Kind people always get taken advantage of at work. Others take credit and then left abandoned once there's no more value to the company. I guess that's just capitalism.
That said, don't think that just because you (try to) have few bosses that there isn't some form of hierarchy in which people don't take credit for other people's work.
Sure, maybe there's no boss by title that people suck up to and take credit for stuff to look good to them. But there very definitely will be the "alphas" in the group that everyone looks up to and wants to look good to and the taking credit for stuff will be done to impress those people.
So, if you weed out this kind of stuff successfully well enough, again, I commend you. But I doubt it's as complete as you may want to think. It's just a different looking game of favours and sucking up to with less easily visible (can't just look at title to figure out who to suck up to) lines.
For some people this will be positive as they're good at figuring out who to suck up to in that situation while others may need the title to figure that out. I bet many socially awkward / socially less aware people find it easier to navigate titles they can read in an org chart than sniffing these out of the "sociosphere".
It’s not about not protecting yourself against abuse but rather not taking advantage of people.
Being kind doesn’t mean you can’t compete or strategize but rather don’t cheat if you do.
Compassion and acts of charity is kindness.
Stoicism promote exactly this virtue of understanding that you are in control of interpreting your own feelings.
Very easy to over-extend stoicism to your own detriment, physically and mentally.
"If I don't exploit this person's kindness now, I'll fall behind those who do and they'll use that leverage against me" gives you some idea
You only need to hang around toddlers or teens for less than a day to realize people do not start off kind.
People start off egocentric. Unaware or unable to take in to account the people around them are individuals with conflicting wants to you. Also unaware that we are egocentric BUT with social instinct built in to us: if we are surrounded by miserable people, or people angry at us, we don't feel good either.
So we learn that kindness, while sometimes initially painful or less opportunistic, in the long term leads to satisfaction.
I too have been lucky enough to hear him speak, and he very much does have this naivete of youth in the way he speaks. He has this very simple and straight forward way to view his contribution, along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.
I don't think he's nearly as naive as he comes off, but I think he wants to be seen as naive, because his personal philosophy is one that places naivete in high regard. He wants to follow happiness, and happiness can oftentimes be a little naive.
Why does that feel naive to you, though? To me, that seems like an issue with your definition of naivety.
The 3 ladders. People on the sociopaths (Elites) ladder think of everyone else – the clueless (educated gentry) and economic losers (labour) – as naive.
The clueless ladder comes off as most naive. Labour knows they're losing and focuses on their own thing. Sociopaths know they're winning and focus on power accumulation. The clueless don't notice any of this and focus on bettering the world or whatever.
https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...
Like, he doesn't see the malice in other people, but its not because he's innocent/naive of such intents, nor does he lack the skills to look for it (guileless), but because (as you say) he doesn't care if people take advantage of him, up to a limit.
Properly calibrated, that's really admirable.
But being vulnerable is sort of an important part of being authentic.
And authentic people might have more opportunities to connect with others, especially with the limited time we have on this planet.
Where does this need come from, to be skeptical or suspicious? Of someone so clearly above board?
Wozniak doesn't need to prove himself to anyone. Maybe he feels comfortable enough in his shoes to be very open about himself, and so motivate people to be true to themselves. At least that's my interpretation.
Anyways, he seems to have protected himself well later on, was able to do good (stories of him giving stock to ppl left out early on, that kind of thing) -- people hyperfocus on one very specific thing (Jobs ripping him off in the atari days) when it's a small point in a much larger life.
Go to Mars.
I used to believe he was a good person actually thinking about the best for humanity (although going to Mars is not the way to do that IMO). But then he turned full nazi so yeah...
As these people drive progress forward and most of us benefit from the side effects. Just don’t get too close.
Of people, who they're willing to subject to absolute poverty, and worse, to have their goals achieved.
Millions of people are left unhappy so that they can say "I made this money yuge[, and did it all by myself]".
Why does a track star strive to run faster when they can already easily a 4:00 mile and running a 3:42 would be of no practical difference in their life? It’s for the drive not the result.
But in pursuit of these made up goals the industry ruins very real lives by widening the gap between the rich and poor :(
One might just as well ask why the person with the largest collection of toasters (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-c...) wants them since there's a limit to how much toast he can consume. Soime people have passions and they work to realize them, whether it's something silly toasters or something crass like as wealth and power.
So which personality worked out better in the end?
(Rhetorical question, not a disagreement with anyone)
It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.
Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.
Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.
"He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."
He never uttered this sentence. You're making it up (lying).
Supposedly, he did say "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"
Which shows a man struggling to come to terms with his diagnoses, desperate for alternatives, and eventually gathering the courage to undergo a major surgical operation.
Which suggests he came around to the fact he should have had the surgery in the fist place?
And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors.
I'm also not blaming my beloved grandfather either when I mention that smoking likely killed him in the end and he knew that years before.
Jobs was a very smart guy with all the means to improve his situation but decided against it. For me it's a lesson to consider where my closely held beliefs could be wrong.
You don't know anything about human psychology if you think searching for alternatives means he thought he was smarter than his doctors.
Here's the most relevant quote from Steve Jobs: "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"
This is the language of fear not arrogance.
Genentech CEO (and PhD in Biochemistry) Art Levinson: he "pleaded every day" with Jobs and found it "enormously frustrating that [he] just couldn't connect with him"
Andy Grove: "Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy"
--
Marc Andreessen: "Steve Jobs was 'one of the most disagreeable people in the history of humankind,' and that was part of his genius."
