損37年的國有企業韓國機械扭虧爲盈，又在不到20年的時間裏，使大宇成爲了緊隨現代及三星之後的韓國第三大財閥。

　　“金宇中速度”曾經征服了許多人，英國《經濟學家》稱他爲“偉大的冒險家”，烏茲別克斯坦總統卡理莫夫說他是“金可汗”，競爭對手讚他是一個勇於下大賭注的玩家，連金宇中本人也略有得意地說自己“在哪里都聞得到錢的味道”。然而，正所謂 “上帝要誰滅亡，必先讓他瘋狂”，金宇中敗也敗在“冒險”這兩個字上。

　　1993年，金宇中提出“世界經營”的口號，那時候，大宇在海外的企業不過幾十家，5年後，大宇在全球110個國家擁有600多家企業。貪婪的大宇涉足太多的産業：汽車、造船、電視、鋼琴、航空配件、光纜通訊等，無所不包，這其中，金宇中最大的夢想還是將大宇打造成世界汽車業的霸主。在歐美發達市場，大宇的競爭力不足，金宇中就採取了他一貫策略——佔領一個沒有競爭對手的新興市場，期望長期獲利，就這樣，大宇在波蘭、烏克蘭、伊朗、越南、印度等國家建立了多個汽車工廠。然而，就在金宇中的汽車之夢全面展開，但遠未産生利潤之時， 亞洲金融危機爆發了，此時，為了給他的全球擴張行動提供資金，金宇中已借貸 200 億美元，大宇的債務危機全面爆發。“我想在 5 年內做到通常需要 10 到 15 年辦到的事情，” 金宇中說，“這是我的錯誤，爲了獲得規模效益，我們在沒有市場的地方投資，然後我們不得不想辦法賣掉這些汽車。”

　　在政府的壓力下，大宇推出了一系列收縮計劃，出售從造船到酒店的多項業務。但金宇中在汽車業務上則加倍下注，不僅接管雙龍汽車和三星汽車，而且繼續推進其成爲國際汽車巨頭的計劃。1999年初，大宇的規模超過三星躍居韓國第二，但其債務總額也在金融危機爆發後從300億美元迅速膨脹到600億美元，負債率達335%。

　　此時的金宇中身陷全球計劃中，已經無法抽身。“不能出售資産，因爲我們的大多數資産都在海外，”他說，“那些大的資産都是和外國政府的合資企業，所以我們不能說走就走。”

　　大多數韓國人不相信政府會讓規模如此巨大的大宇倒閉。在韓國，工會的勢力龐大，大宇破産造成的失業會對政府造成極大壓力。而且金宇中與歷屆執政的政府高層領導都能夠保持良好的關係，他還出資贊助過金大中的總統競選，兩人關係非常密切。當人們都認爲金宇中這一次能夠再度獲得政府的幫助渡過難關時，政府，這個曾經支援他的強大後盾，截斷了他的融資通路。

　　1998年，大宇的主貸款銀行——國有的韓國發展銀行(KDB)拒絕進一步追加貸款。大宇只得 靠大量發行高息債券和商業票據的方法融到135億美元的短期債務資金，隨後韓國政府又禁止這種大量發行“借條”的做法。1999年，金宇中用他的個人財 産進行抵押融資時，政府金融監管委員會公開警告全體國民注意防止可能存在的犯罪行為，大宇發行的債券也被列爲後保債券。金宇中拯救大宇的努力徹底失敗了。

　　1999年8月，大宇宣告倒閉，韓國政府接管大宇。大宇集團破産案也被認為是迄今爲止世界最大的破産案，大批職員丟掉了工作，37萬名大宇的股東也損失慘重，股票市值僅爲其高峰時的1/10。

　　最渴望恢復名譽

　　1989年，正是風光無限的時候，金宇中出版了一本名為《廣闊天地 大有作為》的自傳，在書中，類似“榮譽的喪失意味著社會生命的死亡”的格言警句隨處可見，然而，誰也沒有想到，10年之後，金宇中選擇了一種不名譽的方式離開——逃亡。

　　1999年10月，金宇中到中國煙台出席3家汽車配件廠的開業典禮後，沒有回韓國，而是去了日本東京，開始他的逃亡生活。1999年11月，他給全體員工寫了一封情真意切的告別信，說大宇的問題讓他“全身疼痛”，他在“用一種不可接受的方式”處理這場危機。

　　金宇中出走後，人們斥責他是騙子、是小偷。2001年，金宇中在海外逃亡期間，韓國高等檢察院起訴大宇集團的7名高管會計欺詐420億美元、非法從銀行貸款100億美元、違反外匯管理法向海外轉移資金240億美元等，缺席的金宇中雖然沒有被起訴，卻被認定爲主犯。

