How the CIA quietly kept Steve Jobs's NeXT alive — and seeded the iPhone

A Wall Street Journal report, drawn from Sharon Weinberger’s forthcoming book ‘Valley of Death,’ details how the CIA became a crucial early customer for NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs founded after being pushed out of Apple. The relationship began around 1986, when agency officials approached Jobs looking for serious computing power to support intelligence work — most notably the analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery. The CIA bought thousands of NeXT workstations fitted with classified custom graphics hardware, and reportedly wanted far more units than NeXT could build, with demand running into the tens of thousands per month against a production line turning out only a few hundred.

Those sales mattered because NeXT was a commercial failure by almost every other measure, never finding a mass market for its expensive machines. Government purchases provided real revenue during the company’s leanest years, buying Jobs both time and the runway to mature as a business leader rather than flame out entirely.

The significance is in what that survival enabled. NeXT lasted long enough for Apple to acquire it in late 1996, a deal that brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded and set up his return to the CEO seat. NeXT’s operating system, NeXTSTEP, became the technical foundation of modern macOS and, later, iOS — meaning the software lineage running today’s iPhones traces back to a company that an intelligence agency helped keep solvent.