He was an obstinate man who thought he knew better than everyone else. Sometimes he did. This time he didn't.
My take is that he was scared and acting out of fear. Hoping against hope that his bullshit alternatives would work because he was so terrified of having his body "opened" and "violated" by a major surgery. Maybe that fear sometimes masqueraded as arrogance but that's still just fear.
Like many others, you seem excited to be able to judge Steve Jobs on this point. To judge and laugh at him for his arrogance killing him. When in reality you're judging and laughing at a pancreatic cancer patient for procrastinating on their surgery out of fear.
In this way Elon Musk is very similar. That gets you EVs where none existed and it gets you crappy self driving by eschewing LIDAR for cameras only. It gets you rockets that land themselves and it gets a flat concrete launchpad obliterated by the first Starship launch as others warned.
If you'd said merely "I think it was fear, more than arrogance" that could have been an interesting discussion, but instead you've been making it strangely personal throughout.
Frankly I dont care enough about Jobs to be "excited" or "laugh" or whatever accusations you are throwing around the thread -- they reflect more on you than on me.
Jobs was a flawed man, as are we all.
We are all flawed. I think Steve Jobs was less flawed than most of his critics. Maybe less flawed than myself. The difference is we know everything he did wrong in his entirely life because it's so well documented.
I said his personality--the one that led him to rip off Wozniak along with his other actions (positive and negative)--likely led him to die [earlier]. But in your view the true moral failing was not in these acts which actually harmed other people, but in merely making an observation about how the man's personality likely ended up harming himself too.
Make of that what you will.
From ChatGPT:
"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance of survival if he had pursued standard medical treatment sooner.
Jobs was diagnosed in 2003 with a rare type of pancreatic cancer — a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET) — which typically grows much more slowly than the common and far more lethal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. When caught early, pNETs can often be treated successfully with surgery and other conventional therapies.
Instead, Jobs initially delayed surgery for about nine months while trying alternative diets and other non-standard approaches. By the time he agreed to surgery in 2004, the disease had progressed, and although he lived for several more years, the delay may have reduced his overall odds."
"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance
See the keyword "might" in there? No one knows if he could have been saved, not even his own doctors can be sure.
Rubbish.
> Even ChatGPT is making the same point I am "it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance
> See the keyword "might" in there? No one knows if he could have been saved, not even his own doctors can be sure.
Dishonest rubbish.
No, it's rude and weird to chastise someone for rightfully advocating treatment. He didn't state that he didn't want to risk the horrors of treatment with the end result being the same -- he spread disinformation. It is good he died, because when others repeat his disinformation, we can point back at his death as evidence against his beliefs.
You weigh the feelings of a dead billionaire higher than the lives of young people with hopes and dreams.
And yet it's basic human instinct to do what's possible to survive. I admit that I would have done the same and I wouldn't believe most people who would claim otherwise.
That is morally repugnant. He was a pancreatic cancer patient coping with his diagnoses the best he could manage. The fact that he was a "billionaire" has nothing to do with it. He was a human and all sentient life is sacred in my view.
You also do not actually know the facts of the case. He did not spread disinformation to anyone. He was intensely private during this entire period and very little information is known for a fact.
But by all means enjoy your mocking, judging, and condemnation of cancer patients. I'll continue to find it morally repugnant.
You continue to generalize criticism of Jobs as an attack on cancer patients as a whole, despite people citing specific behaviors and actions unique to jobs.
I can't interpret this as anything but emotionally manipulative sophistry that reads to the viewer as you shielding Jobs behind a vulnerable group, and that isn't ever going to be received well.
If there's another way to read this in light of the facts, I'd appreciate an explanation.
That could have been an interesting position to discuss were it not infused with so much judgment (ironic) for the commenters--making it personal and putting everyone on the defensive.
Because I think the fundamental disagreement is whether anyone considers themselves to be "judging someone [Jobs] for their reaction/choices in the face of cancer." I can see that point, but as you say, I disagree that's what is happening.
I might counter with, "does having cancer make a person immune to criticism? If not, then where is that line?" Indeed I think the other issue is treating criticism as equivalent to judgment (something maladaptive but all too common).
But I think you have the general idea: the tricky part (as you allude to) is that people are making criticisms/observations about Jobs (as a whole) and the story of his cancer is, well, part of his story too.
This thread was borne of the story of Steves Woz and Jobs. One takeaway was Woz was "naive", Jobs was shrewd, Jobs took advantage of Woz: don't be like Woz and get taken advantage of. What I was pointing out was, well that may be so, but who was better off in the end? Often one's strengths and one's weaknesses are two sides of the same coin (like with Musk).
Steve's friends pleaded with him and said what he was doing was bullshit. Were they morally repugnant too?
That's not a cure, it's business, creating return customers.
Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.
And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
Making that jump is obviously scary, but I think many people could find much greater contentedness (not a fan of seeking "happiness", as it's something that I think should be seen as liminal, not a desired constant state) if they only realized that the world is their oyster.
Am I being gaslighted or am I looking in the wrong places? In the EU in my entire 15 year carreer there have been exactly 0 companies or even vacancies offering fully remote.
There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour, which is quite lucrative in most of the world, and you'll generally have less prep and other meta-issues to deal with.
