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Comment by squigz | Hacker News Reader

> Steve Jobs was famously an asshole. Apple couldn't exist if every manager acted like him, but would it exist if he didn't?

Is there any reason to believe it wouldn't?

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Yes. That’s a completely different type of CEO.

If he wasn’t an asshole he might have spent time with his daughter and maybe not came back to Apple at all when it was failing.

And maybe we would have a more diverse ecosystem of mobile platforms and companies today, although nothing quite as fancy as Apple's. Perhaps we also won't have hundreds, if not thousands of founders mistreating their employees under the delusion that they are fashioning themselves after Steve Jobs.

Yes, I'm sure it would be all sunshine and rainbows without the Great Fruit Satan around. The point is the company as it is today probably wouldn't exist.

The question is what evidence suggests that Jobs being an asshole led to Apple's success?

There isn’t any. The only evidence is that everything about Steve Jobs, good and bad, produced the successful outcome.

There is no reason to think fundamentally altering his personality and therefore the entire way he interacted with and ultimately selected leadership underneath him would not drastically change the outcome.

Well I don't think it wouldn't change the outcome - I just don't agree that it would necessarily mean Apple would be less successful. In fact, I might argue it would probably have been more successful had he not been an asshole - because I don't see how his vision about technology was dependant on him being an asshole.

There are people that react well to pressure. All of his directs were made up of those kind of people. These people view a leader focused on being nice as “weak” or “lacking backbone” so they flounder and wash out of environments like that.

There is no reason to think apple would be better if it was effectively run by entirely different leadership.

> The question is what evidence suggests that Jobs being an asshole led to Apple's success?

Could this be measured?

He ceased being the CEO for a while, and then he was CEO again. They had no choice the first time (he was the founder), but the second time they must have thought the risk and annoyance of having an asshole CEO were worth it.

He was also CEO of NeXT and Pixar in between the Apple gigs.

Steve Jobs founded Apple, so my bet is it wouldn't have existed without him.

Pedantry really has no place here. The question was whether Apple would exist as it is (i.e., as successful as it is) if Jobs were not an asshole. It was not whether it would exist at all if he didn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

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