A giant spaceship has landed in Cupertino. This summer, 12,000 Apple employees will start to move into this great disc of a building, which has been eight years coming and is said to have cost $5bn — making it the world’s most expensive office.
Apple Park is Steve Jobs’s last, posthumous hurrah; as a vanity project it is roughly on a par with Nicolae Ceausescu’s People’s Palace in Bucharest. Jobs managed the spec as the control freak he was, insisting on irreproachable door furniture and stone from a Kansas quarry that was distressed to make it look like the walls of a Yosemite hotel he was fond of. The obsessiveness and the grandiosity make the marble that Jacques Attali once ordered when he was head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development look slipshod.
If I were an Apple shareholder, I would not be happy. Overdoing it on the decor of the HQ is a sure sign that calamity is on its way. It did not end well for Ceausescu’s Romania, nor for Mr Attali’s EBRD.