Similarly you can also sell skills. For instance there's a huge market for chess coaching. And while I haven't tried this myself, I'm fairly certain there's some market out there for teaching/tutoring people in coding. Also if you excelled in mathematics or whatever, there's another possibility. And doing this stuff at a school, or even university, is also completely viable - in most places a bachelors is acceptable for teaching at a university.
This is really what I mean with the world being your oyster. There's so much out there but most people just don't realize these possibilities even exist.
Selling something you need yourself seems twice as hard as selling something you don't need and have extra that others want and have few
OTOH I think Amazon would have sounded like a horrible idea. A book store minus the ability to peruse the books, pick up a coffee, or browse in the same sort of way? I wonder if it really was a great idea, or it's just some weird butterfly effect that drove it up, up, and away.
Food/coffee came later when the in person business was declining.
Hypothetically if someone was burnt out and willing to operate in the gray a bit, how much can you make (approximately) doing English lessons under the table?
Eg: I go to Thailand. I enter as a tourist. Ocassionally, I meet someone in a café and have a conversation with them. They value that enough to pay me.
One of my big pre-covid regrets is I didn't travel more... I had intended to, having been laid off just before it started but everything got locked down and I had a bit of a mental health episode, feeling trapped in interactions I didn't consent to as I spent money on rent I could have spent on hotels etc.
Right as COVID fell, I'd been researching doing the Moscow to Beijing train then exploring SE Asia... it's funny how much of the planned route is possibly bust... for example, I was going to skip mainland China and only visit HK since less visa issues, not sure if that's still possible...
What typed of jobs is this referring to, besides teaching English ?
For in person teaching it's the same thing. Most countries have a system of bilingual schools, international schools, and then university type schools. And all of these offer English language instruction in everything from PE to Calculus. The major difference between a bilingual school and an international school is that the latter will generally pay much more and expect much more with certification a stated requirement, though in practice it often is not.
---
Outside of that there's endless odd jobs available that are in need of English speakers. I have friends working in everything from marketing to rehab. A good idea there would be to pick a country you're interested, find the common job boards there (which LLMs may be excellent for, though I have not used them for this myself - yet) and simply search for 'English' or other such keywords. You'll be surprised.
Steve Jobs corralling him into starting a company made him an engineering hero, technology celebrity, and rich beyond his wildest dreams.
He had the privilege of giving away a fortune, to causes he cares about, largely thanks to Steve Jobs.
He's never worried about money and has millions in the bank and multiple houses, thanks to Steve Jobs.
Some people love their celebrity. I've met more than a few, including Wozniak. He seems to genuinely love it, which doesn't mean it doesn't also get tiring at times.
Woz stated he gave away his money because he felt it was corrupting, probably seeing what it did to people like Jobs - although it's more like Jobs was like that to begin with, and the money just made it worse. Woz has also spoken repeatedly about celebrity status. Here's [1] a nice older 'interview' of sorts where he hits on the topic extensively. He didn't want it and has no interest in it.
Interestingly something I didn't know, that's pertinent to our little thread here, is that after Woz left Apple, he became a 5th-9th grade teacher, and did so for a decade!
[1] - https://www.vulture.com/2013/08/steve-wozniak-on-jobs-and-me...
I just meant to contrast the level of ambition between the two. Wozniak was extremely unambitious and Jobs pushed him into starting a company, with great difficulty.
Nothing is guaranteed in life but I've certainly met more than a few people that I predicted would be successful and then they were. There are character traits that incline people toward success.
Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil. He was on that train until he nearly lost his own life flying a plane.
Woz didn’t need the fame and prestige that Jobs afforded him, but he definitely didn’t say no or walk away until his plane accident.
You clearly know nothing about the history of these two. Or, maybe even more likely, you want this to be true so you can feel better about your life being relatively unimportant in comparison to Steve Jobs' life. Seems to be very common.
Woz and Jobs were best friends as teenagers and loved each other. And like many good friends they had their issues but loved and respected each other until the end.
Woz wasn't doing a deal with the devil. He was co-founding a startup with his extremely ambitious and abrasive best friend.
Almost everyone that ever worked closely with Steve Jobs came away with enormous respect for him and deeply appreciated their time together. Yes, they also say that he was sometimes an asshole but that's how people are: complicated.
There's a very good chance more than a few people think you're an asshole at times.
Steve Jobs is the reason Apple, Next, and Pixar made their mark on history. No amount of envy and revisionist history can change this.
I don't know, you'd probably have to ask a billionaire that's ruining the lives of other people to earn their second (or tenth) billion.
Not all of them actively do that, but a large number very actively pursue that sort of thing.
But even selling things that help people doesn’t absolve or prevent someone from doing evil things before or after they hit some specific valuation.
I came to that realization rather late. Now, I reflect often to optimize for this.
(Anyways, better late than never)
I suppose it's related to game theory and I am of the opinion that it's not spoken/written about enough.
My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example).
I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh.
It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components.
I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.
Perhaps this was when he began drifting toward education.
From the outside it looks like the opposite though: Jobs was latching on to everything Woz created — beginning with Blue boxes. (Well, not everything Woz created — Jobs seemed uninterested in his dial-a-joke project.)
Woz is indeed truly lucky that Jobs did partner with him. Jobs saw that it was worth going all in (financially) to push the Apple to the masses. Woz seems like the type that would have remained a hobbyist — perhaps doing a write-up about his "Apple" for Popular Electronics.
Jobs too was extraordinarily lucky he had a smart friend who was just on the cusp of the budding personal computer revolution.
