“Never ask what I would do,” said Steve Jobs on his deathbed. “Just do the right thing.”

Interesting quote, right? Here’s Jobs, whose visionary business and design principles turned Apple, on the brink of bankruptcy in 1996, into one of the most profitable, influential, admired, and scrutinized companies in history — and his advice to Tim Cook, his successor as CEO, was to find his own path.

Yet now, 15 years after Jobs’s death, Tim Cook says Apple is still Steve’s company. “His DNA is deep in this company, and we revere him,” he told me. “He had such great vision and such great principles that, all this time later, still serve as the guide rails for a company like Apple.”

Indeed, Jobs’s obsessions are still central principles at Apple: simplicity, elegant design, making the whole widget, a focus on very few products, closed systems, and, of course, secrecy.

Apparently, it all works. Today, 2.5 billion people carry Apple products — 31 percent of the global population. Apple is a $4 trillion dollar company and a pillar of the U.S. economy. Pretty much anyone with a 401(k) is a shareholder. It has also managed to permanently differentiate itself from all other hardware and software makers. In a world rife with high-speed imitation, most people strongly believe — now many years after they were introduced — that iPhones, Macs, iPads, and their accessories are simply better than the competition’s.

Understanding how Apple got here requires understanding Steve Jobs. But that, it turns out, is extremely difficult. You can read a 600-page book about Jobs and still feel like you don’t know him.

I knew Jobs only casually. I was granted 15-minute meetings with him twice a year when I was the New York Times tech columnist. But those were short, highly controlled visits.

I was hoping that maybe, in the course of interviewing 150 people for my book Apple: The First 50 Years, I could come closer to figuring out who Jobs really was — or at least why it’s so hard to nail him down. Now, exactly half a century after Apple’s founding on April 1, 1976, it seems like a good time to attempt some progress on the question. My reporting both shed new light on Jobs as a person and deepened, for me at least, the mystery around him.

The most famous facet of Jobs’s personality, of course — the one highlighted most prominently in books and movies — is his vicious streak. “This is a piece of shit,” he’d shout at an engineer or designer. “You suck! Get the fuck out of the room!”

Young Jobs was rarely generous with credit, either. “You’ve heard this standard joke, the evolution of an idea?” says Macintosh programmer Steve Capps. “The first time you show him something: ‘That sucks! What an idiot you are!’ The second time, it’s like, ‘Oh, keep working on it.’ Third time: ‘Hey, did you see what I came up with?’”

Some people quit. Some have PTSD to this day. Original Macintosh software engineer Andy Hertzfeld saw these rants as simple cruelty. “The meanness was more of a bug than a feature,” he told me.

(Jobs could be equally unfiltered with journalists. In 2007, I panned iMovie ’08, Apple’s video-editing program, which had been stripped of features to its barest bones. Jobs, livid, called me at home. “You don’t know what the fuck we do here at Apple, do you?” he railed. “We have data!” It showed, evidently, that few customers were adding cross-fades, titles, and music to their iMovie creations. “They just want to whip together some clips and post them on YouTube,” he said.)

Other former colleagues maintain that Jobs’s tirades were a means to an end. The idea was to spur his teams to improve their work in ways they hadn’t originally thought possible. Undeniably, it often worked.

“Having been in Silicon Valley for 50 years, I’m an expert in assholes, okay?” says Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s early developer evangelist. “And 99.9 percent of assholes are egocentric assholes. But Steve is one of the very rare mission-driven assholes. He was driven by a mission to make the greatest computer by the greatest company. And if you got in the way of that, he would run you over. He would run you over, back up, and run you over again.”

But most of these episodes involved Steve 1.0: the raw young man who founded Apple at age 21 with no management experience. In 1985, following a boardroom showdown with CEO John Sculley, he left the company for 11 years. He founded NeXT, bought Pixar, and started a family.

