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Comment by soganess | Hacker News Reader

From the wiki on his daughter:

"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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs

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Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person? Maybe he was a bad parent, maybe he was an overly demanding and overbearing boss, but it's not like he was killing people or selling weapons. He sold phones and mp3 players and computers. He almost certainly contributed to making the world a better place by many objective criteria. I don't know why he's labeled as a "bad person" when there are hordes of people who foment and profit from war and killing and don't contribute at all to human productivity, creativity, or wellbeing but are lauded.

> it's not like he was killing people or selling weapons.

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.

I see your point.

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.

> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person

It absolutely is, in my opinion

He maintained the position that she was not his daughter, even after DNA test proved that claim wrong. Bad person. The worst. There can't be discussion about this. Unloving and neglectful are not even in the same category.

It sounds like she wasn’t his daughter anyway; he was just a sperm donor.

> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person?

Umm . . . yes?

There's always someone worse. That's whataboutism. You don't have to be Hitler to be a bad person.

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.

> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person?

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.

> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person?

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.

> and initially refused to pay her college fees

I don't understand this part, in America, you cannot enter the college for free even with good grades?

Indeed you cannot. There are various sorts of exceptions but that is generally case. And people wrack up massive college loan debt.

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