A lot of "survivorship" bias too since there were plenty of also-rans at the time.
It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it.
It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements.
Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64
Apple I - July 1976
Commodore PET - January 1977
Apple II - June 1977
C64 - January 1982
All four used the 6502.
I think it’s important to remember that he is the product of a very unique time in world history though.
He grew up in a time and place that was arguably the best time ever to be a human in all of history. He grew up in a society with extremely high social mobility, when a house in the bay was cheap, in a homogeneous society with high social trust, surrounded by the smartest people of his generation, in a place in the country which valued open mindedness and true progressive thinking. Things like going to college, buying a house, paying rent, or finding a mate were orders of magnitude easier than today.
Optimizing for happiness is a nice pursuit if this is the society that shapes your worldview, but today this is a luxury view that very few people can afford. The world is much more of a rat race, we have significantly lower social trust, basic survival is much harder to achieve than Woz’s time. So few people can go through life just trying to be happy instead of grinding to get ahead.
There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.
As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.
> “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Everything Jobs was though and the people around him and those that worked before him were important for the state of Apple as he left it.
But Woz is my fav also, and if there were many, many makers like Woz, and there are, that would be fantastic, and it is.
Woz, I love you, man.
I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.
What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.
Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it?
Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.
To assume that ms wasn't headed by bullies requires a striking ignorance of ms' history.
False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego.
Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence.
Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3
I agree. Unconfident people will never take the personal risks needed to get big.
Neither is 'getting big'.
A lot of politics and industry is made up by vacuous people selling hot air these days. Too much confidence, too little respect and knowledge.
A story about Chuck Yeager. He did a stint as squadron commander in the Korean War. When he arrived at the airbase, he watched the squadron land. Afterwards, he called all the pilots together, got a bucket of paint, and marked off two lines across the runway.
He said the pilots were doing sloppy landings and would now land between the two lines. The pilots protested, saying that was impossible. So Yeager got in a jet, took off, circled the airfield, and touched down exactly at the midpoint between the lines.
The squadron pilots got the point.
Yeager wanted his pilots to survive combat, and that meant being perfect pilots every time. If I was a pilot, I'd be glad to have a squadron leader like that in command, even if he was a total asshole.
I'm still trying to find a reasonably priced copy of the book.
My dad, 32 missions over Germany in a B-17, said it was representative of how things were.
See also the original "Memphis Belle".
It’s frequently interpreted as weakness and naivety.
I’m actually a pretty hardboiled and cynical person on the inside, but choose not to approach life in that manner. There’s reasons. Long story for other venues.
It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not.
Kindness and generosity are not [necessarily] weakness.
I'll bite. Go ahead and list some recent examples of this actually happening please.
Why would I tell you my secrets?
Edit to clarify: I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to get paid, I'm saying his being "the happiest person ever" is directly correlated to his ability to collect millions just shooting the shit in front of a fawning audience.
I dont want to do contract work but people ask so I just quote an unreasonably high number and on occasion someone bites. I dont need the money so I need an easy filter.
It's a bit related to how billionaires tell everyone to "just work on whatever makes you happy and it's all going to be fine".
All of these men today are the way they are because they are trying to emulate Jobs
Steve Jobs wanted the world to see him as some sort of artistic, cultured genius. The only aspects of Steve Jobs that today's crop of tech CEOs seem to emulate are his wealth and arrogance.
• Wojcicki admired Jobs while Youtube had the most depraved and moronic comment section on the internet
• Huffman admired Jobs while Reddit had a 'watch people die' subreddit
• Zuckerberg admired Jobs while nuts used Facebook to livestream the Christchurch massacre and Whatsapp to incite mobs to kill Rohingya
• Bezos admired Jobs while Amazon was promoting dollar-store junk on every page
• Musk admired Jobs while Grok was dubbing itself 'MechaHitler'
Those examples are embarrassing enough, though we could go on an on with more. There's no version of Steve Jobs who would allow such garbage to tarnish his image.
Apple did a lot of controversial things under Jobs.
* The raids for leaks * The no cold call agreements * etc
> The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
Besides, it would be easy to list 100 more examples of trashy practices (eg: preinstalled crapware, intrusive advertising, dark patterns, etc) for today's tech companies that have nothing to do with censorship.
Remember how Jobs single handedly bullied Adobe Flash into its graveyard? Bullied record labels into selling individual songs instead of the whole CD? Cannot imagine Woz doing that. Elon is the next Jobs only even harder to stomach. I wouldn't want to work for these people but they, along with those who can work along side them, change the world.
BTW, I do not have a CS degree.
How do you know that? Have you worked with him?
Elon Musk provided the vision and the money to assemble a great team of engineers. However, I find it hard to believe he does actual electric car or spacecraft engineering, given he has no education in these fields.
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 108
All three of those books are advanced engineering books (I have a copy of each).
Yes, there are people like Hal. Not many, but they exist.
If you prefer to think that Elon bungled his way into inspiring top people to implement his ideas, and bungled his way into launching payload at 10% of the best cost NASA could do, feel free.
P.S. Buy those books, and look through them. They're the real deal.
First there are is no hard evidence for his supposedly engineering genius and second he has a long public track record of lying and gross hyperbole.
What I find more likely: Musk throws around wild ideas and his engineers figure out what might work or not. (After all, he also comes up with pretty dumb ideas.) This approach can be successful, but it doesn't make you an engineer yourself.
