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| Steve Jobs |
Few people knew Steve Jobs better than Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The two were friends for more than two decades and lived next door to each other for a time. Now, Ellison is opening up about the Apple cofounder's final days battling pancreatic cancer.
"We'd always go for walks, and the walks just kept getting shorter," Ellison told Charlie Rose in a CBS This Morning interview that aired Tuesday. "Until near the end we'd kind of walk around the block or maybe — maybe four blocks, something like that. And you just watched him getting weaker."
Ellison says that Jobs' loss of strength was all the more striking given his gung-ho personality. "This was absolutely the strongest, most willful person I have ever met, and after seven years, the cancer even wore him out ... He was just tired of fighting, tired of the pain."
Ellison revealed that Jobs eventually decided to stop his cancer treatment, a move that "shocked" those close to Jobs. A few days later, on Oct. 5, 2011, Jobs passed away.
"He decided — shocked Lorraine [Powell Jobs, his wife], shocked everybody — that the medication was gonna stop," Ellison recalled. "He just pulled off the meds — I think on a Saturday or a Sunday. And by the following Wednesday he was gone."
In a particularly moving moment, Ellison described his eulogy for Jobs. "My eulogy began, you know, I guess we're all told that no one's irreplaceable. I don't believe that. I just don't," he said.
At another point in the interview, Ellison proclaimed that Jobs was this era's equivalent of Pablo Picasso and Thomas Edison, and suggested that Apple is in trouble now that he is no longer around to lead the company.
Do you agree with Ellison and think that Apple is doomed without Jobs? Share with us in the comments below.
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