The man who returned to Apple in 1997, whom friends call Steve 2.0, tended to be mellower. His one-year turnaround plan was ruthless — he replaced the entire board, fired all 12 ad agencies, canceled all but four of the 50 Macintosh models Apple was selling — but there were fresh signs of empathy. When he canceled the Newton, the ambitious handheld computer whose handwriting recognition had, after four years, finally become usable, a small army of “Save the Newton” protesters assembled, chanting, in the parking lot below Jobs’s office. Jobs looked out his window at them. “They have every right to be upset,” he told marketing chief Phil Schiller. “Get them coffee and doughnuts, and send it down to them. Tell them we love them and we’re sorry.”

In one sense, then, assessing Jobs depends partly on when you knew him.But both incarnations of Steve Jobs exhibited his famous “reality-distortion field,” a term Macintosh engineer Bud Tribble borrowed from the Star Trek episode “The Menagerie.” It was Jobs’s charisma turned up to 11, powered by an insane degree of conviction that could convince almost anyone of any argument — even if they were aware that he was casting his spell.

In 1984, for example, Apple was about to unveil its revolutionary Macintosh computer. After months of all-nighters, the 15 young Mac engineers were fried to a crisp. But only a week before the deadline for the Mac’s software, it was still crashing, still riddled with bugs. The team begged Jobs for another couple of weeks. Maybe, they suggested, the first Macs could come with temporary software and they could FedEx disks to the dealerships later.“No way,” Jobs said. He insisted they could pull it off. “I’m going to ship the code a week from Monday with your names on it!” Somehow, the engineers were inspired to return to their desks for six more days, fueled by coffee, caffeinated soda, and chocolate-covered espresso beans. They finished the software on time.

Jobs used the same powers of persuasion in 1998 to convince the public that we really didn’t need floppy drives or printer ports on the new iMac. And in 2001, when he convinced his own engineers that they could develop, manufacture, and ship the first iPod in ten months.

And in 2007, after having already announced the iPhone: After noticing scratches on its prototype’s plastic screen, Jobs decided to replace it with glass. He persuaded Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning, to resurrect a decades-old tough-glass formula, repurpose a factory, and produce millions of iPhone screens — in six months. “Get your mind around it. You can do it,” Jobs said. Corning did.

People who knew Jobs well describe even more facets of this already complicated man. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in fact, describes a third Jobs. “You hear about a Steve Jobs 1, vicious, and Steve Jobs 2, a little milder. But there was Steve Jobs 0 before that, for the five years before Apple. That’s the Steve Jobs I loved so much,” he says. “We drove all over, seeking Dylan memorabilia, going to concerts. I mean, we were just like normal kinda friends, playing pranks on each other — totally normal kids.”

Woz’s description recognizes a key quality that’s often missing from the popular conception of Jobs: He was funny. Just ask former Apple board member Al Gore, whom Jobs once mooned during rehearsal for a keynote. Or ask anyone who saw Jobs unveil the iPhone 4 onstage soon after Gizmodo, amid much controversy, had posted photos of a misplaced prototype. “Stop me if you’ve already seen this,” he deadpanned.

No executive, before or since, has incorporated comedy so memorably into product presentations. When, in 2002, Jobs wanted to cajole an auditorium full of software companies to rewrite their programs for Apple’s new Mac OS X operating system, he staged a full onstage funeral for the outgoing Mac OS 9, complete with a live organist, a eulogy he read himself, and a casket occupied by a four-foot–tall Mac OS 9 box.

Behind the scenes, he exhibited a goofy, mischievous streak. In 1982, for example, as the Macintosh was in development, Jobs became giddy about planting a cartoon surprise in the system software.

“Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh,” Jobs told his engineers. “One out of every thousand or two thousand times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you’ll get Mr. Macintosh leaning against the wall of the menu. He’ll wave at you and then quickly disappear. You’ll try to get him to come back, but you won’t be able to!”