I am still confused why you would claim that Musk was better than many engineers you know, based on what little we actually know about his technical skills.
After Musk took over Tesla from its original founders one of the original founders sued him in state court in California
In the course of the litigation, discovery revealed Musk had lied about his educational credentials
The pleadings from the litigation are available:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc6...
The evidence presented showed that Musk lied about educational credentials
The issue raised is Musk's dishonesty, at most fraud, at least loss of credibility
Why did he lie
Note Jobs was named on some patents as well
For example, "Advertisement in operating system"
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090265214A1/
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8712902B2/
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/
("20090265214").pn.
Woz was in the right place at the right time. Jobs would have found someone else and no one would ever have heard of Woz. Jobs gave us some of the most amazing products the world has ever seen.
https://www.slashdot.org/~SteveWoz
Comment Re:No Autonomy (Score 2) 125
by SteveWoz on Monday April 13, 2020 @09:13AM (#59940526) Attached to: Elon Musk Still Predicts 1 Million Tesla Robotaxis By the End of the Year
You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.
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Comment Die in your sleep... (Score 1) 213
by SteveWoz on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:30PM (#58807154) Attached to: People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway
At least Tesla respects our right to die in our sleep.
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Comment Re:Maybe they just realized (Score 1) 172
by SteveWoz on Friday June 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#54537213) Attached to: Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars
You meant to say 'great' cars with 'some' quality problems. Autocorrect can be a bitch...
He was a visionary and "got" tech -- Apple's success with him (both times) and the floundering in between demonstrate his value to their story.
Again, not a nice man and not worthy of worship but definitely of respect for what he delivered.
"After Lisa was born, Jobs publicly denied paternity, which led to a legal case. Even after a DNA paternity test established him as her father, he maintained his position. The resolution of the legal case required him to provide Brennan with $385 per month and to reimburse the state for the money she had received from welfare. After Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire, he increased the payment to $500 a month."
"Despite the reconciliation between Jobs and Lisa their relationship remained difficult. In her autobiography, Lisa recounted many episodes of Jobs failing to be an appropriate parent. He remained mostly distant, cold and made her feel unwanted, and initially refused to pay her college fees."
Well, if your standard is that no one is a bad person until they are literally murdering people or selling war machines, then no, of course not.
But as a parent myself, I think it's fair to say that if you, as a multimillionaire, stoop to doing the bare legal minimum to support the child you created, who was at one point living in poverty because you failed to support her before, then yes: you are a bad person.
There are obviously many other ways in which Steve Jobs was a bad person! He kept obtaining temporary license plates because he wanted to park in handicapped spots without getting tickets. He orchestrated a salary-fixing cartel that artificially depressed wages for many thousands of engineers in Silicon Valley, all so that he and his other obscenely rich friends could get even richer. And he had his devices manufactured in China under horrendously exploitative conditions again, so that he and his shareholders could make an extra buck. (on top of the billions they already had)
But if your standard of being a "bad person" (not even evil!) is murder or complicity in it, then you could make a strong case that Steve Jobs was not a bad person, altogether.
Speaking only for myself, when I call someone a "bad" person (I am wary of calling anyone "bad," but that is the language used in this conversation), I mean that they treat others poorly. They may contribute immensely to the world (as Steve Jobs did), but that is orthogonal to whether they are a good or bad person.
I know others have a different calculus, and I am not trying to convince anyone. Still, being a bad parent, especially after you have asked to reconcile, is... well... a person I would be hesitant to associate with regardless of how much I loved my iPhone 2G, or how cool the Lisa looked in the early 1980s.
It absolutely is, in my opinion
Umm . . . yes?
Being a bad parent can damage a child for life. That's pretty bad in my book. I've seen it so much.
But in my view it's not black and white. He was certainly a bad parent. Also a pretty bad employer when I read the stories of how he treated people. But he was a good marketeer and a role model to many people. Definitely investors will think he was a good person lol
I think it's up to each of us to judge a person by the criteria we find important. Personally I don't think being a successful businessman is a virtue or admirable but creating beautiful things is. He did do some of that and I do admire that (that he sold millions of them and created value for shareholders is something I couldn't care less about though)
But being a kind and caring person is the most important criterium to me. For that reason I have to say that no, in my book he doesn't qualify as a good person. I'm sure that for many others he does and that's ok too. Everyone has their own metrics.
Of course ... and that's not nearly his only negative that has been expressed here.
What is really tragic is that so many people are talking about Jobs at all under this post about Wozniak and his goodhearted ethic.
Emphatic yes. There are only a few such tests that would get an emphatic yes.
That he could have been genocidal but wasn't does not make him less qualified to be a bad person.
I don't understand this part, in America, you cannot enter the college for free even with good grades?
the guy who never acknowledged his kid until a court forced him to pay child support?
He outright lied to Wozniak over payments and shares.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-gave-early-app...
He put himself on the organ waiting list in multiple states when it became apparent that his quack medicine wasn't working to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer. He took a liver from someone out of state and died with it. They changed the law to prevent this happening again.
Sure, complain about him forcing his way onto lists if we're willing to accept that all humans are truly equal (I'm fine with this concept), or being mean to others, but who CARES about the other stuff?
People like Jobs get attention because they're obnoxious. If they never existed, the world would be no worse off.
