Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

Yes, well the same Steve Jobs who denied being the father of his daughter, who dumped the burden of supporting his daughter on ordinary working taxpayers while he counted his first hundred million, this was the guy who called someone who was convinced his company was worth more a liar for saying he knew it. And even got the guy to feel bad about his sin. Amazing. It was all part of his extraordinary toolbox of manipulative tools, the "reality distortion field" that his admirers spoke of.

I got to see him behind closed doors in meetings when he was at NeXT. If you want to see Steve Jobs in a private meeting, watch the scene in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin tells the salesmen that they are losers because the Baldwin character drives a more expensive car. Steve literally did that in one meeting, answering a question about why he didn't do such-and-such with a "I drive a Porsche and you drive a General Motors car" as his argument for why his superior wisdom must not be questioned by losers.

The Rolling Stone obituary is, in my view, the best piece on Steve Jobs [1].

> Jobs may be remembered as the man who brought the human touch to our digital devices. But perhaps his greatest – and hardest-won – accomplishment was bringing the human touch to Steve Jobs.

How do we evaluate someone who exercised wanton cruelty and dismissal of others' lives, but who worked on earning the capacity to change? What does it mean that he got the chance to evolve and make good as a rich man, where so many others would not?

At the end of the day, sometimes we have to just let the story be the story and give up on our anxiety to compress it into simpler, more digestible themes.

[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-steve-...

> called someone who was convinced his company was worth more a liar for saying he knew it.

No, that wasn’t the lie. From the horse’s mouth:

“I was intentionally pretending we had another offer, and he detected it.”

https://twitter.com/apartovi/status/1447324896904638467

You're making a good point while still, I think, missing mine. You, the author, I probably all tell ourselves and others things that we "know" that we mostly hope for. "I know I'm going to lose ten pounds before Christmas." Do you really "know"? Do you have a time machine? And maybe one friend expressed support, so, "...and other people agree with me!" Well, you're implying more than one person, probably without feeling bad about it unless someone challenges you. "How many people? What are their names?" Oops. Now, we're in trouble.

My point is the irony of feeling bad and learning a lesson about being completely honest when caught by a master famed for "reality distortion". Reality distortion is almost literally truth stretching. No doubt the master of doing it was a master at detecting it, but that didn't mean he was deeply committed to the truth himself. He was deeply committed to and famously skilled at manipulating but not being manipulated, which is not at all the same thing.

This story and Jobs' reaction is not about the fluid meaning of the word "know." Jobs immediately caught on to the fact that Ali was lying to him about having a 150M offer, which he explicit admits:

https://twitter.com/apartovi/status/1447324896904638467

It is not about "someone who was convinced his company was worth more" being called a liar for saying he "knew" it.

I wish he would have said this in his original chain. Big detail to leave out.

> I drive a Porsche and you drive a General Motors car

i hate adding to the steve jobs circle jerk, but i think this is actually kind of smart if we can momentarily suspend our disgust for his character.

the fact is that steve and everyone he's in the room with are there because they worship money. that's the social contract with every job. he has the most, and if you want some of his, you have to be quiet and listen even if he's being unbearable.

  > but i think this is actually kind of smart

Claiming you're right because you have more expensive things is a trope associated with assholes for a reason. It's at best an "appeal to authority" fallacy, and at worst it's the lashing out of internal insecurities, but it's never designed to convince someone you're right. It's designed to bully and shame them into obsequiousness.

  > the fact is that steve and everyone he's in the room 
  > with are there because they worship money. that's the 
  > social contract with every job

I can confidently say I'm not doing any job because I "worship money", and probably very few people in those rooms do, not that I'd know personally.

I'm lucky in that I no longer work because if I don't my family won't eat, but that was once why I worked, and it's why most folks hold jobs.

Even the folks in that room probably cared about their career/power/influence/personal mythology more than they did about their bank account balance -- and yes, those two things are related but distinct.

sure my comment was mainly in the context of people like steve jobs and OP who are chasing multi-million dollar deals

but yeah maybe "worship" is the wrong word when i extend it to every job. the fact is whatever our motivations, we still show up to work every single day, and we do it for money.

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