Steve Jobs

[luckyluke 2]

I'm in the 'this is all a bit OTT' group but RIP and all that.

 

(Typed on my iPhone whilst on the bog. If nothing else, Apple/Jobs have ensured that no matter where I am, I no longer have to worry about finding something to occupy myself whilst having a shit. What a legacy)

[Guest alex]

Leaving a tribute to Jobs whilst having one. Nice.

[Dr Gloom 22187]

I don't know a single person that doesn't own at least one apple device. I'm with Andrew. He was a great innovator, with a knack of spotting the next big trend; a product guy who could see what consumers wanted before they did and knew how to package, design and market the fuck out of a product. A great business man. The best CEO ever to come out of Silicon Valley. RIP.

 

(typed lying in bed on my iPad)

 

A single person? Really? I know plenty, including myself. Never owned or installed a single Apple device/application, and I'm fine with that.

 

He did a lot but I think you're giving him too much credit - he didn't do all the work.

 

Really. Everyone i know has at least an iPhone or an iPod. Even my Dad's got iPhone FFS.

[Brock Manson 0]

RIP and all that.

 

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the...-public-giving/

 

The Mystery of Steve Jobs’s Public Giving

BY ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

 

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

Steve Jobs, a founder of Apple, has focused on his work to improve the lives of millions of people through technology.

Steve Jobs is a genius. He is an innovator. A visionary. He is perhaps the most beloved billionaire in the world.

 

Surprisingly, there is one thing that Mr. Jobs is not, at least not yet: a prominent philanthropist.

 

Despite accumulating an estimated $8.3 billion fortune through his holdings in Apple and a 7.4 percent stake in Disney (through the sale of Pixar), there is no public record of Mr. Jobs giving money to charity. He is not a member of the Giving Pledge, the organization founded by Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates to persuade the nation’s wealthiest families to pledge to give away at least half their fortunes. (He declined to participate, according to people briefed on the matter.) Nor is there a hospital wing or an academic building with his name on it.

 

None of this is meant to judge Mr. Jobs. I have long been a huge admirer of Mr. Jobs and consider him the da Vinci of our time. Before writing this column, I had reservations about even raising the issue given his ill health, and frankly, because of the enormous positive impact his products have had by improving the lives of millions of people through technology.

 

 

DealBook Column

VIEW ALL POSTS

Article Tools

 

E-mail ThisPrint208 Comments

Recommend

Share

TUMBLRDIGGLINKEDINREDDITPERMALINK

Twitter

And, of course, it is very possible that Mr. Jobs, who has always preferred to remain private, has donated money anonymously or has drafted a plan to give away his wealth upon his death. (There has long been speculation that an anonymous $150 million donation to the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco may have come from Mr. Jobs.) His wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, sits on the boards of Teach for America and the New Schools Venture Fund, among others, and presumably donates money to those organizations, though neither she nor her husband are listed among its big donors.

 

But the lack of public philanthropy by Mr. Jobs — long whispered about, but rarely said aloud — raises some important questions about the way the public views business and business people at a time when some “millionaires and billionaires” are criticized for not giving back enough while others like Mr. Jobs are lionized.

 

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment.

 

Mr. Jobs has clearly never craved money for money’s sake and has never been ostentatious with his wealth. He took a $1-a-year salary from Apple before stepping down as chief executive last week, though his stock options have made him billions of dollars. In a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine, he said of his riches, “You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.”

 

Which makes his lack of public giving all the more curious. At one time in his life, Mr. Jobs clearly spent time thinking about philanthropy. In 1986, after leaving Apple and founding NeXT, he started the Steven P. Jobs Foundation. But he closed it a little over a year later. Mark Vermilion, whom Mr. Jobs hired away from Apple to run the foundation, said in an interview, “He clearly didn’t have the time.” Mr. Vermilion said that Mr. Jobs was interested in financing programs involving nutrition and vegetarianism, while Mr. Vermilion pushed him toward social entrepreneurism. “I don’t know if it was my inability to get him excited about it,” he said. “I can’t criticize Steve.”

 

Two of his close friends, both of whom declined to be quoted by name, told me that Mr. Jobs had said to them in recent years, as his wealth ballooned, that he could do more good focusing his energy on continuing to expand Apple than on philanthropy, especially since his illness. “He has been focused on two things — building the team at Apple and his family,” another friend said. “That’s his legacy. Everything else is a distraction.”

 

Yet with not many exceptions, most American billionaires have taken up philanthropy in a public way and helped inspire future generations of charitable giving. And those that haven’t have typically come under scrutiny.