　　金宇中成了一名逃犯，這讓他極度鬱悶，2003年，金宇中接受採訪時聲稱，他離開韓國不是因為要逃避起訴，而是應政府高官的要求。他說，當時的總統金大中和高級官員們勸他不要債務重組，承諾他不會因大宇倒閉而受到指控，並且還可以回來重新執掌汽車公司。“總統先生直接通過電話跟我說的。”金宇中說。

　　這番表白在韓國掀起了軒然大波，主要由保守派控制的韓國主流報紙紛紛指責金大中政府在大宇破産案中進行了內幕操作。金大中沒有對此做任何表態，在2003年2月總統任期結束前的一段時間裏，金大中自己也深受助手和兩個兒子醜聞的困擾。

　　在大宇破産後所做的有關調查中，金宇中的親信都堅持認為，金宇中之所以突然出走，是受到來自當時政府方面的壓力。他們甚至提出了當時青瓦台總統府秘書室長金重權和總統府經濟首席秘書李起浩等具體人名。

　　在韓國經濟日報近期出版的一本新書——《金宇中背後的故事》中，作者甚至提出了一個 聳人聽聞的“陰謀論”——由於大宇曾在80年代同伊朗、90年代同伊拉克、利比亞有大量生意往來，這些都是令美國頭疼的國家，因此在金融危機中，美國通過國際貨幣基金組織和韓國政府扼殺本身已經十分虛弱的大宇。

　　總而言之，在金宇中逃亡的過程中，政府扮演了怎樣的角色尚不得而知，但卻頗值玩味。

　　從某種角度來看，金宇中的逃亡生活相當得愜意。他先是住進了德國的一家醫院接受心臟病治療和胃癌手術的後遺症治療。2000年末，他攜夫人遊歷了西班牙和義大利，在2001年初，他作為蘇丹總統奧馬爾的客人在蘇丹住了半年。儘管韓國政府聲稱要求國際刑警組織協助追捕金宇中，國際刑警組織也自稱發佈過國際通緝令，但似乎並沒有人認真執行，金宇中仍然自由地使用著他的韓國護照在歐亞之間往來。在越南，他還是享受著“國賓級”的待遇。

　　然而，對金宇中來說，這樣閒適的生活遠不是什麽享受。即使在以工作狂衆多而聞名的韓國人中，金宇中仍可算得上是工作狂裏的超級工作狂。一種廣泛流傳的說法是：在開始逃亡生活之前的30多年裏，金宇中總共只休息過兩天——一天是參加女兒的婚禮，另一天則是參加兒子的葬禮。1992年，一位小說家曾隨同金宇中做了一次跨越三大洲的商務旅行，“爲節省時間，金宇中壓縮飛行計劃。我們在亞洲入睡，醒來時已經飛到了歐洲。在歐洲入睡，醒來時已經到了非洲。那次旅程中，我在地上睡覺的天數還沒有在飛機上多。”

　　忽然間，金宇中有了大把大把無所事事的時間，這讓他覺得無所適從。夢想的破滅、名譽的喪失更讓他覺得悲痛，在長達一年的時間裏，金宇中切斷跟韓國的所有聯繫，不看報紙，甚至不跟留在漢城經營房地産生意的妻子聯絡。“我想忘掉一切。”他說。但很明顯，他無法做到。為此，他夜不能眠，在那些失眠的夜晚，他總是趴在他那台索尼筆記本旁玩圍棋遊戲。“我最想要的就是我的名譽。”他說。

　　判刑？特赦？

　　對於金宇中，恢復名譽的唯一途徑就是回到韓國並獲得特赦。

　　6月14日回國後，金宇中馬上被韓國檢察機關帶走詢問，調查重點是會計欺詐、詐騙貸款以及向海外轉移資金。

　　大宇的會計欺詐主要通過在集團內公司之間的資産交易偽造盈利數字。例如，在 1998年韓國深陷於戰後最嚴重金融危機時，大宇貿易、大宇重工和大宇電子公佈的合計年度淨利潤爲2.72億美元。但這三家公司有27億美元的收益是來自 於集團內部的資産交易，韓國政府的律師說，這些資産的實際價值要遠低得多，如果去掉這些通過內部資産交易炮製出來的利潤，這3家公司當年合計實際虧損24 億美元。

　　此外，大宇還採用一些拙劣的手段掩蓋損失。大宇在烏克蘭投資2億美元興建汽車廠， 卻無法為這家工廠提供運營所需的配件，遭到烏克蘭政府的抱怨。大宇秘密地將韓國生産的汽車運到烏克蘭邊境，拆解後再送到廠裏重新裝配。通過這種虛假生産號稱取得了銷售收入和利潤，並以此非法獲取貸款。