It's weird how much he gets under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole, or at least definitely above the one guy they've ever seen a tell-all story on.
edit: it's almost like, in the current social meta of "doing no wrong is more important than doing good", there is a need to denigrate any approach that doesn't feel extra cozy and warm and loving. But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history. He had a helluva team and made things work. I gotta be honest, I don't really care if he said scary and mean things.
I never understood this kind of thinking, and have always found it particularly heartless & puzzling, until one day I stumbled upon something I myself had no visceral reaction to but other people clearly did. It looked like they were being fake about it, either completely, or just in an exaggerating way.
Turned out no, I was just not in the headspace required. Which makes sense cause I mean, let's be honest: what do you think is more likely? The majority of people secretly and intentionally all just messing with you, or rather them just actually saying what they think, and then you just not being able to relate to it?
I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick when something like 50% of CEOs already show psychopathic traits.
Then how am I supposed to interpret "people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole"? You literally say people are pretending.
> when they say he’s some kind of monster because he didn’t get chemo (???) and was rude to people and took up handicapped parking spaces
I would 100% say he was "some kind of monster" for power abuse (verbal harassment), as well as for denying and neglecting his child, yes. The scrambling for an organ donor after his drug-addled delusions fell through thing doesn't sound too hot either.
Judgements are subjective. Usually people operate under shared assumptions, so one would just expect that their judgement would be widely shared - but this doesn't make them some universal truth.
This is how and why you end up in a circle when people describe things he's a bad person for, and then you just say "well I don't find those things to be bad". Great, we already know he's not a bad person for you, you said as much. People just disagree and see it different, and list things off for you to try and relate. And so you list off counterpoints to make them try and relate.
> I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick
Yes, well, being extremely "well known", along with his personality, despite never having met 99.999% of the people who "know" about him is pretty unrealistic / unnatural to begin with. This includes me of course.
And I’m not surprised that you think he’s some kinda monster. That’s the insane world we live in today, and why it’s such an obnoxious one. You’ve got nothing to balance any bad act on, besides “everything must be done with perfect kindness”, so even something as minor as being rude comes across as “some kind of monster”. You’ve artificially moved your Overton window to such a falsely soft world, you can no longer reasonably judge regular people.
Tried my best to be persuasive, but this is all I had in me. Let's see where our opinions take this world.
I'm not perfect but he was everything I strive not to be (I'm not always successful though). I strive to be kind, fair, generous, caring and inclusive. I'm not always those things but I do try. From what I 've seen about Jobs is that he didn't really share those values.
I understand that other people admire him a lot but I don't really, because I have other criteria.
And really to be honest I would not like 95% of successful corporate CEOs. It's not just Jobs. You have to be a certain type, an ambitious person with shark tactics who puts everything aside to get to the top. Otherwise someone else who is will beat you to it. Those are not qualities I consider good in a person.
However each person makes their own judgment and that's ok. My opinion doesn't really matter, but it is mine.
He would, if he were still alive. But he’s not. Most likely due to his own irrationality.
> But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history.
Do you really believe that life would have been particularly different if he had never existed? I don’t. I suppose if you’re some sort of Apple fanboy, you might feel that way, but from any broader perspective, I don’t see it.
I care about someone fucking over his business partner.
Answer: because he was the only one brave enough to be this transparent. Literally all you're doing is encouraging everyone to hide this behavior as much as possible, and never EVER own up to it.
Personally, I don't give much credit for "bravery" when it's expressed in terms of "being transparent" about being an asshole.
“Everyone, I’m bravely showing you my spotless record” is really not an impressive showing. Being willing to completely upend your own reputation is.
I give more bravery points (which are worthless of course) to a whistle blower or someone running into a burning building to rescue the world's most tragic orphan.
i want courts to make it right, not for the swindlers to be confident talking about how they swindle people without consequence.
"owning up to it" is making it right, not chit chatting
Comment on him positively, you're now contributing to elevating his identity into something beyond human (etc.).
Comment on him negatively, and now you're just using him as a scapegoat (etc.).
It would seem like the real devil is in the asymmetry of significance, not in the people in question, or even the traits.
this was done so he could park in disabled spaces
which is pretty scummy
I’m sure Jobs could have had all the legal handicap plates he’d have wanted, if the point was just parking in the handicap spot. But it wasn’t.
That makes no sense to me. I can't think of a place Jobs would ever drive his car where it would matter if he could park at a disabled spot. He had his own spot at both Apple and his home, where else did he ever park often enough for that to matter?
Personally I believe the explanation that he did it to avoid the ugly license plate. It mirrors how he refused any stickers on the Mac, when all other PC makers had to put the "intel inside" on theirs.
I found an article that this successful use of a donor organ, rather than waste it, was celebrated, and motivated a pro donor law in California.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-does-it-after-alm...
>to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic cancer has a 13% survival rate
>refused to register his automobile?
Who cares.
The sheer amount of conspiratorial, loaded questions on HN these days is absolutely staggering.
No, you don't have to keep saying Jobs was not a good person.
It regularly referred to a "distortion effect" he could create, by essentially "gaslighting" (to use a common turn-of-phrase) people into doing things they thought they couldn't - often at great emotional expense. Essentially, he was somehow able to become a target of hatred, causing his employees to team up together "against him". It was extremely effective, but created a lot of copycats who just ended up abusing the hell out of their employees without getting the desired effect.
Realistically, he's just the only person we're getting a truly honest tell-all from. I'm not sure he's really that much worse than most people, I think we're just all judging him much more surgically.
