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Comment by howinteresting

5 years ago

Between that and his ":)" response to the Google recruiter getting fired because they were unaware of the collusion going on between Apple and Google, he will go down as one of the worst, most abusive tech barons in history.

I think he has already gone down in tech history, and it wasn't as "one of the worst, most abusive tech barons".

  • Pretty sure he's widely acknowledged as a guy who was an insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in the case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of unpleasant interactions with him.

    My personal favorite of the early Apple stories was the one where Jean-Louis Gassée saw him park his big dumb Mercedes in a disabled parking spot and said "I never realized those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped" [0].

    [0]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

    • >Pretty sure he's widely acknowledged as a guy who was an insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in the case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of unpleasant interactions with him.

      Yes, we have anecdotes (plus all the other nice things people said about him, including his daughter in her book and the author of TFA elsewhere in Quora).

      Those are not what he is remembered about though, but for building one of the biggest companies on Earth (at times, the biggest), plus doing it twice in his 20s and in his 40s, while also building two other companies (one worth billions for its movies, the other sold to his first company for half a billion), plus defining several modern consumer tech markets and/or phenomena.

      And of course, there are far far worse employers than a demanding jerk (abusers, rapists, racists, thieves, even murderous CEOs and founders) - and with less saving graces and nowhere near the same results.

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