　　檢察官們還指控金宇中通過設在倫敦的名爲“英國金融中心”(BFC)的殼公司轉移資金。審計師表示，19年中進出該公司賬戶的總額爲200億美元。一些分析人士稱，至少其中的一部分是由金宇中個人掌握的賄賂基金，用來向全球各地的政府官員、客戶公司和銀行的高管行賄。一位前大宇高管曾向美國《商業周刊》說：“金主席扛著成捆的鈔票到世界各地的新興市場爲大宇的專案遊說。”

　　當然，更令韓國公衆關注的則是金宇中在韓國國內的賄賂行爲。金宇中曾以2億美金賄賂 1988年至1993年在位的韓國總統盧泰愚，後者總計6.5億美元的鉅額政治賄賂醜聞最終敗露。1995年，金宇中和其他8位商業領袖被判犯有行賄罪。 1996年，通過上訴，他和幾位CEO最終被判無罪，法院認定企業領導人爲了公司利益而採取的行爲不應由他們個人承擔責任。有傳聞說，在挽救大宇的過程 中，金宇中也曾花費鉅額資金“遊說”政客。

　　據韓國聯合通訊社的報導，目前，金宇中已經基本承認上述指控，但否認轉移外匯用於私人目的。

　　對於金宇中未來的命運，韓國國內兩派意見針鋒相對。

　　金宇中回國當天，大批支持者和反對者趕到機場。幾個民間團體和部分大宇的前員工到機場抗議示威，要求起訴金宇中，不准特赦。示威者幾度和警察爆發衝突，機場一片混亂，場面相當火爆。反對者認為，金宇中應當為全球規模最大、給韓國國民造成 重大損失的大宇破産案負主要責任，入獄服刑。

　　儘管已經逃亡多年，金宇中在韓國國內的人氣指數並不低。今年5月，韓國MBC電視臺做了一項關於“誰是經濟領域首屈一指的英雄”的網上調查，金宇中的排名是第四位。金宇中的支持者認爲，金宇中和大宇曾為韓國經濟起飛做出過重要貢獻，應免於起訴。很多金宇中的支持者仍將政府1998年掐斷大宇銀行資金來源視爲大宇破産的主因。

　　韓國政府經常在重要的公共假日特赦罪犯，比如，今年5月15日的佛誕日，韓國總統盧武鉉就特赦了31名犯有受賄、財務欺詐以及涉嫌2002屆總統競選“黑金醜聞”的商人。金宇中的妻子及其支持者們也希望，金宇中能在8月15日韓國解放日這天得到赦免。

　　對於金宇中，盧武鉉總統確實懷有同情之心。他將金宇中的處境概括爲：在巨大的成功和失敗的岔路上，曾獲大成功的人遭遇逆境而最終落魄。但是，盧武鉉否認在金宇中回國之前進行過秘密接觸，同時暗示相應的司法處理必須進行。

　　無論是判刑還是特赦，與剛剛完成了對著名CEO審判的美、俄相比，韓國對商業人士的態度要友善得多。前期，美國紐約法院宣判世界通信公司的前CEO埃博斯25年徒刑，俄羅斯則判處尤科斯公司前總裁霍多爾科夫斯基9年監禁。而2003年6 月，韓國最大的煉油商、著名財閥之一SK集團的董事長、前總統盧泰愚的女婿崔泰源因會計欺詐被判3年監禁，但只在監獄裏呆了3個月就出來了，並繼續擔任 SK集團的董事長。今年6月初，漢城上訴法庭維持了對崔泰源的有罪原判，但撤銷了他的3年監禁，稱他在改善公司治理方面起了關鍵作用。

　　一位參與此次大宇案調查的證券律師李先生預測說：“幾乎可以肯定，金宇中將被判得很重，但考慮到他的健康狀況，他可能未必會到監獄中服刑。”
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後記:
　　2006年5月30日, 韓國首爾中央地方法院以財務詐欺及挪用公款, 判處前大宇集團會長金宇中10年監禁, 並責令他賠償21.4兆韓圜, 並處以1,000萬韓圜的罰款. 但因個人健康因素而暫緩執行. 11月3日首爾高等法院駁回金宇中的上訴, 判處他八年六個月的徒刑, 罰金1,000萬韓圜及追繳17.9兆韓圜的資產. 之後獲總統盧武鉉特赦.

　　2008年9月25日, 首爾地方法院判處金宇中18個月徒刑, 因企圖隱匿超過1,000億韓圜資產, 逃避數十億美元的罰款, 但考慮到他的健康因素緩刑兩年.

　　2011年1月7日, 金宇中出席大宇造船海洋與中國遼寧省丹東日林集團簽署合作備忘錄的典禮. 目前大宇造船海洋的最大股東是債權銀行--韓國產業銀行.