this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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Yes, because of his financial success, he considers himself a genius—which he very obviously never was. This is a common trait among billionaires. Many of them are psychopaths who have amassed their wealth through utter unscrupulousness, irresponsibility in the form of an absurd willingness to take risks, and sheer luck.
In the case of Musk, Thiel, and various others, that stroke of luck was PayPal. That company was so successful that it made all of its investors immeasurably rich—it was more a matter of chance that PayPal succeeded, and everything that followed really wasn’t all that difficult because that kind of money cannot lose anymore no matter how ridiculous stupid someone might be.
That’s precisely the problem: We only hear about the people who bet everything on one card and won—they’re portrayed as geniuses, which they never were. We never hear anything about all those who failed miserably—and that’s the vast majority.
Billionaires aren’t geniuses or even above-average in intelligence. Their financial success has, in the rarest of cases, anything to do with intelligence.
Some of them might be considered marketing geniuses, like Jobs was.
I would rather consider Steve Wozniak than Steve Jobs. Jobs was undoubtedly excellent at selling products, and he was certainly a smart (and also ruthless) businessman, but the pioneer—and the one who actually "did the thing"—was Wozniak.
It’s true, of course, that Wozniak probably wouldn’t have been able to make his product a success on his own, but that’s precisely where the problem lies: Bill Gates is certainly no fool either, but DOS—the product that made Microsoft the billion-dollar-company that it is today—was developed by someone else, namely Gary Kildall. Gates’s achievement consisted mainly of making a lot of money from it. He did just that, and did it well, while Kildall was fobbed off with a ridiculously small sum relative to the product’s success, since he was in a weak position at the time.
Although Gates was far more technically adept than Jobs, his core qualities were essentially the same—a good sence for business and a utter lack of scruples: Kildall never received a bonus payment from Microsoft for his work that would have even remotely acknowledged his importance.
There are many people in the IT sector who are worthy of admiration, but almost none of those who truly deserve it are among those the industry or rather the public celebrates as pioneers or visionaries—these are almost exclusively businesspeople who played only a marginal role, if any, in the development of the products they market.
In my view, success stories like Apple or Microsoft are fundamentally no longer possible today, since visionary spirit, wisdom, and inventiveness have been permanently replaced by the inhuman logic of cutthroat capitalism, which the U.S., above all, embodies. Its heroes are always the wrong ones—not those who have advanced humanity through their achievements, but always those who have known how to exploit others particularly ruthlessly for their own ends. These people lead the Western world today, which is why it stands on the brink of total collapse, since these people know nothing but boundless greed.
They are utterly unfit to lead millions upon millions of people—yet that is precisely what they seek to do in their pathological hubris.
The thing about The Woz is, he showers.
I really think Jobs dying was the start of the tech industry enshittification.
While he was a massive cunt and didn't personally develop the products, he pushed his people to innovate, and the rest of the industry followed to try to keep up.
Once iPhones became yearly iterative bullshit, the industry followed.
But Moore's Law slowing down does come into play.
My lay-person perspective is Jobs pioneered enshittification. The iPod was not an mp3 player, you had to use proprietary format music, which needed to be loaded with iTunes, a piece of proprietary software that acted almost like a virus once installed on your machine.
Huh? You could use mp3s and other formats on the iPod.
Yeah, but you could only load the mp3’s on there from iTunes on one specific computer. Other mp3 players at the time would let you drop mp3’s in from any computer’s file system (which enabled a lot of piracy)
It may be that his death marked a turning point, in a sense: He had already been forced out of his role as CEO by business executives in 1985 and didn’t return until 1997, when the company was on the brink of collapse. He then truly turned the company around through innovation: first with the iPod, then with the iPhone—both products that changed the world. I don’t want to downplay this foresight at all, and I also think that Jobs was someone who cared about the cause—about products that are meaningful and useful.
Nevertheless, I don’t believe the start of enshittification can be pinned to the date of his death. Rather, he was one of those, who laid the groundwork for it—here’s an example: soon, Google will tighten the screws and design the Play Store along the closed model that Apple introduced back in the day.
In short: I think there are many other reasons. Jobs was an outstanding businessman, but he lived in a different world than the one we live in today.
Did you write that wall of text to say that Wozniak was the marketing genius instead of Jobs?
I'm pretty sure they were saying that while Woz was the real genius that made the product, simply making a superior product isn't a guarantee it'll be successful.
In reality, you need both people.
He understood the market and knew what products to put there, I'd say he is a genius at that - but imo a marketing genius would be someone who can sell anything no matter how shitty the product is, so i'd say that term would be better fitting for his competitors at Microsoft for example.