And when the one millionth iMac was about to roll off the assembly line, Jobs wanted to hide a golden ticket inside the box, as in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Whoever found the ticket would get the iMac for free and win a trip to Cupertino. Jobs himself, wearing a top hat and tails like Willie Wonka, would give the winner a tour. (In the end, the lawyers killed the idea; in California, the law for sweepstakes is “no purchase necessary.”)

The most moving stories, though — ones I’d never encountered before — involved the depths of his kindness. I know, right? Kindness? This billionaire who gave nothing to charity? The guy with the mean streak?

But one interview subject after another told me stories of quiet acts of compassion: how he visited engineer Bill Atkinson in the hospital daily after a car accident. How he paid for a nanny for his overwhelmed Macintosh marketing chief. How, unbidden, he gave Pixar’s John Lasseter a bonus to replace his dangerously rickety Honda Civic.

Jobs had a particular soft spot for people with tough illnesses. In 2004, a horrific rare virus sent iPhone software chief Scott Forstall to the hospital. He was throwing up every 15 minutes; within two weeks, he’d lost 30 pounds. Doctors plied him with anti-nausea treatments, but nothing worked. “For weeks, I wanted to die,” Forstall told me.

Deeply affected, Jobs called Forstall every day, sometimes multiple times. He sent over the world’s finest juicing machine with baskets of fresh fruit. “Sometimes he was exhausting,” Forstall says. “But he was just so, so caring.”Finally, one night, Jobs told Forstall he planned to come by the hospital after hours with the world’s best acupuncturist. “She’s going to fix you,” he said.

Forstall thought acupuncture was junk science, but he was out of options.That night, Jobs sneaked into Forstall’s room with the acupuncturist. The treatments lasted until sunrise — and for the first time in more than two months, Forstall no longer felt nauseated. After a second session, he felt well enough to drive home. “I was 100 percent dying,” he said, “and Steve brought this person to me and saved my life.”

Jobs always seemed to see the future, to predict exactly what people would want. The iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone each seemed risky for its time. (A translucent, egg-shaped computer? A phone with no physical keyboard?) Each one was a wild success, exactly as Jobs had foreseen.

In truth, though, he wasn’t as confident as he seemed. He had crippling stage fright, for example, rarely slept the night before a keynote, and had a personal porta-potty installed just offstage, which he used after each appearance.

In private contexts, he could exhibit astonishing fragility. Del Yocam, Apple’s COO in the late ’80s, remembers a corporate offsite meeting at the Carmel Valley Country Club. After hours, Jobs invited a couple of his lieutenants to join him in his hotel room.

“He just started in talking about everything: The garage [where the Apple I was assembled], the trip to India [he’d taken when he was 19],” says Yocam. “It was around midnight and I wanted to get out of there, but he got very emotional and upset. And so I went and sat on the bed next to him and put my arm around him. And he just lost it and, you know, put his hand on my neck. I waited until he finally went to sleep before I left. Steve was very emotional. He had a lot of internal demons.”

Where did those demons come from? The usual theory: Because Jobs was adopted as a baby, he harbored a deep, lifelong sense of betrayal and abandonment.

That premise may be convenient, but Jobs called it a load of bull. “That’s ridiculous,” he told biographer Walter Isaacson. “I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.” Nothing about Jobs was simple or convenient, not even his origin story.

“A Man of Contradictions”

So what was Jobs like? After years of reporting on him, I can understand why he seems so elusive. He was a mysterious person, and learning more about him tends only to deepen the questions.

His character changed from from era to era, sometimes from hour to hour. “I always thought he was bipolar,” Sculley says, “because I would have been with him, let’s say, at 8:30 in the morning,” at which point everything was fine. “And then I get a call from his assistant an hour and a half later, and she’d say, ‘Get over here right away. Steve’s having a tantrum!’”

If you encountered Jobs in only one context, you were like one of the blind men in the parable of the elephant. You’d have to have known him for years to see the whole man, and even then you might get a picture that felt fractured or incomplete.

“He was a man of contradictions,” Hertzfeld says. “Almost any adjective you could think of could apply to him at different times.”

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