Jobs turned 90-days-bankruptcy Apple into the wealthiest company in the world.
Jobs takes a lot of the credit, and some of it is due, but there were many other people involved in bringing him back on board & the transition back to profitability/dominance.
It literally had to be Jobs and Gates making that deal, and it worked. Apple got enough money to launch its iMac which made it enough money to then launch its store, which gave it enough money to finally turn real profits.
I know a lot of people were involved in that happening, but Steve Jobs was literally the only person in the world who had the cult following to execute on his vision. Any other leader would have been met with resistance and skepticism every step of the way.
Am I suggesting that SJ should make $200mil for that effort, no, but I am suggesting that if you're making an argument against CEO impact, SJ is probably the worst example as I'm 100% sure that man was the only one who could have turned Apple around.
That said it's hard to argue that Jobs didn't have vision, or wasn't at least able to find people who had vision & talent, even if he was a polarizing figure.
That is a great question. The answer is complicated, but the primary reason is he screwed up. The machine was way too costly for its target market. By then, he'd run out of money. But he'd learned a great deal. He then bought control of Pixar, and turned that from failure into a massive powerhouse. Then he went back to Apple.
There's a book about it, "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs".
Jobs made three fortunes: Apple II, Pixar, and then Apple again. Just one of those would be a spectacular achievement, but he did it 3 times.
Probably not.
The difference was Jobs made much better decisions.