Basically, what people mean is "he could, at times, be a bit of an asshole". I'm not even sure about your assertion about risk-taking because I can't think of any events that deviate significantly from the risk-taking of similar companies. It's also hard to say how much his "being an asshole" contributed to Apple's success.

He chose homeopathic remedies when first diagnosed with cancer rather than the known and proven effective treatments. By the time he realized it wasn't a joke the effective treatments were too late. He used his wealth and influence to get on organ transplant lists in numerous states. At the time doctors were publicly confused because the organ could no longer save his life, only extend it.

This action likely cost another person their life. With his final days he designed and built a super-expensive yacht Steve Jobs may not have been sociopathic but he wasn't someone that cared about the well-being of others. He was the first member in the cult of his own ego. That's selfish, true, but I could see myself doing something similar when faced with the fear of death.

Not admirable, but human.

I'm not sure he was introspective enough to be a member of the cult of his own ego, but yeah, he wasn't a nice man. I think he was very introspective but, because of being put for adoption and other traumatic experiences in his childhood, he focused on things that are atypical hence the accusations of sociopathy.

You know that he was neither stupid, nor naive Smart people can do stupid things. I feel like that's Silicon Valley's motto at times. Denying his own child was his is way up there too. I forgot about that one. It just makes me feel bad for his daughter. As someone with two kids, it makes me feel sorry for him too. The early years are a lot to miss out on.

A highly functional sociopath could be defined as: They are likely to be highly successful in the field they endeavor politics, business, etc. They plan very meticulously and the presence of sociopathic traits like lack of empathy, lack of remorse, deceptiveness, shallow emotions, etc.

That self destructive lack of forethought though was clearly there for him, as evinced by his avoidable death. To be fair though, Steve basically did it three times, once with Pixar, once with apple computers, and a third time with rejuvenating apple with mobile tech like the ipod and ipad. There has got to be something to it when someone can pull it off repeatedly. I remember Ellison once called it an experiment, you tried Apple without Steve and it failed, you brought Steve back and watched it succeed, that combined with the success of pixar suggests that Steve is either doing something right or he was chosen as tech emissary by God.

You will never hear about the almost-Jobs who fail to succeed on their subsequent come-back attempts. Tempest on Nov 5, But using the coin flip analogy, I would say that each successful company requires hundreds of "coin flips", with the outcome "heads" a majority of the time. A few bad flips could sink a company. I think it's much more than getting lucky 3 times -- more like mostly "lucky" hundreds of times. He failed hard with NeXT. Well, except that NeXT bought apple.

Failed hard by selling a company for a couple hundred million? And then ask Apple where OS X comes from. Ask the wider world about object oriented programming. If you can see past the bottom of the balance sheet and beyond the next quarter, NeXT lives on, despite not achieving commercial success. Actually - much more: That would mean he was taken more seriously and would be able to hire and influence better than if he was not famous. And of course in the current culture having even a large failure is enough to put you on the map to get more attention for the 2nd time around.

This is not the way business used to be by the way. Used to be if you failed you failed and nobody would touch you with a ten foot pole. I hate how you're getting static for this. In my personal life I became a lot more successful when I stopped giving a shit about other people as much. I now have a much more fluid morality without being a "bad guy. I think its okay to be sociopath-lite. I believe guys like Jobs were like this. I don't think he remotely was a full blown sociopath. He genuinely cared about the experience of his users.

I also this we downplay the sociopathic tendancies of techies who may be on the autism spectrum like Woz. Woz is brilliant, but I don't think he could relate with non-techies. I don't think he ever really understood the benefits of usability while at Apple. He was all about code and hardware and gave no shits about grandmas who didn't want to learn basic or type in archaic commands. Jobs on the other hand cared about usability, but also gave no shits about people in his way. I think there's a wonderful, dare I say, synergy between aspie indifference and leadership sociopathy.

I sound like a drone when I talk about this in my social circles. Either I do a poor job explaining this or some people are just never going to be able to wrap their heads around this. This and the 'if I only had a good idea I'd be a successful startup' meme are two peeves I try and argue against in vain.. By contrast what you're saying to them requires them to think in a new way, and maybe let go of some deeply held beliefs.

