Chicago Booth Review Podcast Steve Jobs’s Ghost Haunts Silicon Valley

Hal Weitzman: Streaming services love a good tech startup business story, preferably one featuring a quirky CEO devoid of self-awareness, with an oversized ego, a grandiose sense of ambition and purpose, and one finger always resting on the self-destruct button.

Hence Super Pumped, the story of Travis Kalanick and Uber, The Dropout, about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and WeCrashed, the tale of Adam Neumann and WeWork. If you haven’t had a chance to watch them all, fear not, we’ve got you covered.

Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I’m Hal Weitzman, and in this episode we’re sharing insights from John Paul Rollert, an adjunct associate professor at Chicago Booth and our in-house ethicist. In this essay from 2023, Rollert watched those three streaming series and saw one common thread: the echoes of the legendary Steve Jobs. It’s read for us by the author.

John Paul Rollert: Academics move at their own pace, often defiantly so. For months I was pestered by friends for a business ethicist’s opinion of the streaming service triumvirate—Super Pumped, The Dropout, and WeCrashed. A smorgasbord of schadenfreude drawn from the pages of the business press, all three shows debuted in spring 2022 and were widely acclaimed for exposing Silicon Valley excess by savaging the founders of Uber, Theranos, and WeWork, respectively.

Bankers might be inclined to ask what took Hollywood so long. For decades, it has found ample excuse to interrogate the culture of high finance—Wall Street (1987), Boiler Room (2000), American Psycho (2000), Margin Call (2011)—and the conclusion has consistently been that enviable success requires participants to sell their souls, or at least a raft of crummy securities.

Comparatively speaking, the tech sector has gotten off easy. Before the recent season of television, the most noteworthy illustration of “bad business” in Silicon Valley was The Social Network (2010), David Fincher’s darkly comical account of the litigious origins of Facebook. It’s a splendid movie, but its strength as an exercise in storytelling comes at the price of its potential for social commentary. The film tells a fairly conventional tale of sophomoric striving and human frailty. An awkward and unlikable young man lies, cheats, and casts aside old friends in pursuit of being cool. But the movie’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is ultimately too idiosyncratic and ad hominem to be a cautionary tale about the tech sector. “Zuck” is simply a weirdo who buries his face in code and backs into a billion-dollar company.

This is not a failure of Fincher nor of the movie’s silver-tongued screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin. In addition to the fact that agitprop rarely makes for enduring art, when The Social Network debuted, the wunderkinds of the tech world represented a welcome alternative to the wolves of Wall Street. This apple-cheeked army of hoodie-wearing overachievers would “bring the world closer together” (in Facebook’s mission statement) by building new networks of relationships, expanding the global reach of e-commerce, and filling our pockets with “apps.” They would prove that the newest, most exciting, and, yes, most lucrative frontiers of capitalism could be fully explored while still keeping faith with Google’s famed credo: “Don’t be evil.”

Oh, what a difference a decade makes.

Today, the tech sector is synonymous with emotionally maladroit leaders who vacillate between sketchy marketing, self-mythologizing humbug, and the tendency to regard as a mark of genius what is in reality nothing more than a mean streak. Such traits serve as themes for Super Pumped, The Dropout, and WeCrashed, something I discovered when I finally set aside time to watch them. I embarked on a 24-hour pilgrimage of programming spread over three consecutive days, a vast plain of “prestige television,” and as I made my way across it, episode by episode, one name, like a natural wonder, slowly rose into view: Steve Jobs.

Moving violation

Steve Jobs died in October 2011, nearly a year after The Social Network arrived in theaters and only a few weeks before the biography he authorized and collaborated on was published. That book, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, was a worldwide sensation, eventually selling more than 3 million copies in the United States alone. Among its readers appear to have been Elizabeth Holmes, Travis Kalanick, and Adam Neumann—the founders of Theranos, Uber, and WeWork. If their on-screen depictions are at all accurate, each seems to have been inspired by the Apple founder’s spiky personality and shamanistic persona.

I spent the first day of my journey with Kalanick, watching all seven episodes of Super Pumped, the Showtime series based on the eponymous book by New York Times technology reporter Mike Isaac. In the opening scene, the show depicts Kalanick posing a question that establishes the tone of the series as well as the moral conundrum at its heart.

“So you want to work for Uber,” Kalanick says to a potential hire. “I have one question for you. Are you an a——hole?”

