Jerk? No, Steve Jobs was an asshole, across the board. He was also a visionary and he was able to achieve great things. Guess what, being a highly achieving visionary is orthogonal to being a good person. People need to stop conflating the two and stop idolizing people just because of their achievements.
For some of this tone and context matter.<p>If you tell someone they smell like a toilet but you smile before and laugh after, or sort of squint and say it playfully, it might be a joke and not mean.<p>This is doubly true of a family member.
Jobs famously used his wealth to jump in line for a kidney transplant.
His penchant for parking in handicapped spaces is well documented.<p>I don't think the book is making him out to be a jerk....
I've seen this pattern from quite a few authors before. They describe Jobs as a jerk, and then go on to explain how his jerktitude actually helped them later on, like he was teaching them a life lesson or something. He was just very good at manipulating people.
> The neighbors next door worried about the teenage Lisa, and one night, when Mr. Jobs was out, they moved her from his house and into theirs. Against Mr. Jobs’s wishes, the neighbors paid for her to finish college. (He later paid them back.)<p>> Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes her father’s frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her. “Sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute,” she writes, “walking out of restaurants without paying the bill.” When her mother found a beautiful house and asked Mr. Jobs to buy it for her and Lisa, he agreed it was nice — but bought it for himself and moved in with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.<p>> Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she wrote “Small Fry” in part to figure out why he withheld money from her even as his wealth ballooned, and as he spent it more freely on the children he had with Ms. Powell Jobs. She said she now sees it was about teaching her that money can corrupt.<p>It's almost as if whenever financial support was involved, he went out of his way to actually embody the moral corruption and decadence of wealth. It's an extraordinarily Spartan and hard-bitten way to teach these lessons. One must marvel at the mental fortitude required to keep coming back to him with such obvious love. She seems to have taken it as an almost Islamic lesson in peace-through-surrender, requiring the same absolute faith without recompense.