Besides, who wants to believe that we know so much less than we like to pretend, and in fact the books they might have read and loved are just Both could have easily failed. So Jobs was a billionaire in NeXT did fail by most standards. It didn't turn profit and went out of business after a generation or so of products that failed to penetrate the market. They ended up being the foundation of OS X and the box on which the web was invented.

Even if NeXT failed as a company they're still a historic milestone. Assuming that's the figure, I don't remember myself. Without jobs, would it stilll happen? Apple was completely lost before Jobs returned. There were some interesting ideas, but execution and management were all over the place. I don't think Jobs is an example of survivor bias. I think Jobs was an extremely talented marketer with an unusual aesthetic sense. Sociopaths are more likely to kill their companies than make them grow. They love drama, abuse, and terror for their own sake.

Jobs was more of a narcissist. He lacked empathy, but he wasn't constantly trying to destroy other people because he enjoyed it. It was more that he knew what he wanted - his own vision of himself as a guru of consumer technology, aesthetics, and creativity - and he didn't care what it cost to get it. Personal and business relationships were all disposable. It's more likely the undisclosed sum well higher that kept Apple from the brink of bankruptcy.

It was negotiated by Jobs. I have the same 'issue' with other professions. Before the tech-industry was big, you had the occasional CEO saying: That's reversed reasoning gone wrong: Same holds for famous artists: Didn't listen when I told him that cleaning was all contracted out and the "boss" would never see me working hard as a cleaner.

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If you are in silicon valley you can sample from everyone that took a seed round or everyone that quit their job to work full-time on a startup. In my sample of people I know or know of, the people who took risks created more wealth. If you don't play, you can't win, but that's such a basic, entry-level observation that it can't sell books or seminars. People don't want to know the obvious, that if you don't try you can't succeed, they want to know how to select for success. I'm not sure about that.


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The choice is between getting a seed round and going and working at Google making k entry level in total comp. I doubt many startup founders beat "just go and work for Google full time". I think using Jobs name in this article is kind of clickbait'ish Steve didn't do that, he funded that. I think most people realize that there is no secret to success.

However it is useful to occasionally ask the question. Two people are not the same and their situations are not identical but sometimes its worth narrowing the gap so that you have less variables. I don't think you can attribute his success to luck. Yes he did take risk and yes he was a sociopath in that he didn't care much about how much he had to emotionally torment others to get what he wanted. However if you want to compare what he did to winning the lottery, it would be like he bought lottery tickets and then flew down to the loterry operator and did everything he could to fix the game so that he would win.

There was luck in being in the right place at the right time, and in meeting Wozniak. Sure but lots of other people had that luck too. I mean, they all went to computer club meetings and spoke openly about what they were working on. How many other people at those club meetings founded transformational computer companies that survive today, let alone as one of the most valuable companies in the world? He was there at the beginning, got super rich, but what was his long-term impact [1]? Have you ever even heard of him, outside of a Steve Jobs bio?

It's not pure luck. It's the mixture of the two. I agree with that. I interpreted your comment above as over-emphasizing luck; perhaps a misinterpretation. A lot of other people met Woz too. HP turned Woz's idea down. I think it was Woz's luck he met Jobs. Working backwards or forwards, the result is the same. If one in four American billionaires are sociopaths, the likelihood of a sociopath being a billionaire jumps from 1. The random sociopath is still unlikely to be a billionaire, but is 25 times more likely to be a billionaire than the random person.

That doesn't make it a recipe for success or a magic ingredient, but it's still interesting. So tired of this garbage meme about public figures being sociopaths.

Today in Apple history: Pixar IPO makes Steve Jobs a billionaire

Please show me the study where a trained professional did an actual clinical diagnosis of any of these people. I can't point to such a study. But - based on life experience - I believe the meme. WWKong on Nov 3, The lottery example is fantastic to explain the misplaced expectation of startups. Indeed if we take a results of lottery winners Jobs, Gates, Musk etc. Right, but at the same time every lottery winner purchased a lottery ticket.

If you just say "survivorship bias" and never buy a lottery ticket then you will never win the lottery. My personal goal in life is to play the metaphorical lottery as much as I can, within reason. I'm not mortgaging my house to throw money after my buddy's 'Uber for Planting trees' idea. Play the lottery, but accept that you could do so for thousands of lifetimes before you win, and unfortunately, you only get the one lifetime.

