spend a little bit of time in SF or the peninsula and you’ll see that’s a common thing there
unless you’re running a company into the ground and getting a bailout from your rival who is trying to delay an antitrust suit, then you’re not doing Steve Jobs correctly
It's usually people who never worked for Steve or ever got to meet him who seem to take this approach.
Their company isn't just a business, it's a cult, and they're the Founder (notice the capital "F") and part of being in charge of this cult is asserting dominance over others. Steve knew to rarely pull this outside of tech executive circles; the new generation doesn't seem to keep it in SV. Musk is the go-to example but Altman's turning that way too.
Steve Jobs was a superficial asshole but was fundamentally a good and ethical person. There's only one major ethical mistake documented in his entire life (being an absentee father while his first daughter was young), which he spent decades making amends for.
The people that emulate Steve Jobs poorly are usually real assholes with a long list of ethical mistakes.
Steve Jobs gave Woz half of the base amount, which is what Woz agreed to. Jobs withheld the fact that he was going to receive a bonus on top of the base amount, and did not share any of that money.
Was it an ethical mistake? Sure. He should have at least disclosed that he was receiving the bonus money, even if he didn't want to share it.
But claiming it was a "major ethical mistake" seems fairly out of touch with reality.
And of course, taken in the context of all of the good things they did together, it was completely insignificant and Woz has said as much.
As a rule, Apple gave stock to employees prior to the IPO, many of whom got rich. But some employees weren't eligible according to the criteria Steve (really, the board) came up with, and so they did not receive stock. Their criteria were typical for the time.
Woz and a few others felt bad about this and shared some of their stock.
Whether those ineligible people "deserved" stock is a matter of judgement...
IIRC Jobs also later blamed Wozniak's head injury from a plane crash for him not remembering several good things Jobs did for him, as a cover for those things never happening.
The fools are the people who express more hatred for Steve Jobs than cigarette, oil, and pharma CEOs that irreparably injury and kill millions of humans simple because of his obnoxious methods of demanding the best from his highly privileged teammates.
Tensions run high in these situations, and in the end they were just building personal computers. So yes, I can understand a boss who's always yelling that the product is shit and demanding that people fix it, but is also an ok person.
If there's a comic book villain tech leader out there, it's a CEO of some lifeless conglomerate that mainly buys out the competition and fires everyone aboard, or it's someone in charge of society-altering tech who is choosing to misuse it. And I'm not going to name names.
By all accounts, he was an incredible bully not just to his employees but also to his family as well.
He refused to recognize his daughter even after a paternity test, and despite being a multi millionaire 1000 times over only paid child support when forced to by the courts.
Does that sound like the behavior of a good and ethical person?
Shhhhh, he's the patron saint of the tech world, and you're on HN -- do you really expect a large percentage of folks here to share your views?
FWIW, I think he did understand some very fundamental truths about how to sell technology to the masses, but he definitely diverged from Alan Kay's philosophy outlined in "Dynabook".
IMO, he's less of a "savior" and more of a "god-tier salesperson".
Edit: I mentioned the "Dynabook", because Jobs often used the "bicycle for the mind" line, in interviews and newspaper ads.
In fact, the average person in Silicon Valley is as clueless as you are about Steve Jobs and would agree he was merely a good salesperson.
But people that know what it takes to build great products almost universally respect his world-class design and leadership, and even his deep technical knowledge.
I agree, that and the "no cold call" agreement (which equally involved other CEOs). If I were that famous, someone would probably pick out all my missteps and make me out to look like a horrible person too.
The most iconic superficial Steve Jobs impersonation was the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
