Being a cruel and abusive boss? There’s a guy for that! Berating and intimidating
your pregnant girlfriend? There’s a guy for that! Sending your security force to
pose as police officers and threaten leakers? There’s a guy for that! And
even washing your feet in toilets for some weird reason - Yep, there’s a guy for that!
And if you’ve read the title, you’ll know that guy’s name was Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the
world today. Many people considered him to be a genius businessman and inventor.
It’s undeniable that he helped pioneer the 1970s and 1980s personal computer revolution,
changed what we thought possible for phones, and encouraged us all to think a little differently.
But for all the praise heaped onto Jobs, there is a dark side to the Apple founder. He was an
abusive boss, an absentee father, and an absolute menace in his day-to-day life.
The title of David Coursey’s Forbes article tells us everything we need to know, “Steve
Jobs Was A Jerk, You Shouldn’t Be.” In the opening sentences, Coursey makes his case immediately,
“Steve Jobs was a major, world-class jerk. A friend who knows about these things — but not
Steve — wonders if he wasn’t at least a borderline sociopath. If you define that as someone who does
evil things and doesn’t feel remorse, the picture of a smirking Steve Jobs does begin to emerge.”
It’s likely that a lot of his behavior was influenced by his own insecurities. As a child,
he was bullied for being a scrawny, nerdy kid. Kids also taunted him for
being adopted. Children are cruel, and it left its mark on Jobs. As an adult,
he continued to be impacted by the pain of being put up for adoption by his birth mother.
His birth mother, Joanne Schieble, had been a graduate student. Her parents didn’t approve of
Steve Jobs’ biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a Syrian immigrant. The couple decided
not to marry and to give Jobs up for adoption due to Simpson’s father threatening to disown
her if they wed. Six months after giving Jobs up for adoption, Schieble’s father died, and they
married. They would later have a daughter, writer Mona Simpson. They divorced in 1962.
When Schieble remarried, she and her daughter, Mona, took on her new husband’s surname,
Simpson. In 1970, Joanne Schieble Simpson divorced a second time and moved to Los
Angeles to raise Mona alone. Mona wouldn’t find out she had an older brother until 1986
when Jobs reached out to Joanne after he lost the mother who raised him to cancer.
Jobs referred to Abdulfattah and Joanne as his “sperm and egg bank.” It would
upset Jobs whenever people referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents,
or if anyone implied they weren’t his “real” parents. This was a sensitive subject for Jobs,
and it’s likely the childhood bullying picked at the gaping emotional wound.
Clara once admitted that when Jobs was going through his terrible twos,
she questioned if she should have adopted him. He was a temperamental
child who often got in trouble at school and at home. The fact
they didn’t have much money may have been the source of his greed in his adulthood.
It’s not unusual for a child who feels abandoned to lash out. Jobs’ childhood
behavior is possibly not so unusual, but he didn’t seem to improve as he
grew into an adult. In fact, the bullied Jobs would grow up to be a bully himself.
He was a verifiable tech tyrant. He would publicly humiliate his employees if they disappointed him
or failed to meet his standards. In 2008, MobileMe launched. It was an email system designed to offer
smooth synchronization features. It was met with scathing reviews. This includes a piece by Wall
Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. He said that MobileMe was “far too flawed to be reliable.”
Jobs was livid. It’s reported that he flew off the handle at the team. He accused them
of tarnishing Apple’s reputation. He asked them, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to
do?” When the team explained, he snapped at them, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”
He also added, “You should hate each other for having let each other down.”
People who worked under Jobs said that he was incredibly mean at the time.
But it wasn’t just his employees he was mean to. He used the same abrasive tone
to tell anyone what they were doing wrong. He didn’t care who they were.
He would never apologize for how he spoke to people or the fact he demanded perfection from
everyone. As Apple grew, Jobs would become more and more cruel. His temper wasn’t
reserved for employees. He alienated people that were close to him as well.
Despite having the gift of the gab when it came to Ted Talks and company press releases,
he was reported to have bad communication skills on an interpersonal level. But
whenever he failed to communicate his ideas, he would blame the other person
for not understanding him. Jobs was known to rudely interrupt others in business meetings.