Now, if you’re thinking, Oh, thank goodness. This young man wants to make sure that only the best people work at his company!—well, you’re half right. Kalanick does want only the best people working at Uber. Unfortunately, he believes that being an a——hole is a prerequisite for such excellence. “That’s the right answer,” Kalanick says when the job applicant answers in the affirmative, “because if you’re not, you’ll never make it at Uber.”

By all accounts, Steve Jobs was a legendary a——hole. “He was an enlightened being who was cruel,” Chrisann Brennan, the mother of his first child, told Isaacson. “I think the issue is empathy,” said another former girlfriend, Tina Redse. “The capacity for empathy is lacking.” Isaacson, who spent hundreds of hours with Jobs in the final years of Jobs’s life, saw things differently. “When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness,” he wrote. “Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.”

Hurt them at will. Coming from a fairly sympathetic biographer, that’s quite the statement.

Jobs did not deny his sadistic bent—“This is who I am,” he replied, when Isaacson confronted him—but as the biography makes clear, Jobs regarded cruelty as a whip he could snap to drive out the insufficiently talented from among Apple’s ranks and brutally inspire the rest. (Jobs had something of a Manichaean view of management, Isaacson believed. He regarded the work of people around him as “either ‘the best’ or ‘totally shi——y.’”)

The willingness to upset people and established practices is captured in one of Jobs’s most famous maxims, “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.” As early Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld explained it, “Being a pirate meant moving fast, unencumbered by bureaucracy and politics.” He continued, “It meant being audacious and courageous, willing to take considerable risks for greater rewards.” It also meant slitting a throat or two when needed and engaging in a little plunder. (Steve “never minded occasionally stealing good ideas from others.”)

Rules don’t apply to pirates, or at least they don’t recognize them. Uber’s Kalanick didn’t. Much of Super Pumped involves him scheming to sidestep rules of some sort or other—moral, legal, or merely contractual. Whether it is in his directing Uber’s engineers to find ways to block officials attempting to enforce laws designed to keep the company’s drivers off the streets, or brazenly violating the terms of Apple’s App Store to identify individual iPhone users, or simply idealizing outrageous behavior (“It’s not really illegal if the laws are bulls——t in the first place.”), Kalanick embodies the description of Jobs provided to Isaacson by Apple’s longtime chief design officer, Jony Ive: “The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him.”

In the sixth episode of Super Pumped, Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Google’s self-driving car project whose company Uber purchased, puts the matter more crudely. “These f——king people, holding me and Travis to this standard like we’re average, like those standards apply,” he says. “People like me and TK, we have the ability to make the world better, and applying conventional morality to the world’s most brilliant minds is insanity.”

Insanity, indeed.

In real life, Levandowski ultimately pleaded guilty to stealing secrets from Google and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, while Kalanick, much like Jobs before him, was pushed out of the company he founded when his board of directors got tired of cleaning up after their Übermensch.

A bloody mess

I finished the final episode of Super Pumped at 2:28 in the morning. Just over 10 hours later, I started The Dropout. Based on Bad Blood (2018), the best-selling book by former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou, the Hulu series revolves around Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout and tech sector CEO who most overtly endeavored to channel Steve Jobs.

Jobs was a hero to Holmes. She kept a photo of him in her office, referred to her faulty blood-testing device as “the iPod of healthcare,” and even adopted the uniform of a jet-black turtleneck as an homage to the mock turtleneck Jobs commissioned from the Japanese designer Issey Miyake. (Holmes wore it for cover stories in Forbes, Fortune, and Inc., the last of which was titled, “The Next Steve Jobs.”)

Jobs was famously attuned to the impression made by his products as well as his person. It was a tendency that, to some, was an unwitting reflection of the fact that, for a man who was synonymous with Silicon Valley, he seemed to have little interest in benchwork. “Steve didn’t ever code,” Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak said of his colleague and frenemy. “He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs,” Business Insider reported.

If “Woz” was being uncharitable—Jobs briefly worked as a technician at Atari after dropping out of college—it is true that Jobs’s genius lay not in building new technology from the ground up but in ensuring that user-friendly design elements and sleek packaging were hallmarks of the final products.

The extraordinary success of such efforts at Apple led Jobs’s friend, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, to remark to Isaacson that Jobs “created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry.” And when it came to brand management, Jobs was as particular about how he came across to the general public as he was about the launch of the latest iPhone. “He seemed more a showman than a businessman,” former Apple CEO John Sculley told Isaacson. Jobs lured Sculley away from PepsiCo in 1983, only to be famously forced out of the company he founded by Sculley, who felt of Jobs that “every move seemed calculated, as if it were rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.”

