It's an open family secret…

My cousin Joe made Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve jobs cry.

I've never told this story before.

The part of the story where Jobs burst into tears isn't in dispute. He admitted it himself.

It happened in 1982. He was a candidate for Time‘s Man of the Year at the time.

Or so he thought. It probably wasn't true. But there were persistent rumors that he was under serious consideration.

Time sent him an early copy of the magazine. Here's the cover. It wasn't him. The man of the year was a computer.

Jobs describes the moment this way…

“I remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this computer sculpture thing. I thought “Huh?” And then I read the article [about him], and it was so awful that I actually cried.”

Jobs blamed Michael Moritz. He was Time‘s correspondent in San Francisco and the one who interviewed Jobs and did the legwork for a feature article on him.

But Moritz didn't write it.

My cousin Joe did.

Years later Moritz wrote a book called Return to the Little Kingdom.

He accuses my cousin of doing a hatchet job.

I don't think Cousin Joe would agree with the “colorful” language Moritz used… “My material [was] siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with gossipy benzene by an editor in New York…”

That's my cousin he's complaining about.

But Joe admits he badly misjudged Steve Jobs. He told me a few years ago it's probably the worse miscalculation he's ever made.

He thought Jobs was a super salesman but not a visionary or product genius when it came to computers and connecting.

Boy, was my Cousin Joe wrong.

Next Apple Blockbuster

Under Jobs' leadership, Apple came out with one blockbuster game-changing product after another.

The business model demanded it.