A friend of Jobs once told biographer Walter Isaacson, “He had the uncanny capacity to
know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe.”
Isaacson’s biography of Jobs pulled no punches in revealing the ugly truth about
the inventor. Jobs parked in handicapped spaces, screamed at subordinates, and at 23 years old,
he denied paternity. According to his ex-girlfriend, Christen Brennan,
Jobs denied paternity of their daughter, Lisa, for two years. Jobs claimed that it
was impossible for him to be the father because he was “sterile and infertile.”
He even went as low as to state that 28% of the male population could be Lisa’s father.
After Brennan told him she was pregnant, he was angry and became more volatile and
unpleasant over time. Jobs told her that if she gave the baby up for adoption,
she would be sorry, and he didn’t want her to have an abortion. Yet he also told her he
wouldn’t help her care for the child. Brennan quit her job at Apple and had to go on welfare. She
would clean houses to make more money under the table, despite Jobs’ fortune. He would
only speak to Brennan through his lawyer, refusing to speak with her face to face.
Jobs eventually accepted he was Lisa’s father,
but the damage was done. And he only accepted it after a DNA test was done. Unsurprisingly,
Jobs was an absentee father. He would only start to contribute more when she grew older.
He would later meet his wife, Laurene Powell,
and have three more children. So much for all his blathering about being “sterile and infertile.”
Jobs was an infantile man who would cry like a small child when he didn’t get
his way. He was frequently pulled over for driving a hundred miles an hour,
and he even had the audacity to honk at the officer if he took too long to write
up the ticket. We can’t even imagine having the gall to honk at a police officer. We’re
not sure how many people would even be able to get away with that if they weren’t Steve Jobs.
He also seemed to have been a frustrating hotel guest. There’s a story of him arriving
at a hotel suite in New York and, at 10 PM, deciding that they had to reposition
the piano. He also found the strawberries they provided to be inadequate and even complained
they’d brought him the wrong kind of flowers. He demanded calla lilies, but when his public
relations assistant returned with some, he told her that her suit was disgusting.
He was such a perfectionist that he lived in an empty house. Unable to decide on what
the perfect decor and furniture would be, he would rather just not have anything. Of course,
while he demanded the perfection of others, Jobs had trouble admitting to his own failures.
Living with Jobs was an exhausting job in and of itself. “We spoke about
furniture in theory for eight years. We spent a lot of time asking ourselves,
‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’” Laurene Powell, his wife, said.
They spent two weeks discussing what sort of washing machine to buy at the dinner table,
debating between a traditional American washer and dryer and a European one.
He was so beholden to perfection that it paralyzed even the smallest life decisions.
But beyond his temper tantrums and bully personality, he was just downright immoral.
He was once the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Pixar and during his tenure, the company lost
profits in hardware, software, and animation. Jobs made deep layoffs, but he insisted that
employees were fired without warning or severance. Getting laid off is bad enough, but it had to
be even worse when they didn’t see it coming and had no severance to act as a safety net.
When Pamela Kerwin, who was Pixar’s vice president and general manager at the time,
demanded they be given at least two weeks' notice. Jobs’ response to her was, “Okay,
but the notice is retroactive from two weeks ago.”
For all the talk of Jobs being a genius inventor, he was known for taking credit
for other people’s ideas. For example, Jonathan Ive is the designer responsible for the iMac,
the iPod, and the iPhone. Ive revealed that Jobs would shift through his ideas and tell him that
most of them aren’t very good. When he found one he liked, Jobs would later take full credit
for it. Ive would be sitting in the audience, watching as Jobs pretended it as his own idea.
In fact, he was proud of his stealing. He would,
at one point, say, “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Perhaps Jobs’ true skill was convincing others he was more of a genius than he was. He was better
as an editor than an inventor. He could take an existing product and refine it.
He definitely thought too highly of himself in the editorial arena,
too. After he saw the first iPad commercials,
he found James Vincent, the copywriter, to tell him that his commercials sucked.
While Jobs very proudly stole his own ideas, he would lose his cool if he
thought someone else was doing the same to him. When Microsoft came out with Windows,
Jobs was livid. It used the same graphical user interface as the Macintosh. When Jobs brought
Bill Gates to Silicon Valley to confront him at Apple Headquarters, there were 10
Apple employees in the conference room with them, waiting to watch Jobs tear into him.
