Steve Jobs was furious over what he called Google’s “grand theft” of Apple ideas, and he didn’t mince words about it, the Huffington Post reports. “I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this,” he says in Walter Isaacson’s biography, discussing Apple’s patent lawsuit against HTC, which by extension fingered Android. "Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google you f---ing ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off," Jobs said. "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."
Some other fascinating revelations from Isaacson’s biography, courtesy of the Huffington Post:
- Jobs told Barack Obama he was "headed for a one-term presidency" at a fall 2010 meeting. Jobs was upset with, among other things, the "regulations and unnecessary costs" associated with building factories in the US. But he still offered to help design Obama’s 2012 ads.
- Jobs said Bill Gates was “basically unimaginative and has never invented anything” and instead “just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.” Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
Click for more revelations, including
one of Jobs' big regrets. (More
Steve Jobs stories.)