Please don't break the guidelines like this. You might not owe Steve Jobs better, but you owe this community better if you'd like HN to be a place for having good discussions about interesting topics.
you and i certainly have very different ideas of what an "awful" human being looks like
and i hate to play mr. ceo defender but "a very good businessman who made a lot of money" is selling him rather short, i think. he developed several products that radically changed the paradigm of computing and consumer electronics. that deserves a certain degree of veneration, i think. he didn't get rich by jacking up the price of insulin or dumping chemical waste into rivers or selling petroleum products or developing a human psychology-hacking enterprise to sell ads.
For the insulin thing, maybe you are thinking of Martin Shkreli. What he did got him in prison more than he got him rich.
For the pollution thing, the truth is that many of those who got rich polluting the rivers and such actually produced lots of innovation. Plastics fit your description, and I think few things have been more of a paradigm shift than plastics.
I get you with the ads business, but Google made a revolutionary search engine, Amazon disrupted e-commerce. I have a hard time defending Facebook/Meta but they have their fair share of innovation.
Almost all "very good businessman who made a lot of money" actually made great things, that's how you make a lot of money doing business. Though usually, there is a dark side, and Steve Jobs is no exception. You can also make a lot of money just being an asshole, think crime lords, or Martin Shkreli, but it often doesn't end well.
Well, sort of. Matt Levine noted at the time that penalties for fraud are usually based on damages. Shkreli's fraud had no damages (and his legal team, obviously, emphasized this), but people hated him, so he was sentenced based on unusual factors.
taking ideas and making them, i.e., translating said ideas and said "makes" into consumer-ready and profitable products at high quality and massive scale, is not exactly running a lemonade stand and certainly isn't just a flick of the magic wand.
sure, he wasn't John von Neumann. fine. certainly one hell of a visionary and one hell of an executive, though, and a sharp and insightful person. for anyone here who hasn't yet seen it, check out "steve jobs: the lost interview". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m68auPIPRk&t=1s
jobs wasn't a charlatan and he was certainly no slouch.
I think it's pretty well documented that Jobs had direct input into product design. But also, hiring and managing people effectively to produce novel products is part of producing those products.
I think he was all of those things, but also could be the opposite of those things, too.
Humans are complex and when you already changed the course of history by 25 or whatever, you are going to be even more complex.
I don’t idolize Steve Jobs but I do find him to contrast positively against other similar figures like Gates and Ellison. Low bars, I know. But I guess I wanted to defend that people can have a soft spot for Jobs without ever making a dime from any of his endeavors.
There's a great interview of Allen Baum, high school friend of Wozniak and peripherally involved in the early years of Apple (he pilfered the HP stock room to supply Woz with parts for the Apple 1 & 2 prototypes). He was a roommate with Jobs for one summer and, notably, doesn't say anything bad about him over the course of the three hour interview.
People are complex, with good and bad areas, which is precisely what makes cults of personality problematic. And the discourse around some people (Jobs in particular) is waaaay more cultish than is healthy.
And this particular anecdote is the poster child for it.
'Printing out and framing the response' as the daydream reaction to receiving that e-mail is wild, even with the caveats.
At the end of the day, they'll be the "Andrew Carnegie" of the era, and no one will actually remember them unless they have a famous hall named after them.
He made a lot of clients very happy with the products they bought. Products that are not just small gimmicks, but something they use every day as their main drivers in work and personal lives. And yes, since we've seen Apple with and without him twice already, there's enough information to suggest it was his personal effect.
So is being asshole to a few thousand employees worse or better than improving life of tens of millions (at least) with great products that they use everyday? Not an easy question to answer. But it's certainly not just about money and shareholder value.
Of course Steve Jobs had character flaws and made mistakes but this meme that he was some kind of Stalin character sending people to the gulags is an ignorant joke.
Steve Jobs was deeply loved and respected by his family, friends, and colleagues. People who knew him intimately, who lived and worked with him every day for decades in many cases.
IMO it makes more sense to judge people by their worst than their best behavior. A monster who's deeply loved by his family is still a monster. I didn't read "Small Fry" by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, but the picture painted in the reviews of that memoir is scathing and heart breaking. He was a terrible father to her and he knew it.
> The fact that most research participants and their families are unaware that they are part of a vaccine trial, leaves no room for justice or compensation.
What an absolute load of tripe.
Straight from disease surveillance being a bad thing (it isn't) to this drivel /eyeroll.
Disease surveillance helps stop potential pandemics before the cost of addressing them and the damage the can cause, including loss of life, reaches colossal proportions. Recommended reading: The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.
I note how the conspiratorial assertion of Africans being used, in effect, as guinea pigs is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatever. Vaccine trials happen everywhere, not just in Africa, and no national healthcare system in Africa blindly accepts vaccines as if people were experimental animals.
Did you give informed consent yourself for the childhood vaccinations you received?
LOL the guy parked in handicapped spaces and let’s celebrate his mischief, aiiight y’all go off.