Steve Jobs is portrayed as Savior of Apple but isn't it true that he was the man who actually drove Apple into ground in the first place by pushing Lisa over Macintosh. In many ways he was lucky enough to return at a time computing power had caught up to realize the dreams cooking into his head. In addition to this he didn't had a formidable competition as Microsoft didn't had the right leadership after Bill left.

I remember Microsoft demoed Surface back in but then lost to mobile war completely. Nonetheless, some analysis could be done. If you haven't seen this, you need to: I don't even get how you come to your conclusion.


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Can you link it somehow to the story? What I see is talented people putting in nearly 20 years of hard work and a lot of money. If you look who did this your "broad population" may be quite small and, I suspect, very closely related to the population of "highly successful people". And in the minds of the lottery-playing population, at least when you play, there's a chance of winning.

Avshalom on Nov 3, Well there's always my plan: I figure the chances of winning a frivolous lawsuit are huge compared to winning the lottery. The most likely outcome is losing your money and winning nothing, while there are other ways to make that money which don't involve throwing good after bad. Even if odds are super-low??? You'd have better odds with committing serious crimes and getting away with it, so there's that.

You could take out lightning strike insurance and wait. Pretty much anything really; the lottery is just a tax on people who can't math. As others have mentioned, what you've described is survivorship bias and it's prevalent in many places. I found the following to be an excellent and very readable article on the topic. That is incredibly accurate. Well your opinion is a popular one for sure. It's very important to a certain set of people to ascribe all success to luck and psychiatric issues.

Not a terribly useful or interesting conversation, but definitely popular in a certain crowd. If there was an award for passive-aggression, you'd win it. I'm not sure if you had much more of a point to make than to single out people you assume to be I'm guessing here embittered, but if you did I'd encourage you to make it clearly, and lose the implications.

I'm not the person who opined that Steve Jobs became a billionaire because he won the sociopath lottery. I'm not sure what was passive or aggressive about my reply. Feel free to explain it to me.

How Steve Jobs Became a Billionaire | Hacker News

Animats on Nov 3, Jobs didn't do Pixar. Ed Catmull did Pixar. Jobs was the investor. The real payoff for Jobs with Pixar was that it made the iPod possible. Others had done MP3 players, but nobody had a good deal with the music industry.


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  7. Jobs was able to do that for a Hollywood reason - as a studio owner, he outranked the music execs, and they had to take his calls. Hollywood is very hierarchical like that. It was heading Pixar that got him in the door at Warner, Sony, and Universal. He was more than an investor. He believed in the computer graphics work that they were doing and became the sole owner of Pixar when they were on the brink of disbanding.

    He bought the company outright and moved them from the eastcoast to the westcoast. Nobody does that as an investor. Steve Jobs, apple steve jobs, steve jobs, steve jobs biography, the inspirational life story steve jobs, life story of steve jobs, steve jobs book, steve jobs autobiography, steve jobs and apple, steve jobs apple, steve jobs bio, steve jobs biography for kids, steve jobs iphone, steve jobs kindle, steve jobs kindle edition, steve jobs kindle biography, steve jobs kindle book, steve jobs leadership.

    Read more Read less. Product description Product Description Learn the history and gain greater insight in to the life of one of Americas most innovative thinkers and the secrets behind his success; Steve Jobs Secrets behind the Success of the Apple Billionaire! Kindle Edition File Size: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a product review.

    Showing of 1 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. I have not received yet. Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. A great and concise book that presents not only the turning points in the life of Steve Jobs and his company, but also discusses his business philosophy, approaches to marketing, to innovation, and even to life as a whole.

    I expected to read just a biography, but got business and life advice taken straight from the life and business practices of one of my idols, Steve Jobs. A very good book! Unlike at Apple, Jobs did not act as a hands-on micromanager at Pixar. Although he played a big part in negotiating deals for the studio, he took a passive creative role. He simply sat back and watched a group of brilliant people from whom he learned a great deal achieve greatness.

    He possessed an unswerving faith in the possibilities offered by computer-animated movies. He also helped broker the deal that brought Toy Story to silver screens. It gave Pixar an equal share of the profits, along with merchandise and on-screen credits. That required money in the bank. Lightroom-busting Darkroom comes to iPad.