Do we like Steve Jobs?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up and there is real good, but a famously harsh style and a thin personal giving record keep him mid-table.
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955, adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and raised in Mountain View, the heart of the electronics industry. He quit Reed College after six months, worked at Atari, then started Apple with Steve Wozniak in the family garage in 1976, aged 21. A power struggle with CEO John Sculley pushed him out in 1985; he then built NeXT and bought the animation outfit that became Pixar, and came back to Apple in 1997.
The reputation as a boss is the big stain. His biographer Walter Isaacson told 60 Minutes he was abrasive and cantankerous, and said Jobs could have been one of the world's worst managers even as he made great products. Isaacson recounted him telling a programmer who had worked all night that the work was badly flawed. Jobs's own explanation was that he wanted to be around people who demand perfection, which is a fair reason and a cold way to deliver it.
The courtroom side is mostly shareholder and wage fights. In 2008 Jobs and other Apple executives and directors settled shareholder suits over backdated stock options for about 14 million dollars, paid largely by the company's insurer. Years after his death, Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe settled a class action brought by employees who alleged the firms agreed not to poach each other's staff; final approval of 415 million dollars came in 2015. One antitrust professor called Jobs “a walking antitrust violation”, though the reporting I read doesn't show him as a named defendant.
On the harm test, I found nothing hateful from him about LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants. One NeXT employee's account has Jobs working with HR so partner coverage reached gay staff, and Apple gave 100,000 dollars against California's Proposition 8 in 2008 while he was CEO. On the planet, he published an open letter in 2007 promising to phase out toxic substances after Greenpeace ranked Apple last, so he responded to pressure rather than leading, but he did respond.
Nothing new on him lately, which is no surprise for a man who died in 2011. The latest news is the usual anniversary stuff: on what would have been his 71st birthday in February 2026, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted a tribute calling him an incredible leader, innovator and friend. That's a company tribute, not a verdict, so take it as colour.
The good stuff is real but oddly thin on the personal side. A 2011 New York Times report found no public record of him giving to charity, which Bono answered by pointing to Apple becoming the biggest contributor to (Product)RED, the AIDS campaign, with tens of millions of dollars. His Stanford speech in 2005, ending “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”, is still handed to graduates a generation on.