Here are some pointed remarks in today's Journal about Steve Jobs' personality traits. The article raises the question of what would have happened to Mr. Jobs had he been born in Russia or China.
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Vladimir Ilyich Jobs?
By RICH KARLGAARD
May 3, 2005
The greatness of American democratic capitalism can be summed up in two words: Steve Jobs. The Apple CEO's gifts to the world -- from Macs to iPods -- have vastly improved our lives.
But there is, always has been, a dark side to his genius. Once again we see it. Angered out of scale by an unauthorized biography called "iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business," Mr. Jobs went nuclear last week. He banished iCon from Apple stores. You might say, fine, that is his prerogative. But is it wise? Apple's shareholders, not its CEO, own the stores. The harmless potboiler would've driven buyers to Apple stores. Mr. Jobs, alas, didn't stop with iCon. He also yanked from "his" stores all books from iCon's publisher, John Wiley & Sons. These include dozens of popular nerd books, such as "Macs for Dummies," written to help Apple's customers. The dummy here is Mr. Jobs.
Mr. Jobs's war on iCon follows another stupid public relations move born of, well, totalitarian impulse. In January, Apple sued three bloggers for publishing leaked information on Apple products. One is a young college student who began writing Mac devotionals at age 13.
For all this, America loves Steve Jobs. Me, too, though I shouldn't. Years ago, he phoned me on a Saturday morning and tried to squash a story my then-magazine, Upside, was about to print on NeXT, Inc. NeXT was his second startup after Apple. But it was failing and our story said so. On the phone Mr. Jobs cooed and threatened, including warnings to "watch my backside" and, strangely, "don't ride a bicycle alone on dark roads." We ran the story. Michael Moritz, before he was a venture capitalist funding Yahoo and Google, once covered Apple as a Time magazine reporter. Mr. Jobs repeatedly tried to get him fired. Dozens of journalists have stories like this.
I can easily forgive Mr. Jobs this because he changed my life for the better. The first Mac of 1984 was so easy to use, so cool; it got me, and millions, into computing. A few years later the Mac became the plank of a new industry -- desktop publishing. A pal and I figured we could start a magazine on the cheap with just two Macs and a laser printer. We did. That's why I'm in magazines today. Thank you, Steve.
That Mr. Jobs changed my life for the better is not an accident. The driving impulse of Steve Jobs is to change the world for the better. Upon his return to Apple in 1996, he deployed print ads and billboards to link Apple to revolutionary heroes who'd changed the world -- Mahatma Gandhi, César Chávez, Rosa Parks, and so on.
But like many revolutionaries, Mr. Jobs appears to be one who loves the world and loathes people. He has been known to bring misery to people's lives, and not just book authors. His capacity for cruelty runs the gamut from verbal lashings of his own customers to rumored summary dismissals for the sin of having brought him the wrong brand of bottled water. He denied the paternity of a daughter for years. In a book called "Infinite Loop," writer Michael S. Malone describes how, in the early 1970s, Mr. Jobs even screwed over his eventual Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. At the time, Mr. Jobs was a young freelance software writer for Atari but in over his head. He convinced his boyhood friend, the technically brilliant Woz, to help him write a game called Breakout. He told Woz they'd split $700. Woz, who had a job at Hewlett Packard, stayed up nights to write Breakout. He did all the work. His marriage suffered. Upon completion, Atari paid Mr. Jobs $7,000. Mr. Jobs took credit for writing the game and paid his friend Woz "half" -- $350. Years later Woz read about the rip-off in a book about Atari. He started crying.
The genius, idealism, charisma, salesmanship, obsession, paranoia and cruelty that come together in Steve Jobs and other great American icons such as Henry Ford and Howard Hughes also combine in history's worst tyrants. The cult of personality built around Lenin and Mao is not unlike the cult Macolytes have built around Mr. Jobs. One can only speculate what the two-sided genius potential of a baby Steve Jobs, dropped by a stork into Russia or China a hundred years ago, might have become. Deprived of a capitalistic playing field, where would his energies have gone? Toward the dark side is one guess.
Dropped by a stork into California in 1955, the boy Jobs grew up among fruit orchards and found himself in Silicon Valley, the heart of entrepreneurialism in democratic America. What amazing providence for him and for us! That is the true genius of America: It takes would-be Lenins, redeems them in the crucible of capitalism, and turns out Steve Jobs.
Mr. Karlgaard is publisher of Forbes magazine and author of "Life 2.0" (Crown Business, 2004).
Wow. Quite interesting. Thanks for the article.
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