I was watching Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine on Amazon Prime last night. As the documentary progressed, there were many occasions where it described who Steve was. I couldn’t help myself from comparing him to Donald Trump. There is no question about Steve’s genius and achievements. He had a brilliant and gifted mind. There are many books, articles, and such written about him. His autobiography, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, describes his split personality in detail. While he was a genius, many of his traits are questionable. He could be mean, brutal, a control freak, and so on.
What struck me most when watching the documentary was that some of his traits described made me draw a parallel with Trump. Here are some of the narrations taken directly from it. “Behind the scenes, Jobs could be ruthless, deceitful, and cruel.”
Reminds you of someone?
I will simply list the narrations in the documentary and let you decide.
“I think Jobs is always a storyteller. There was always a sense that he was constructing a persona…He thought that he was a paradigm shifter. He wanted to be the renegade, but he also wanted to be legit.” — Michael S. Malone, Technical journalist.
In another instance, when he was paid $7,000 for designing a video game board for Atari, he told his partner, Steve Wozniak, that he was paid $750 and wrote him a check for $350 while pocketing the rest.
“Steve said, ‘Come work for me.’ I told my wife, ‘How bad could it be? Hahaha. I didn’t realize how bad it could be…Steve ruled by a kind of chaos. He uses a vast number of really irritating tools to get other people involved in his scheme. He is seducing you, vilifying you, and ignoring you.” — Bob Belleville, Director of Engineering, Macintosh, 1982–1985.
“Steve was hugely successful, yet he mistreated many people. How much of an asshole do you have to be to be successful?” Daniel Kottke, Friend, Apple Technician, 1977–1984.
“His stuff was beloved, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t a nice guy. First, he had a reputation as a womanizer, and then he had a reputation for not caring about anybody and being a tough guy. People are not connected to him because of his character.”
Reminds you of someone?
“When writing about Apple, I would get 80% hate mail.” Joe Nocera, journalist
“Steve created reality distortion. If he said, ‘The sky was green,’ you’d kind of go, ‘Yeah, okay. Yeah, the sky’s green.’” Jon Rubinstein, Head of Hardware, 1997–2006.
Jobs was known to park his car in a handicapped parking spot because he thought he was above the law. He felt that he had the right to have power without any responsibility. Under him, Apple terminated its philanthropic programs. He told people that giving away money was a waste of time.
One of the prominent engineers who was a key Apple employee in developing the iPhone later went to Palm. When he tendered his resignation, Jobs called him into his office. According to him, “It was a half-hour mind-fuck. It becomes very “Godfather”-esque. You know, ‘You are part of my family, and Apple is my family. And you don’t want to leave my family.’ And at the end, he says, ‘If you choose to leave my family, should you decide to take so much as one member of my family away from me, I will personally take you down.’”
There is no question that he built products beloved by the world. However, I question Apple’s business philosophy. If you are in Apple’s ecosystem, everything works smoothly. However, making it work seamlessly is tough if you get a non-Apple product involved. Take me and my family, for example. I’m on Android, while the rest of them use iPhones. When they want to share a video on iMessages, if I’m included, the video quality is downgraded. So, they have created a group that excludes me. Yes, I’ve become a social outcast in my own family. Their response to my complaints is, “Ditch Android.” My response is, “Yeah, right.” I already wrote about iPhone vs. Android. Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple products. I use an iMac, an iPad, and AirPods. However, I’ve found myself struggling to integrate my Android phone into their ecosystem seamlessly. But I digress with my rants.
I suspect that is by intention, and it was Jobs’ thinking. He had a very binary, transactional mind. Either you are with us or against us.
As the documentary narrates, sometimes Jobs would not hesitate to bend or break the law to get his way.
Reminds you of someone?
My favorite description of him is that he was an Evil Genius. I think it perfectly sums up his true character. To the majority of us, he was a genius. However, to a few, he was evil. On the other hand, the word ‘genius’ never crosses many people’s minds while describing Trump.
Jobs was a genius who made the world better by creating beautiful products that positively impacted humanity. However, depending on who you are talking to, Trump’s impact on the world is debatable.
