It was probably more "even a broken clock is right twice a day" than a principled stand. He was notoriously cheap. He avoided paying child support for a long time, short-changed Wozniak, etc. [1]
After working there for a bit the most amazing story I heard is that he would lease a new car every six months so that he wouldnt need to get a plate put on it so he could park in the handicap spot without getting ticketed.
1) How does not having a plate let you park in the handicapped space? The regulation is probably written such that you are required to have the handicapped plate or placard, and displaying no plate would be probable cause here.
2) Why not just have Apple reserve a parking space for the CEO or Steve Jobs outright? There's no regulations against reserving parking spaces in such a manner that I'm aware of.
3) Why is there so much worship in the tech industry of complete assholes like this?
I thought the handicapped spot story and the every-six-months-new-car-for-no-plates story were separate. Steve didn't want a license plate on his car because he thought it messed up the aesthetics. He was also a jerk and parked in the handicapped spot because he could.
They’ve always been separate stories to me too and I’ve heard the same “aesthetics” point a bunch too (which doesn’t make it “true”, but sounds plausible anyway).
I was always under the impression this was less about being cheap, but more about being really idiosyncratic about the way license plates look on cars.
Leasing a new car every 6 months is not cheap. It literally costs 6x as much as leasing the exact same car every 3 years (the industry norm).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10