Jobs laid into him, “You’re ripping us off! I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!”
Gates remained calm. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of
looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox,
and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
This wasn’t the only time he would be angry a competitor
stole his idea. When Jobs caught sight of Google’s Android phones,
he sued. He claimed Google was ripping off the iPhone wholesale. He considered it grand theft.
Isaacson wrote about Jobs’ rant. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to,
and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank,
to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to
go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty.”
Jobs was no stranger to censorship either. While you can argue all platforms engage in some level
of censorship, like not letting people engage in hate speech, it was telling what Jobs targeted.
Jobs decided what apps could be downloaded in the Apple Store,
banning apps that featured gay art, gay travel guides, political cartoons,
“sexy photographs” and Congressional candidate pamphlets. Jobs suggested that customers should
buy competitors’ products if they wanted to view things that Jobs decided were “morally suspect.”
It wasn’t his only method of censorship. Jobs would rely on fear and intimidation
to silence the press, often using his legal team. In 2005,
Apple brought a civil lawsuit against Nick Ciarelli, a 19-year-old blogger. On his
blog “Think Secrets,” Ciarelli had accurately reported on the Mac Mini before it was launched.
Apple claimed that Ciarelli regularly posted rumors about Apple’s upcoming releases. They
pointed out that he would sometimes be incorrect in his reporting. Eventually,
Ciarelli agreed to shut down his blog for good.
Gizmodo had their own run-in with Apple’s legal team. When they posted a video of
an iPhone 4 prototype, Apple turned to law enforcement. Police would raid the
home of editor Jason Chen due to Apple’s report.
Jobs did not hesitate to censor the media through the law,
no matter how minor the infraction was. No one was too big or small for him to come down on.
You may not be surprised to learn that Jobs relied on sweatshops for production. In 2010,
it was reported that Apple’s Foxconn factory operated in China, and they regularly employed
children under the age of 16. Within a year, it would worsen. Overseas employees were forced to
work grueling hours. Some were reported to work 34-hour shifts. The factories operated 24 hours
a day, seven days a week. This was, allegedly, to meet international demand for Apple products.
The Apple factory is carefully guarded. Security guards were at each entry point,
and employees had to enter with ID cards. Once, a Reuters journalist was dragged
out of their car and beaten because they had taken photos from outside the factory. Foxconn
is the largest employer in mainland China, and 1.3 million people are employed there.
There have been reports of explosions and poisonings in the factories in China as well.
It makes it all the more devastating to realize many of the workers there are still children.
Management at the factory would mimic Jobs’ abusive work tactics. Former employees noted
that managers would scold employees in front of their peers. They didn’t discuss performance in
private or even face-to-face. They would wait until there was a meeting to call employees out
in front of everyone. Managers would stockpile complaints while watching the employees work.
If a worker made a costly mistake, they were expected to give a formal and public
apology. They would have to read a “promise letter” to their co-workers in order to state,
“I won’t make this mistake again.” It was an insulting and humiliating process.
The stress, anxiety, and humiliation led to widespread depression within
the company. When Brian Merchant, a reporter at The Guardian, managed to enter Foxconn in 2017,
they noticed several violations of OSHA, the US Occupational Safety
and Health Administration code. There were unprotected construction workers,
open chemical spills, decaying and rusted structures, and plenty more.
What he noted, however, was the silence. There are rules at Foxconn that workers must be silent
while working on the factory floor. He described it as feeling “heavy, even oppressively subdued.”
Merchant agreed with a former employee that it was not a good place for humans.
Despite it all, Jobs would deny it was a sweatshop and claimed to be troubled by the deaths at his
factory. In Jobs' words, “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. They’ve got restaurants and swimming
pools. For a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory. We are on top of this. We look at everything at
these companies. I can tell you a few things that we know. And we are all over this.”
After his death, more of his shady dealings came to light. An audit by the new CEO
showed that while overworking the employees in China, they were also underpaid. When the
Senate looked at Apple’s finances, they found that Apple had been engaging in tax
evasion. They had only paid 2% income tax while funneling their income into overseas accounts.
