> Powell Jobs and Jobs' sister have said in a statement that the book "differs dramatically from our memories of those times."
I've learned from experience that people who aggressively denounce others publicly sometimes have stuff going on that isn't readily visible.
It's not that I want Jobs to be free of moral stain. I have no investment in it. But people should be cautious trusting a report of one person's disputed report.
Jobs was a raging asshole and misanthropist famous for treating his coworkers and employees like shit -- luckally he was able to deliver, and everyone forgets that shitty behavior.
it's not crazy to think he was like at that home, too.
I worked with some of them and have one as a friend on FB (we're all dying off). I was too young to get in on early Apple for a firsthand account. S.Jobs was universally known as a rageaholic, among his other qualities. This is portrayed well enough in much of the infotainment media produced about him.
There's no question in my mind that having kids gets in the way of single-minded vision that's required of the kind of career success that Jobs had.
It's unfortunate, but the reality is that having kids and actually caring for them in a way that gives the best chance to turn them into good, undamaged human beings requires a massive amount of attention that would heavily distract from lofty career goals.
If the drive for career success is strong enough, kids will be resented and treated as such. It sucks, and they probably shouldn't have had kids in the first place, but the biological imperative is incredibly difficult to overcome.
Being absent for work is different than being cruel.
As a counterpoint I would highlight Buffet, Branson, and others who have managed to fulfill their obligations to the next generation without failing to dominate their industries.
There is no excuse for cruelty to children, doubly so when they are your own. Jobs was an asshole because he was an asshole, not because he was driven.
Have you read the article? He didn't just ignore her. He combined periods where he ignored her with periods of caring only to hurt her in dark ways.
> Once, she says, as Jobs groped his wife and pretended to be having sex with her, he demanded that Brennan-Jobs stay in the room, calling it a "family moment." He repeatedly withheld money from her, told her that she would get "nothing" from his wealth — and even refused to install heat in her bedroom.
It's all very nuanced, but to put it overly bluntly: career-orientation is about power and control and self image. My understanding is that it's all mental illness related behavior.
Happy to be disagreed with, it's just my experience of the world.
> There's no question in my mind that having kids gets in the way of single-minded vision that's required of the kind of career success that Jobs had.
It's a common misconception because so many psychopaths become examples of "successful businessmen" but they're not successful PEOPLE. Steve's arrogance literally killed him, his insistence he knew better than everyone made him ignore his cancer until it was too late.
No one should try to be the next Steve Jobs. Be better than he was, better to your family, better to your employees, better to your friends. There's no one Steve didn't try to screw at some point. That's not success.
When Jobs was alive I could still play YouTube videos with my screen locked, I could listen to music with a set of conventional headphones, and iOS did not yet suffer from the storage bug.
> When Jobs was alive I could still play YouTube videos with my screen locked
I still can today. It's background mode, part of Youtube Premium.
> I could listen to music with a set of conventional headphones
You can still do that, too. USB-C to headphone adapters are easy to use and cheap. Lots of folks complain about the lack of headphone jacks, but if you have a cable from your headphones, 4 more inches for the adapter at the end is not a problem.
> and iOS did not yet suffer from the storage bug.
No but when he was alive it had lots of other bugs.
And Steve was still not a great person. So for all these allowances, we can't rewrite history.
> I still can today. It's background mode, part of Youtube Premium.
If you’re trying to make the case that things are just as good under Tim Cook as they were under Jobs, paywalling commonly-used features behind a monthly subscription is not an argument in your favor.
> You can still do that, too. USB-C to headphone adapters are easy to use and cheap.
Using an adapter means I can’t charge the device while I’m using headphones. It’s also pointlessly cumbersome.
> If you’re trying to make the case that things are just as good under Tim Cook as they were under Jobs,
I never made such an argument.
> paywalling commonly-used features behind a monthly subscription is not an argument in your favor.
Blame Paypal, not Apple. Apple's to blame for plenty anyway.
> Using an adapter means I can’t charge the device while I’m using headphones. It’s also pointlessly cumbersome.
It's not cumbersome AT ALL if you're already carrying headphones. Many phones charge wirelessly so you CAN charge them while using a USB-C headphone adapter.
> It's not cumbersome AT ALL if you're already carrying headphones. Many phones charge wirelessly so you CAN charge them while using a USB-C headphone adapter.
I am never willfully obtuse. It's an asshole move.