There's a good argument that FLW was a supercharged version of Jobs - wildly charismatic, visionary, uncompromisingly obsessive about the most minute of details, and could be manipulative and cruel. What we see w/ Jobs and Lisa, FLW was even worse as in 1909 he just up and abandoned his family of 7, seemingly out of the blue, to travel through Europe w/ his mistress. This was a national scandal at the time.
In his houses, he did all decorations (including providing art from his large personal stash) and built all the furniture and would go on tirades against his clients if he found out if they moved or replaced anything after they moved in, usually cutting off all further ties if they did not give into his demands. Also a fun fact is FLW had an obsession w/ Japanese woodblocking, similar in a way to Job's thing w/ calligraphy.
On top of that, their life took a similar arc where each had incredible success early in life that eventually crumbled under their own ambition, spent a time out in the wilderness, then went through a resurgence toward the end that greatly eclipsed their early success. Regardless, throughout his lifetime he maintained he was the best architect in the world, perhaps in history.
FLW actually wrote an autobiography during his time in the 'wilderness' (basically running an architecture cult in the desert) in the early 30s, and much of it is fanciful bluster, a bunch of half truths and exaggerations, almost as a means to save his legacy. You read it and kinda feel sorry for the guy. Yet, five years later as he turned 70, he created Fallingwater which led to so much work, that the last 20 years of his life he produced over twice as many commissions than he had done to that point. In fact when he died he was in the middle of actively working on 60 projects, most notably overseeing the construction of the Guggenheim.
There's plenty of WTF things you'll find upon digging in, such as his partner and her children (and other friends) being axed to death by a servant at one of his early compounds, and his time in Japan building the Imperial Hotel to be earthquake resistant - only for it to be hit by a 7.9 on its opening day, and being one of the few structures to survive mostly intact in all of Tokyo.
And with Fallingwater, after lying to his client that the design was complete, the client basically said, “great, I’m coming over.” Wright hadn’t produced anything - it was all in his head. According to his assistants, he worked feverishly over the next couple hours, putting the design to paper with virtually no mistakes - floor plans, elevations, scale drawings, site modifications - so that by the time the client arrived, it looked fully realized. A project of that scope would normally take months of work and dozens of revisions, but Wright had spent the better part of a year building it entirely in his mind, mostly on site visits just staring at the waterfall for hours at a time.
Others may say it, but there's a difference between being annoyed that other people say something, and turning your comment in such a way that others saying it looks like you're being prevented from saying what you want.
Nobody is perfect but this doesn't excuse everything.
> We just aren't allowed to acknowledge his accomplishments
Nobody prevents you from acknowledging anything.
Don't be obtuse, while you aren't "prevented" you are certainly shouted down/shamed on social media
I haven't seen these things said, but apart from HN I don't do social media. I'll believe you that these claims are stated. They are of course shallow.
I bet it depends on how you present stuff. How you "sound". Or when you choose to present facts.
Here, for instance, it looked like you dismissed the criticisms towards those guys. You stated that these guys have their flaws like everybody. You diminish their issues and that's exactly what will make people strongly disagree with you. In many people's heads, those guys are huge assholes, really not comparable to your random person. You'll need to have this in mind when discussing this stuff. If you do it like this, people might not listen because you may sound like a guy who is a fan of two huge assholes at the same time to many of us (even if it's false).
Even if what you state is true, if it sounds like you take the defense of these billionaires whenever they are criticized for other things, I can certainly believe you will be shut down. They have / had a lot of power, it can seem way off to defend them, they really don't need your help.
There are good and bad timings, and effective ways to state facts and others, not.
You'll need to read the room. Of course.
And toxic places also can't be saved. Just flee.
Conversely, Woz started numerous companies after parting ways with Jobs, and I can't think of a single one that had a lasting impact.
The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.
This is an odd thing to say when Steve Jobs achieved most of his success after parting ways with Woz. Jobs was the product guy at Apple. He laser focused on every detail to make sure that the experience was perfect.
Jobs wasn't an engineer, but there were plenty of talented engineers at Microsoft working for years on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone) because it was so unintuitive. By contrast, the original iPhone was a decade ahead of it's time in terms of design. It had pinch-to-zoom, a proximity sensor to prevent accidental touches during calls, a light sensor that adjusted brightness, and an accelerometer for landscape and portrait mode. These features were originally considered gimmicks, but it turned out to be indispensable.
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
I think the net effect of people like Jobs is a huge positive in this world. Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction. You think this could be related? Perhaps there is something unpleasant about the person that had some effect on his ability for greatness? Or do you think people are like a video game with knobs where you can turn down "don't be a jerk" without affecting anything else?
Just because theZuck and his ilk made apps that dominate the use of the tool does not make the tool bad. Being able to use maps the way we can now is definitely a positive. Having a single device that does that, plus allows communication with anyone you know, plus take very decent images/videos, allows for access to the whole internet all while fitting in your pocket is absolutely a net positive for society. It's those shitty apps that make you question it, and you should not confuse it with the net effect. The net negative are the shitty apps.
Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them.
… This doesn't work very far.
This doesn't mean smartphones are useless or don't have positive points of course! :-)
It is not the iOS devs' fault that theZuck makes a shitty app designed to destroy people. It is not iOS that allows theZuck to do that. It is the algorithm created by theZuck's minions. It is the tracking that theZuck's minions have created that feed that algorithm. The iOS devs are playing cat&mouse games with theZuck's minions to not allow iOS to willingly participate in that data collection.
