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Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...

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I mean, the argument is essentially one of "sure, he may have been completely awful, but it all worked out so, if we assume that's the reason things worked out (ignoring the myriad other factors and pure luck) then we suppose that, however they had acted or the damage caused, they were right to do so. The ends justify the means - even if we can't tell for sure or not that by those awful means we arrived at those desired ends."

Frankly, it's ex post facto justification by false entailment. I don't buy it.

Not the person you responded to but I find it an interesting situation. I agree with you that jobs (from what I've read) seems to be awful but at the same time I don't believe theft is okay. If I pay someone to do a job and they choose not to do the job after taking my money they have stolen my money. I am not okay with that. In this case jobs invested in them. It was clearly enough money to give him power over them. He had an agenda, they decided they didn't like the agenda and weren't going to do it his way and he came in and cracked heads (in an awful way probably). They can choose not pick his way, but BEFORE they take his money. Once they take the money they are obligated to do it his way or give the money back in my opinion.

Jobs paid that money for the business as it was at the time of sale - not for what he wanted it to be in some theoretical future - and he got precisely that. The theft analogy doesn't hold because the deal was completed upon transfer of the organisation. There could be no theft, only the inability to meet the expectations Jobs placed on their employees - for which I'm sure many were fired. That's the only prerogative Jobs purchased when they purchased - and were delivered - ownership of the organisation. That is to say, they bought - and were given - the decision making power over who to hire or fire and for what reasons. Nothing more, nothing less.

> Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.

> [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...

So if someone spent for example 44*10^9 dollars on some venture, would it still be ok to be jerk, or would it be counterproductive to viability of such investment?

"Tradeoff" implies you have to choose, like there's no way to have power without being a jerk. This is demonstrably false. It's just hard.

Quit making excuses for "brilliant assholes" and start demanding better.

> Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole

What does this even mean in the context of the story from TFA? The "impediment" was one of his employees getting a competing job offer, and the "irreparable damage" was...having to actually pay someone as much as they'd be valued elsewhere? That's not a reasonable way to behave, and masking it in impersonal language doesn't somehow make it more reasonable.

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