In this case I GENUINELY do not see how it's cumbersome at all. I've done it. I used cell phones before they used the standard headphone jack, and tended to use the smaller trrs with a Y adapter to breakout mic from output, even that didn't bother me, I left it attached to the headset I sued with those devices. I find the wired part the most cumbersome, so the addition of 3 inches of cable for the adapter never made even the tiniest difference to me. I moved to Bluetooth very early.
It's 3 inches, 5 grams of weight, and it stays attached to the end of the headphone cord. It's a joke to say carrying this along with a wired headphone/earphone is cumbersome.
I'm in no way attempting to do that. I live my life in the opposite manner, I have two great kids (that are my lifetime greatest achievement) and a "career" that pays the bills that I could totally take or leave (pending the ability to pay the bills).
it seems quaint to dunk on Jobs now...he seems like a saint in comparison, in light of Mao Zedong-style mass-murder-by-policy from the current crop of tech industry CEOs.
> Musk has pushed back against guardrails for Grok [...] Musk has “been unhappy about over-censoring” on Grok “for a long time.” [...] At one meeting in recent weeks before the latest controversy erupted, Musk held a meeting with xAI staffers from various teams where he “was really unhappy” over restrictions on Grok’s Imagine image and video generator
...how are the shareholders not in revolt over this?
The stock seems completely disconnected from the antics of Musk. I would think that having a CEO who is clearly a heavy ketamine user and spends more time playing politician than actually running the company would have a negative impact on the stock, but tesla's stock has been divorced from reality for a long time.
having the power to destroy a government agency that provides aid and actually going through with it is not morally equal to not donating a few dollars of your income
1 - the moral calculus is different if you were already doing so and then suddenly shut it off
2 - i was happy with the arrangement of the government doing it on my behalf, and in doing so making the united states stronger and have allies around the world
3 - elon musk did this illegally
4 - elon musk also caused additional deaths by virtue of supporting trump, rfk, and these other lunatics which he was definitely affirmatively a part of doing
While the quantification isn't inherently reliable, the reality of many dead at the hands at Elon Mush is a simple fact that's not up for dispute. The only question is how many he's killed so far. He cut off life saving meds to sick kids and food aid to the areas with food shortages, the deaths are known and reliably reported.
It is easy to prove, it is shown in the linked model. The model is simple. If I spend X amount of dollars feeding people, I can save Y lives. Since this model is obviously bunk, I'm sure you can easily articulate why this model is inaccurate, untrustworthy, or otherwise unhelpful.
Technically his department produced and advised on the data. It's just a government BI team. This is like blaming the BI team for the CEO's decision to fire people. Part of the process, sure. But this a decision made by the majority of Congress. Let's not forget who the bad guy is.
Absolutely true. But it's certainly not the bad guy with no power to do what parent accused him of that deserves blame. It's a logical impossibility. We still follow logic, I hope.
So the kids died as a result of the action taken (withdrawing meds from impoverished children), but the person who took the meds away from the sick kids who then died as a result is innocent? I feel like you might want to look at that word "sophistry" long and hard, and do a bit of soul searching.
African women dying of HIV did not contract it from Elon Musk. They got it from somewhere. I'm open to theories that do not involve blaming a pretentious billionaire who will inseminate anything except black women.
Subrogation could not be more central to the discussion if you're using blame to justify disbursement of money from parties with no obligation or responsibility to provide free healthcare to another continent.
USAID should never have been created; it serves no strategic purpose unless the purpose is exfiltration of wealth to NGO networks. Auditing government programs for efficacy is not a scam, it's accountability. Eliminating a program that benefits others at our expense is not homicide.
All of your arguments are made in bad faith. You don't really have one beyond emotional blackmail and ad hominems. Sophistry.
The argument is very simple, Elon Musk's decision led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and will result in millions more. Auditing government programs for efficacy is not a scam, but Elon Musk did not do that. He said he would do that but did not.
The USG spend is higher than it ever has been, most of the savings cited were fake, and thus he killed a lot of people for no reason.
Eliminating USAID led to deaths. Just because you don't like that it existed did not mean it was preventing deaths. Pulling the plug on someone is killing them, even if you didn't give them the disease and paying for their healthcare was expensive for you.
Your comment makes me interested in the hypothetical of how Jobs would have positioned Apple under the current administration.
I haven't read much about Tim Cook being anywhere near the level of sycophant, or raising the curtain to show the ugliness behind, as much as some of the others.
I thought it was already pretty well established that Torvalds is a jerk? Or, at a minimum, somewhat petulant.
