"Steve Jobs was always telling the truth as he saw it at the time."
I doubt it.
I'll offer two stories about it.
When Steve recruited me to work for NeXT, he spent an hour or two with me in a conference room, working on persuading me. The experience was fascinating.
One thing Michael Fassbender's portrayal in the film "Steve Jobs" missed was the hard, piercing quality of his gaze when he was pitching. People like to talk about "laser focus"; Steve's gaze is the best example of that I've ever seen in a real, person-to-person encounter. His eyes were hard, vigilant, analytical. He noticed everything.
He tried a series of pitches to get me on board. Now, I did end up going to work for NeXT for a while, but I wasn't buying any of Steve's pitches that day.
He detected my skepticism really quickly each time. He would start a pitch with all the passion and conviction you would expect if you've ever seen one of his keynote speeches or interviews, like his whole being was invested in the pitch. He would immediately detect that it wasn't working, and he'd just drop it, like it had never mattered. He'd move on to another pitch, something totally different, and he'd be just as committed and passionate as in the previous one--until he detected that it wasn't selling me.
It was like he was flipping channels, looking for anything that would work.
The second story is from a couple years later, after Steve returned to Apple and took over again. I was back at Apple, too. Steve held a town hall meeting for the whole company to introduce the new candy-colored iMac (which was basically just the old iMac in new candy-colored clothing). I attended with a good friend who was working on the system software.
Steve came out in full pitch mode, selling Apple's new product to its employees. My impression of his pitch was that it sure was a good thing that he went into selling products and not into politics. Before that, I had always been sort of baffled by the ability of history's great demogogues to move huge crowds to behavior that in retrospect was clearly ill-advised. Steve's internal pitch for the iMac was a sort of "Oooohhhhhh...now I get it" moment for me. He was just extremely good at reading a crowd's reactions, saying what it wanted to hear, moving it to the reactions he wanted it to have.
Walking out after the pitch, my friend was shaking his head, saying, "I believed him. I knew it was all lies. I mean, some of that stuff is my work, and yet I believed him."
My sense is that Steve's objective was always selling his vision. He preferred to tell the truth to accomplish it, but if the truth wasn't working, he was perfectly happy to change channels to anything else that would do the job.