- We get an insight into Steve Jobs
that I've never seen before.
Even in reading the biography of him, we see a side of him
that we didn't know.
You became, as you just said, really close friends with him
and he actually told you about the cancer.
That moment on the bench, describe
that moment on the bench.
We were announcing the acquisition of Pixar
from Pixar.
We had gone up to Pixar's headquarters
in Emeryville, California.
It was a $7.4 billion acquisition
and we would be announcing it at around 1 o'clock California
time, after the stock market closed.
And we were assembled in a conference room kind of waiting
for the announcement to be made and Steve showed up at the door
and pointing his finger at me or did sort of this and said,
can we go for a walk?
And I thought, oh, he wants to--
this can't be good.
He wants to get out of the deal or he wants more money
or he wants something.
I just thought, why would he want to go for a walk with me
on the brink of making this gigantic announcement?
And we went for a walk.
The Pixar campus is this beautiful campus
with beautiful walking paths and there was a bench
that the two of us sat down and he put
his arm behind me on the bench.
I thought, this is very interesting.
I wasn't close with him at this point.
I was getting close.
OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah.
And he said, I'm going to tell you something that only
my doctor and my wife knows.
Wow.
ROBERT IGER: And he had had cancer a few years earlier.
It was announced and he was operated on
and he had declared himself cured.
It was a form of pancreatic cancer that was operable,
and this was a few years after that.
And nothing had been said more about his illness
or about his medical condition because it
was assumed he was fine.
And so he said to me, I'm telling you
something only Laurene Jobs, his wife, and my doctor
knows and you can't tell anybody else.
I'm thinking, this has got to be momentous in some form.
Were you thinking then that the cancer had come back?
Well, when he said, "doctor"--
You thought--
ROBERT IGER: --I immediately thought something's bad here.
And he said, I need you to know my cancer has come back.
He gave me some details.
And I said, why are you telling me this?
And he said, I'm giving you a chance to get out of the deal.
I said, get out of the deal?
And I looked at my watch.
There was a clock ticking at this point
because we had announced the press conference
and we were going kind of live to the world
to tell everybody about this deal.
And I thought, my goodness, in less than an hour,
we have to tell everybody this and what am I going to do?
I had no idea what my responsibilities were.
He was becoming a member of the board
and our largest shareholder.
Even though we were buying Pixar,
we weren't buying Steve Jobs.
And I said, you need to tell me more.
And he told me that he had a 50/50 chance
of living for five years.
And I said, can you tell me more?
And he told me it had metastasized to his liver.
And I think I even asked, give me some more perspective.
And he said, my son is in high school.
He's going to graduate in four years.
I'm going to be at his graduation.
His son, Reed.
I thought, wow, there's something very
powerful in that statement.
That he's so determined to live and it
was very meaningful to me.
And it came so from deep within him
and I could tell he was emotional about it.
And I said, look, I have no idea what my legal responsibilities
are here.
You have my word I won't tell people.
I don't really know what the right thing to do here
is from a corporate perspective but my sense is that we
should go through with this. I'm not going to back out.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
And--
It said a lot about him and about you.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting I haven't really thought much
about what it said about me other than maybe I just--
it didn't--
you know, it was a difficult moment
because even though I wasn't that attached
to him at that point, this guy was telling me
that he was very ill. - Yeah.
ROBERT IGER: It couldn't be good.
That he was dying.
And he was talking about his kids
and I felt terrible for him, so I had that going on.
But I wasn't that concerned about the,
I'll call it the corporate side.
That was early 2006 and he died in October of 2011.
So he made the graduation?
He made the graduation.
He made that and a lot more.
What he did in that period of time, in terms of his life
and at Apple, is just extraordinary.
And the heroism that he exhibited
in that period of time with such incredible pain.
And then I love this moment when Laurene Jobs says to you,
she tells you about the moment Steve tells her--
Yeah.
--that he has told you.
And she says, can we trust him?
And Steve Jobs says about you, I love that guy.
Yes, she told me that at the cemetery.
OPRAH WINFREY: Mm-hmm.