But also a good example of someone’s accomplishments .. arguably being worth something even if that’s true. I made my whole existence off of Linus’s handiwork and owe him a debt of gratitude for it. I probably still get more in monthly residuals than 90% of the people who wrote anything I deployed. Who cares what I think of anyone personally?
I’d hate to be so deranged about anyone that I can’t see any good in their accomplishments. I’m not exactly Miss Manners in the professional or personal realm either, don’t let me cast the first stone.
Id even go as far as saying that Linus’s are way more important and that Steve’s destroyed society but that’s enough out of me. Even if that’s my opinion, I’m still saying that about a trillion dollar company and that’s still someone’s yardstick for success. Genius is genius, accomplishments are accomplishments
… and god what a grey and insecure and screwed up IT world this would be if neither of those people ever existed and Microsoft ruled the world. Either we wouldn’t even have functional cash registers let alone any other technical pillars or infrastructure… or we’d all be in our rightful BSD utopia right about now.
To emphasize the difference between Linus and Steve. Steve seemed to be 100% an asshole when he wasn't performing, whereas Linus is (afaik) mostly very opinionated and doesn't care about being diplomatic at all, but not fundamentally a bad human being.
To make sure history doesn't only remember the good things like their accomplishments. He was often really mean in person, that's pretty clear from his biography (and I also heard from some people who met him). Seeing him remembered as a tech saint is weird then.
I'm glad I never worked for Apple while he was there. Though I have unfortunately worked for someone with very similar traits.
Even though he is dead and can no longer improve himself, people will use him as a role model and idolize all the bad stuff too.
> Seeing him remembered as a tech saint is weird then.
Hero worship is always pretty weird. I wish we would do less of it in general. But for Steve Jobs, I feel like negative reports about his character were pretty well known during his life and after his death. I don't feel like I've seen a lot of positive only content about him now that his death isn't so recent (maybe a little bit in the context of people hating on current Apple products), unlike some other celebrities where people seem to forget all of the misconduct (alleged or proven) during their lifetime.
I did work for Apple while he was there, and he was entirely decent.
I came to believe that there was a bratty entitled personality from his 20s that gave rise to most the jerk stories people reference, and that he wised up after being ousted (probably for being that jerk). He was essentially exiled for the better part of a decade.
The jerk was there from the beginning. A friend's mom was temp-hired by two young guys, both named Steve, to help them set up their first company office. She liked one of the Steves but declined the offer to join their new company as the first office manager because the other Steve was an a-hole.
depends on their legacy. If a a policy maker died but still has bills and laws in flight, it's an easy way to kill those. As well as any proteges that were running for office.
For me, it is important to know and reflect on these stories so we can collectively heal and learn from them, regarding child abuse, narcissism, and especially (what is also mentioned in the article) enabling such abuse. This is why I posted it.
If we bury these stories, and always only talk about it when people are long dead or not at all, we as communities will not evolve out of those patterns. A culture that "honors the dead" by not talking about the bad stuff they've done is catering to its abusers.
Today, we should talk about Trump, Musk, etc, also in the light of how they treat their children. And what we can and should do to protect those that cannot protect themselves.
We all have responsibility - the ability to respond. If we look away from the stories, we will also look away when something happens near us. And it should encourage us to grow in how we treat other people (especially children) around us. Yes, this can bring up difficult feelings about our own acts, and our own childhood experiences. And it should.
He is a canonized saint of Catholicism and revered as a virtuous defender of Christianity. More evidence based history instead indicates he was a narcissist primarily motivated to elevate himself politically in Alexandria which included wide spread murder and the destruction of the greatest intellectual institution the world had ever seen.
Jobs was idolised during his later life. (reality distortion field a-la the register) lots of founders and CEOs adopted his mannerisms, and cosplayed his stories, because they thought that was what made him _good_
Obviously there were dissenters, either people who were personally shat on by him, or didn't buy the "Jobs is better than jesus" stuff.
But, they made a fucking movie about him, thats how much he was idolised.
Really? I have heard plenty of "Jobs was an asshole" comments, every time his name comes up. The most consistent assessment seems to be "he was talented, lucky, and a real asshole to work for."
> Powell Jobs and Jobs' sister have said in a statement that the book "differs dramatically from our memories of those times."
I've learned from experience that people who aggressively denounce others publicly sometimes have stuff going on that isn't readily visible.
It's not that I want Jobs to be free of moral stain. I have no investment in it. But people should be cautious trusting a report of one person's disputed report.