The modern mobile device is an amazing achievement. After all, theZuck came along well before these devices and he and his minions were already up to their shenanigans before their apps were released.
Also, I have none of theZuck's apps on my devices, and do not willingly participate in his shenanigans. I don't have Dorsey's Musky app either, or any of that social crap at all. This forum is the closest to theSocials as I get. My phone is definitely a net positive in my life. You will not convince me otherwise. Because other individuals have made poor choices in their use of the device does not make mine bad. I will agree that theSocials are a net negative for society. So if you want to "fix the glitch", remove theSocials and it'll be clear the devices are a net positive
Edit: Because you clearly edited yours. "Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them."
This is where we disagree. I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.
Of course you did and were able to. But I think you're wrong :-) you know I meant this.
I get your point but I think it is a bit naive.
> Because you clearly edited yours.
Yep, sorry, I can see how this impacted your answer. I notably removed the part were I said I think it's important that engineers and salespeople should take responsibility in what they do. I do think so.
> I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.
But I do 100% agree. That's my point.
Facebook is not innocent in the design of its apps.
The same way Apple is responsible for the design of the iPhone.
We seem to be focused on the iPhone, but what about a Pixel or a Galaxy? They're just devices. People use them for shitty things does not make the device shitty just for existing. You're throwing the baby out with the bath water here, and gleefully acknowledging it.
Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.
Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”
Do you feel the same way about MLK based on his FBI files?
If everyone was super nice and pleasant we would likely wouldn't have made any progress.
The underlying ideas here are greatness and individuals ascribed to doing great things.
Without any evidence I suspect an extremely large majority of progress is done by normal individuals whose names we’ll never know.
That's true! But neither does the 1% spoil the 99%, or make it unimportant. People are very bad at seeing the good and the bad in a person; they want to distill it down to one single data point of "he was good/bad". But that isn't remotely just, and it's worth pointing out whenever people skew too far towards glossing over flaws or refusing to acknowledge the good.
Right now, the zeitgeist is to refuse to acknowledge the good in someone if they did something the speaker considers bad enough. So, one has to frequently nudge people to not forget the good even as they acknowledge the bad.
But also: they are not weighted the same. Bad things are usually "more important" -- both practically, and for evolutionary reasons. So the bias -- and I agree the bias has gone too far in our current zeitgeist -- does have some foundation.
Everyone has some flaws, yet generally we remember the positive deeds that great people did in history. The positive deeds are usually exceptional, while the flaws are often commonly found in many humans (at least relative to the era when that person lived) that they're unremarkable. And we remember and celebrate the exceptional deeds instead of dwelling on the human flaws.
I'm talking about relationships you have with real people in your life. Avoiding large threats is evolutionarily more important than taking advantage of good opportunities. So if someone does something bad to you -- lies, steals, betrays, physically hurts -- that will generally make a bigger impact, and be remembered longer by you, than nice, helpful, or otherwise positive things they did.
I think you have in mind someone like Jobs, who was known for being an asshole but also for exceptional accomplishments, and in cases like that it is true that history will remember the accomplishments. But historical figures like Jobs are unbelievable statistical outliers. In your entire life you likely won't have substantial personal dealings with anyone of comparable historical legacy. And by the way, I'd guess that for most who had personal dealings with Jobs and were treated badly that the abuse will personally be a more salient memory than his success, even if they are able to acknowledge the greatness of his achievements.
I mean, there's no reason for somebody who hasn't had personal interaction with Jobs fixate on whether he was an asshole (which did not affect them) and ignore his accomplishments (which probably affected them to some degree)... but this seems to be the fashionable thing to do here.
Otoh, it's more nuanced than just "did not affect them". Multiple things are happening here, and some have validity:
1. Such discussions are often serving (or people feel they are) as proxies for discussions about what the current rules should be. In that context, an insistence of calling Jobs or anyone else out serves as an insistence that such behavior not be allowed now. To me, it's silly that people can't separate these two things, but alas many can't.
2. There is a genuine issue of incentives. If people observe that success buys you a free pass for being a raging asshole, many of them will take note. Indeed, being able to get away with being an asshole can even become a special marker of success.
Because I don't want to live in a world of things built by socially maladjusted misanthropes, I want to live in a world build by kind and social people they made with their own hands.
There is something incredibly servile and pathetic in the psychology of people who latch onto perceived great men instead of looking to their neighbor. Like the kind of people who spend their day on twitter hoping that Elon retweets them and gives them attention.
We wouldn't even know who Woz was without Jobs. Sure Jobs had character flaws but everyone does.
Is there a world where you get get a person who has all of Jobs's positive traits without any of the negative? Maybe but not likely.
There are a lot of people who want to be happy. Let them be happy, but it's the relentless builders/dreamers who pushes through the entire journey of getting a product out there to the people.
Personally, I'd take that over being the creator of something valuable.
If Elon Musk is being held up as a pinnacle of achievement, I don't want that.
In this day and age, most people are attracted to "influencing". For better (giving back to society, educational) or worse (pranksters, grifters, "manosphere").
One notorious case is "Zara Dar", a PhD dropout to OF creator. Seemed to have high potential in the industry then something just flipped (money? too difficult? not fond of the grind?) and decided to go to OF.
The new world, with its hypercapitalistic tendencies, take advantage of the worst of us. It's one of the reasons for the rise of kakistocratic administration in the United States.