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.
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.