The instincts for careful brand management and constant calculation are central to the Elizabeth Holmes we meet in The Dropout. The series portrays her as being in a protracted audition to be the next Steve Jobs. Isaacson’s biography served as both a sacred text and a how-to manual for Holmes. According to Carreyrou, employees at Theranos “could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’s career she was impersonating.”

Chief among the traits Holmes takes on from Jobs is his legendary reality distortion field. As Hertzfeld described it to Isaacson, “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.” Jobs applied this sense of uncanny conviction to due dates and design details as well as to all sorts of things he decided were not merely possible but certain. “There can be something he knows absolutely nothing about,” Ive recalled, “and because of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows what he’s talking about.”

In The Dropout, Holmes possesses the same reality-bending resolve, though she’s more ham-fisted in her willfulness. (The show includes a paperweight with the inscription “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” Holmes famously placed it, facing her, on her desk.)

Unfortunately, when the promise of her groundbreaking blood-testing technology so consistently comes up short—like Jobs before her, Holmes is hardly an engineer—what she attempts to do is supplement the will to believe with sleight of hand. In the second episode of the series, an early prototype refuses to process results. Rather than call off an imminent presentation to a potential blue-chip client, however, Holmes pushes ahead. The machine is quickly reprogrammed to give the impression of an instant diagnosis of a drop of blood, but the demonstration is entirely, 100 percent fake.

“It’s going to work,” she later assures herself. “It just didn’t—that day.”

In a reminder that the most significant corporate misdeeds are matters of collaboration and a promiscuous spirit of permissiveness, one of her engineers defends Holmes’s deception to a skeptical colleague. “When we get the box to work, we’re not even going to remember this,” he says. “We’ll be geniuses, and you’ll be able to tell this story at a conference wearing flip-flops.”

He concludes: “This is how it works.”

“It,” of course, is the ethic of “Fake it till you make it” that is the stereotypical story arc of Silicon Valley success and the engine of entrepreneurship more generally. There is the spark of it in Jobs’s reality distortion field, though its strength was so considerable precisely because, like the greatest showman-cum-salesman, Jobs didn’t know he was faking it. (“He can deceive himself,” Bill Atkinson, an early engineer at Apple, told Isaacson. “It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it.”)

Holmes’s deception included fake machines, fake numbers, and, most alarmingly, fake test results. As The Dropout makes plain, the upshot of such chicanery is that Holmes was less Jobs’s protégé than his doppelgänger, a cautionary tale for the corporate world about what happens when style overwhelms substance, sleight of hand becomes simple fraud, and reality proves a brick wall.

“Do you have any idea of what you did?” the general counsel for Theranos incredulously asks Holmes near the end of the final episode when it appears she has no sense of the harm she’s done.

“I was trying to help people,” Holmes explains. “Ultimately, the healthcare industry just was not ready for real innovation.”

The lawyer corrects her.

“You hurt people,” she says, repeating the verdict over and over again, trying to pierce Holmes’s reality distortion field. It proved impenetrable, much like it did for the man Holmes so desperately hoped to emulate.

On the third day of my streaming-series Odyssey, I looked forward to a story that didn’t end, as it did for Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, in a criminal conviction and a company’s implosion. On the contrary, I was relieved to discover that the final lap of my journey—eight episodes of WeCrashed over another 12-hour day—involved two characters who seemed less likely to blast subordinates or bilk investors than to stumble out of the back of the Scooby-Doo van.

These characters—Adam Neumann, a cofounder of the workspace-sharing giant WeWork, and his wife, Rebekah—are first presented in Apple TV’s production as a couple of vicuña-clad hippies. A liveried servant invites Adam to begin his day with a toke from a cobalt-colored bong, while Rebekah confers with an interior decorator about her airplane hangar of a kitchen where, much to her dismay, “the feng shui is off.”

Just as it had for the first two entries in my streaming-series marathon, the ghost of Steve Jobs seems to hover over WeCrashed. As Walter Isaacson recounts in his best-selling biography, Jobs, much like Adam and Rebekah, had a penchant for lifestyle fads and woo-woo mysticism that Hollywood at once likes to parody and embrace. In his teenage years, he grew his hair long, dabbled in Eastern religion, and commenced a lifelong habit of eating only certain foods, typically fruits or vegetables, for unusually long stretches of time. (“I’m a fruitarian,” one friend told Isaacson, poking fun at Jobs’s dietary pronouncements, “and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight.”)

