Steve Jobs’ Cryptic Final Words Revealed

Apple founder Steve Job’s deathbed remarks, revealed in sister Mona Simpson’s eulogy, are appropriately mysterious.

For all his fame and fortune, Steve Jobs held his cards close to his chest. He was a private person, rather than a fame-seeking party boy like many of his Silicon Valley peers. For both personal and occupational reasons, Jobs kept his secrets. Now that he’s dead, we’re learning more and more about the man who shaped our modern existence.

In addition to his opinion that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is “destructive,” we now know Jobs refused to give friend and early employee Daniel Kottke stock options when Apple first went public, found Bill Gates to be “unimaginative,” and, thanks to his sister, his final words.

In her eulogy for Jobs, published yesterday in the ‘New York Times,’ Mona Simpson reveals that Jobs, laying on his deathbed, uttered one phrase three times: “Oh wow.”

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Of course we’ll never know what Jobs was marveling at: was he reflecting on the life he was leaving, or remarking on what he saw ahead? Did the universe share its vast mysteries or did Jobs want one final secret for us to mull? Again, we’ll never know.

But we do know that Jobs, for all his cutthroat business skills and aloof ways, was a romantic at heart, deeply fascinated by love. “Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him,” said Mona in her eulogy.

“He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.”

As should we all.