It was revealed that Apple manufacturing used “blood minerals,” specifically from
the mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They’re also known as conflict
minerals due to the fact that the process of mining them often helps fund
armed conflict. The minerals in question are tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold.
Tin is used for soldering metal components together. Tantalum is in capacitors,
a device that stores electrical energy; tungsten is used to help
make the phone vibrate, and gold is used in the circuit board connectors.
67% of the world’s tantalum comes from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mining tantalum
minerals helps fuel the violence between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups in the eastern part of the
Democratic Republic of Congo. There are over 120 armed groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of
Congo, and miners often have to pay taxes to these armed groups to gain access to the coltan mines.
At some mines, armed groups have fully taken over. Sometimes, they will extract
the ore themselves or use slavery to obtain it. They’ll then use whatever minerals are mined to
buy weapons. Needless to say, the conditions at the mines can be dangerous in and of themselves.
According to pastor and civil society leader in Bukavu, Nicolas Kyalangalilwa,
“I think in the past four or five years, every year we’ve had people
being buried underground. So, it is a very dangerous job, both from a security side,
from a financial stability side, from a health and safety side.”
This is, admittedly, a problem that expands far beyond Steve Jobs,
but he most certainly contributed to the issues involving conflict minerals.
While Steve Jobs didn’t fear honking at slow-moving police officers,
he also didn’t fear having his employees imitate police. In 2011,
Apple lost an iPhone prototype in a Bay Area bar. Using GPS, Apple security
personnel tracked the phone’s location to the home of 22-year-old Sergio Calderón
Calderón would pay the price for Apple’s incompetence. Apple sent security guards
to his house to ask about his whereabouts on the evening the
iPhone disappeared. They flashed their badges at Calderón and told him that,
if he didn’t allow them to search his home, they’d return with a warrant.
Calderón allowed them to search his home, including his computer. They never once
revealed to Calderón that they were not real police. They were just Apple employees who did
not have the authority to enter Calderón's home or the ability to obtain a warrant.
They had even threatened Calderón’s family. They asked about Calderón’s
family’s citizenship status and even asked who in the household were American
citizens. The implication of getting them deported was not lost on Calderón.
They didn’t find the phone at Calderón’s residence. As they were leaving,
they would try to bribe Calderón. Based on Calderón’s version of events, he said that one
of the security guards was on the phone with the supposed owner of the iPhone. They told Calderón,
“The person’s not pressing charges, they just want it back, and they’ll give you $300.”
Steve Jobs couldn’t be bothered with giving to charity. Despite his billions,
he had no interest in philanthropy. In 1986, he opened the Steven P. Jobs
Foundation but closed the whole thing down in a little over a year. He returned to
Apple in 1997 and immediately shut down Apple’s philanthropic programs for good.
No one completely knew what his motives were. Mark Vermillion,
who ran the short-lived foundation, stated that Jobs didn’t have time for
it. “I don’t know if it was my ability to get him excited about it,” Vermillion once said.
Jobs was far more focused on expanding Apple as a company. Jobs has absolutely
no public record of ever giving to charity. It still manages to be astonishing despite
all of his bad behavior throughout his life. Most American billionaires give
to charity in some way, even if it’s just for the tax write-off.
We’ve covered a lot of the worst parts of Steve Jobs as a person,
we wanted to end on a sillier note. Jobs had a disgustingly weird habit he would partake in.
He used to put his feet in the company toilets.
It was one of his go-to stress relievers in the early days of
Apple. He would go into the bathrooms at Apple and soak his bare feet in the
toilet water. We’re not sure how this could be considered relaxing. All we
can think about is what kind of germs he might have collected on his feet.
But it sounds like hygiene just wasn’t a thing for Steve Jobs. When Jobs worked at Atari,
he was placed on the night shift due to the fact he didn’t bathe very often and
he liked to walk around barefoot. For a man who demanded so much perfection,
he seemed to be completely at ease with having no standards for himself.
It’s just another bizarre piece of the puzzle that was Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs stole ideas, never gave back to his community, and he was a terrible human being
in his professional and private life. Yet his legacy is that of an innovator, and, to some, he
was a role model. He did change the world with his work, but maybe he isn’t the person to look up to.
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