 

Before Bill Gates decided to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to give away their entire fortune, he was often cast as a greedy monopolist. Similarly, critics of Mr. Buffett sometimes zinged arrows at him before he announced his plan to give away the bulk of his wealth, using the foundation of his friend Bill Gates to allocate the money. Even after he announced his philanthropic plans, Mr. Buffett was criticized for not giving his money away earlier or for not devoting more energy to giving it away himself.

 

“He gave away 2 and one half cents for the first 70-some-odd years of his life. He gave away nothing and then in one fell swoop he gave away almost all of his money, thoughtlessly, to one guy,” Michael Steinhardt, the hedge fund manager and philanthropist, said in a somewhat surprising outburst on CNBC earlier this year. (Mr. Steinhardt has long held an inexplicable grudge against Mr. Buffett.)

 

Another billionaire, Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores, did not start the Walton Family Foundation until he was 69, just five years before his death. In his autobiography, Mr. Walton expressed misgivings about formal charity programs. “We have never been inclined to give any undeserving stranger a free ride.” He was also reluctant for Wal-Mart itself to give money to charity. “We feel very strongly,” he wrote, “that Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business.”

 

Of course, some wealthy executives give away money, in part, to buff their image — and Mr. Jobs has never needed any help in that department.

 

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, gave a $100 million challenge grant to Newark’s troubled school system. The donation was made a week before the movie “The Social Network” was to be released and many speculated, perhaps unfairly, that the donation was timed to blunt any negative repercussions from the film. And programs like the Giving Pledge have been criticized by some philanthropists as more about getting attention than being selfless.

 

Mr. Jobs, 56 years old, is not alone in his single-minded focus on work over philanthropy. It wasn’t until Mr. Buffett turned 75 that he turned his attention to charity, saying that he was better off spending his time allocating capital at Berkshire Hathaway — where he believed he could create even greater wealth to give away — than he would ever be at devoting his energies toward running a foundation.

 

And last year, Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire, defended his lack of charity and his refusal to sign the Giving Pledge. “What we need to do as businessmen is to help to solve the problems, the social problems,” he said in an interview on CNBC. “To fight poverty, but not by charity.”

 

Mr. Jobs’s views on charity are unclear since he rarely talks about it. But in 1997, when Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he closed the company’s philanthropic programs. At the time, he said he wanted to restore the company’s profitability. Despite the company’s $14 billion in profits last year and its $76 billion cash pile today, the giving programs have never been reinstated.

 

While many high-growth technology companies have philanthropic arms, Apple does not. It does not have a company matching program for charitable giving by its employees like some other Fortune 500 companies. The company did donate $100,000 in 2008 to a group seeking to block Proposition 8, a ballot measure that would have banned same-sex marriage in California. But over all, Apple has been one of “America’s least philanthropic companies,” as termed by Stanford Social Innovation Review, a magazine about the nonprofit sector, in 2007.

 

Still it is worth noting, and commending, Mr. Jobs for his role last year in helping push California to become the first state to create a live donor registry for kidney transplants. Mr. Jobs suffers from pancreatic cancer and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 in Memphis, in part because no livers were available in California. A conversation he had with Maria Shriver, then California’s first lady, led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to help take up the cause.

 

Mr. Jobs helped introduce the legislation at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital with Mr. Schwarzenegger, but that appears to be the last time he publicly advocated on behalf of cancer patients. Unlike Lance Armstrong and other celebrated cancer survivors, Mr. Jobs has not used his prominence to promote charitable giving.

 

In 2006, in a scathing column in Wired, Leander Kahney, author of “Inside Steve’s Brain,” wrote: “Yes, he has great charisma and his presentations are good theater. But his absence from public discourse makes him a cipher. People project their values onto him, and he skates away from the responsibilities that come with great wealth and power.”

 

Yet Mr. Jobs has always been upfront about where he has chosen to focus. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 1993 , he said, “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me.”

 

Let’s hope Mr. Jobs has many more years to make wonderful things — and perhaps to inspire his legions of admirers to give.

 

Has there been any indication as to what is going to happen with his billions now that he's passed away? Just curious is all as I didn't realise he wasn't part of the billionaire's pledge.

[Gemmill 46102]

I'm over this now. Lock the thread.

[Guest alex]

Da Vinci of our time. FFS, what does that say about our time? Or the author of that piece?

[Ketsbaia 0]

When he returned to Apple after his illness he cancelled all of the organisations philanthropic campaigns, didn't donate a cent of his fortune to charity and made my Uni life hell as I tried to get to grips with Apple Macs that did infact do all the bad things that PCs did, therefore Gates > Jobs.

[Ketsbaia 0]

I think I'll keep my iPhone charged half battery all day today #iSad

 

A better tribute would be to let it die, surely?

