William Fankboner

I found myself not only saddened, but annoyed, at the death of Steve Jobs. Maybe I hadn’t been keeping up, but the last I heard his cancer was in remission. Suddenly all the business columnists and technology insiders were talking as though his passing had been a foregone conclusion. They hadn’t dwelled on the fact in print out of consideration for Jobs and his family. Such reverence is rare in the American press, but it was in Jobs’s case well-earned. He had become the great, long-sought cultural hero of our time.

Not that Steve Jobs was a saint. In fact he could be a ferocious and brutal critic. I saw him explode with the wrath of Zeus on Olympus when a new management hire introduced himself during a company meeting with a bullet list of his professional accomplishments. Jobs angrily dismissed the manager’s résumé as “bullshit,” and said such a conventional skill-set would be of little use in his company.

And he could be vindictive. A distinguished magazine publisher once told me that early in his career Jobs had mounted a furious campaign to have him fired because he had written an unfavorable review of one of his products. Then there was the famous story—probably apocryphal, but no less telling for that—of the time Jobs got on an elevator with one of his employees; and by the time they reached the ground floor the employee had been fired.