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Decoding Steve Jobs: Was He a Genius or Cruel?

Decoding Steve Jobs: Was He a Genius or Cruel?

By Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times | Updated: 8 September 2015 10:13 IST

Nearly four years after Steve Jobs died, a debate is still raging.

Does Jobs deserve to be admired?

That's the underlying question that emerged in a new documentary released over the weekend by Alex Gibney in "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine." It is also a question that lies beneath the surface of the upcoming biopic by Aaron Sorkin, "Steve Jobs," which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival this weekend and will open on October 9.

Jobs, of course, was a complicated leader: brilliantly creative and obsessive about every last detail yet so maniacal that he could make his colleagues cry and, yes, there is no getting around it, at times, he created his own truth. (That's the polite way of putting it.)

Gibney, who directed the recent HBO documentary "Going Clear" about Scientology, explained what appeared to be his rationale for pursuing a documentary about Jobs in a voice-over at the beginning of the film.

"When Steve Jobs died, I was mystified," Gibney said, as he showed images of people all over the world mourning his loss. "What accounted for the grief of millions of people who didn't know him? I'd seen it with John Lennon and Martin Luther King, but Steve Jobs wasn't a singer or a civil-rights leader." He added: "The grief for Jobs seemed to go beyond the products he left behind. We mourned the man himself. But why?"

Gibney, a remarkably talented and persuasive filmmaker, uses the next two hours to seemingly make the case that Jobs, the man, doesn't deserve the iconic status he attained. Through a series of interviews - including one with the mother of a child Jobs denied was his own until much later - Gibney paints Jobs as "ruthless, deceitful and cruel." Gibney retreads a laundry list of Jobs' sins: backdating options, factory conditions in China and secret agreements with Silicon Valley rivals to prevent employee-poaching.

But all these efforts to paint Jobs as a hero or a villain miss a larger truth: He can be both and still be worthy of acclaim. More than 700 million of his iPhones have been sold around the world, with a new version to be announced Wednesday. Hundreds of millions of people spend more time with their iPhones - and all the copycat and directive devices - than just about anything else on any given day. Think about this: He managed to create an emotional attachment between humans and a device.

Say what you want about the man, but you don't have to be an "Apploonian" to appreciate he has an authentic claim on changing the world during this last generation.

Not surprisingly, most people who have had a huge influence on the world have been flawed, some deeply so. It should go without saying, but most people happen to be flawed in one way or another.

Gibney held out Lennon and King as somehow more worthy of the wave of grieving that took place after they died than Jobs. But both men, in truth, were terribly troubled, too.

Lennon's own son Julian told The London Telegraph in 1998: "I felt he was a hypocrite. Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world, but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces - no communication, adultery, divorce?"

King had his own personal demons: It is well chronicled that he was a serial adulterer.

Sadly, it does appear that being flawed in one area may help in others. In an article in The Atlantic titled "Why It Pays to Be a Jerk," the author Jerry Useem quotes several studies that show that nice guys don't usually win. Donald Hambrick, a management professor at Penn State, told the magazine, "To the extent that innovation and risk-taking are in short supply in the corporate world, narcissists are the ones who are going to step up to the plate."

Of course, not everyone thinks Jobs was a jerk. Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president for Internet software and services, wrote on Twitter that he felt the Gibney film was "an inaccurate and meanspirited view of my friend. It's not a reflection of the Steve I knew."

But the black hat-white hat version of Jobs may be too confining.

In a fascinating interview last year with Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, Jony Ive, Apple's famed designer and longtime friend of Jobs, recounted a telling story. He remembered a time when Jobs had been tough - too tough, in Ive's estimation - on his team and Ive pulled him aside and told him to be bit nicer. "'Well, why?" Jobs replied. "Because I care about the team," Ive replied. "And he said this brutally, brilliantly insightful thing, which was, 'No Jony, you're just really vain,'" Ive recalled. "He said, 'You just want people to like you, and I'm surprised at you because I thought you really held the work up as the most important, not how you believed you were perceived by other people.'"

That story and the documentary left me with two questions: Would you rather do something extraordinary that benefits the lives of millions of people? Or be liked by several hundred? And does it have to be an either-or question?

The answer, like Jobs, is complicated.

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