[Andrew 4872]

When he returned to Apple after his illness he cancelled all of the organisations philanthropic campaigns, didn't donate a cent of his fortune to charity and made my Uni life hell as I tried to get to grips with Apple Macs that did infact do all the bad things that PCs did, therefore Gates > Jobs.

 

publicly

[ewerk 31229]

http://www.rositacortez.com/social-media-1...-case-of-apple/

[luckyluke 2]

"No, YOU show me proof that God DOESN'T exist"

[Ketsbaia 0]

Didn't really seem to give a shit about those poor lads and lasses at Foxconn either.

[LoveTheBobby 1]

"Free Candle - *****Dedicated to S. Jobs whose vision lit the way to the future for hundreds of millions. You will always be remembered.

Thank you to the thousands of people around the world who have used this app in tribute.

May the candle never go out.*****"

 

Have a word .

 

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-candle/id434064534?mt=8

[wykikitoon 20859]

Really. Everyone i know has at least an iPhone or an iPod. Even my Dad's got iPhone FFS.

 

He was a copyright nazi from what Ive read but a successful businessman nonetheless who took advantage of the fickle and OCD buying patterns of the middle classes.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

I've never owned an apple product. I don't think technology is wholly a force for good and I include some of the Apple products in that. What is the legacy of Steve Jobs? Now you can't have a conversation with people because halfway through the sentence their eyes will wander away onto their fucking Ipad as they twiddle about on facebook and tweet about the fucking X Factor or whatever crap they've been watching on telly. Now they can pump 50 gigabytes of Britney Spears into their ears on a loop from a stick the size of your thumb, leaving them even more braindead and bog-eyed than before. Oh great, what incredible progress for society.

[Howmanheyman 33921]

I personally don't have an ipod/pad/phone and know people who don't, besides, is the criteria for mourning these days? When the bloke who made the Dyson dies will I have to join twitter to pay my respects? "He changed the way I hoovered up my carpet, etc"?

 

Littlewoods Lingerie section editor passes away: "Today I'm going to glue some pages together in tribute"

 

And so on.

[Billy Castell 0]

I personally don't have an ipod/pad/phone and know people who don't, besides, is the criteria for mourning these days? When the bloke who made the Dyson dies will I have to join twitter to pay my respects? "He changed the way I hoovered up my carpet, etc"?

 

Littlewoods Lingerie section editor passes away: "Today I'm going to glue some pages together in tribute"

 

And so on.

 

I agree .

 

He was a bloke in charge of a very successful computer company. He died fairly young of cancer. End of fucking story. He isn't the Edison/Da Vinci of our age, but Princess Diana: the next generation. There are some right mongs in this world.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

tbf Jobs would have passed his O levels, Diana Spencer failed them twice. Jobs was brilliant at marketing and selling products, anyone can hug an Aids victim. May as well give them a blowjob too seeing as you were buying Gucci dresses with tax money after marrying a gormless prick who whispers to plants.

Edited October 7, 2011 by Kevin S. Assilleekunt

[2bias 3]

Rip

[wykikitoon 20859]

I suppose its the way society is nowadays tbh. A bunch of techno geeks who cant hold a conversation without their phones etc around them.

 

I was away for the weekend a couple of months back. In the same place staying there was a group of lads. At breakfast not one of the spoke to each other, they all had iPads or phones on and using them. Society and the world is better for that? I dont think so.

[Park Life 71]

Da Vinci of our time. FFS, what does that say about our time? Or the author of that piece?

 

Ridiculous.

 

"Oh look if you move your finger over the screen the page scrolls"!!!!!!!11111133221221!!1

 

Fuck off.

[Happy Face 29]

da Vinci worked alone didn't he?

 

more like Edison was jobs surely. Taking all the credit for the hard work of a team of designers and engineers. Bloody important bloke like.

[Kitman 2207]

tbf Jobs would have passed his O levels, Diana Spencer failed them twice. Jobs was brilliant at marketing and selling products, anyone can hug an Aids victim. May as well give them a blowjob too seeing as you were buying Gucci dresses with tax money after marrying a gormless prick who whispers to plants.

 

 

"God bless you ma'am, that was fantastic. Any chance of a sandwich?"

[Nyff 0]

All the follow up to this and the tributes and the like remind me a lot of the worship of Henry Ford in Brave New World.

[Guest alex]

I personally don't have an ipod/pad/phone and know people who don't, besides, is the criteria for mourning these days? When the bloke who made the Dyson dies will I have to join twitter to pay my respects? "He changed the way I hoovered up my carpet, etc"?

 

Littlewoods Lingerie section editor passes away: "Today I'm going to glue some pages together in tribute"

 

And so on.