Steve Jobs

To many people, Steve Jobs was a saint, a visionary. The outpouring of grief following his death was overwhelming, with the hashtag #isad appearing all over the internet. Stores closed, candles were lit, people who hadn’t even met the man shed tears. But the man was not a Martin Luther King. He wasn’t a Florence Nightingale. By all accounts, he was a thoroughly unpleasant man.

Wind the clock back to the Apple II. A phenomenal machine, Jobs argued with the true man behind the machine, Woz, over the number of ports and whether to close the system or not. In the “debates”, Jobs would lose his temper and broadcast the phrase “F*ck you”. Charming.

When it came to the launch day of the Macintosh, he refused to recognise the Apple II team out of pure stubbornness. And when he was told by his chief engineer that the Mac may be unable to say “Hello” without crashing, he threatened him in front of a crowd, publicly, and abused him right then and there. But that’s nothing compared to how he treated his love child, Lisa. He refused to acknowledge her as his daughter and fought her in the courts. He eventually agreed to pay Lisa and her mother a pittance in child support; they could hardly afford heating and Lisa slept in a parker whilst Steve was worth millions. When he was told of his then girlfriend’s pregnancy with Lisa, he even went so far as to strike a hissy fit and storm out of the room. He even tried to claim he was sterile, to get out of paying a penny; then this warped into a distaste for the poor child, who, gifted as she was, got into a good college… which Steve refused to pay for. As it turns out, a friend of the family paid for her first semester and counselling, which Jobs eventually reimbursed – after a roaring argument.

A disabled man in a wheelchair who had travelled 25 hours just to see Steve Jobs asked for an autograph… only to be told, “sign it yourself”. Things got uglier as Jobs taunted the man, saying “Oh, now lay on the guilt, start crying,” finally before relenting and signing the paper.

Under Jobs, for a time at least, all philanthropy efforts at Apple were cut when he took over as CEO of Apple in 1997. He funnelled tax through a company with no employees in Ireland, where tax was 1%. He sourced materials for his iPhones from factories that employed pre-teens, who routinely suffered and even died. He sourced the final products from Foxconn, who have a disgraceful safety record with accidents, suicides and poisonings. And get this: THEY WEREN’T HIS PRODUCTS! People say, he invented the iPod, the iMac and so on… but they were never his. Because love him or hate him, he was a clever man and once went on record to say that his engineers were the best in the world, playing first violin… but that he played the orchestra.

Clever bugger.