Because of his plant-based diet, the young Jobs assumed that he didn’t need to wear deodorant. (Follow the logic? Neither do I.) And the repeated suggestion that he smelled a little odd did nothing to dent this conviction. Don Valentine, an early investor in Apple who first met Jobs when he was assigned to the night shift at Atari (a consequence of his distinct aroma as well as his tendency to call coworkers “dumb s——ts”), told Isaacson that Jobs’s “wispy beard” and skeletal appearance made him look like Ho Chi Minh. His conclusion: “Steve was trying to be the embodiment of the counterculture.”

The verdict is a reminder that, while we typically think of him as an austere prophet of a technosaturated future, Jobs was a child of the ’60s. Born in 1955, he spent his teens in the Bay Area, and while the politics of the flower power era never seemed to make any abiding impression on him, he embraced many of the cultural proclivities that attended it: a search for elevated consciousness and mystical engagement beyond the familiar portals of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the adoption of exotic medicinal regimens and novel dietary practices in pursuit of that fugitive abstraction “health and wellness,” and a disdain of materialism and moneymaking (explicit in speech, if often ambivalent in practice).

The algorithmic sensibility of Silicon Valley and the metaphysical adventurism of the ’60s counterculture might seem like strange bedfellows—computers run on complex operating systems not crystal power—but Jobs was part of a small band of technophiles who regarded advancements in computing as conducive to the aims of self-actualization. In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford—as much a touchstone for his legacy as Isaacson’s biography—Jobs recalled the Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine published in his youth whose slogan promised “access to tools” that would empower self-sufficiency among its ecologically minded readers. “It was sort of like Google in paperback form,” Jobs told the graduates of what he implausibly called “one of the bibles” of his generation. “It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

Practically speaking, Apple shared that aim. By putting a personal computer into the hands of every man, woman, and child, Jobs hoped to provide users a world of ideas as well as the virtual tools to exploit them. “We are inventing the future,” he told Bill Atkinson (according to Isaacson) when Jobs tried to persuade him to leave grad school and join the company. “Come down here and make a dent in the universe.”

The power of personality

As WeCrashed makes clear, the Neumanns share Jobs’s propensity for grandiose pronouncements. “Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness,” Adam tells a business journalist in the fourth episode. When the journalist asks how exactly WeWork might accomplish this task, Rebekah interjects, “By living proactively and with purpose. By being a student of life, for life.”

Throughout the series, Rebekah and Adam are a font of New Age inanities, a reflection of the couple’s real-life penchant for celebrating themselves and the seemingly limitless possibilities of a workspace-sharing company. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Adam proposed that WeWork could one day “solve the problem of children without parents” and end world hunger. Then he might pursue other goals he openly contemplated: running for president of the world, living forever, and becoming the first trillionaire.

Rebekah’s musings were somewhat more restrained. She proffered pseudoscientific dietary tips, such as the notion that the energy of sad animals will make you sad when you consume them. She claimed on WeWork’s corporate website that she had studied under “His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Mother Nature herself.” And she seconded her husband’s unusually expansive vision of WeWork’s mission. Her most notable addition to the company’s portfolio, WeGrow, was a venture that aimed to educate young children in subjects typically omitted from a grammar-school curriculum, such as meditation, farming, and entrepreneurship. (“In my book, there’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” she told Bloomberg.)

In the corporate world, such preposterous behavior is often tolerated by those who know better but have every incentive to keep their mouths shut. This was certainly the case for the early investors and employees at WeWork when the company was growing by leaps and bounds. But even beyond giving everyone involved good reason for embarrassment, such conduct is problematic in that it both mirrors and emboldens a self-conception that confuses superior skills and some measure of success with uncanny abilities and providential appointment. Adam Neumann shared Steve Jobs’s habit of parading around the office barefoot as if he were indeed the Dalai Lama, but he also adopted the unnerving custom of staring at people intently in the middle of conversation. “He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink,” former Apple CFO Debi Coleman said of Jobs. The upshot of that tendency? “It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.”

Colleagues made similar observations about Neumann. “When you’re in a room with Adam, he can almost convince you of anything,” a WeWork employee told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman in 2019. WeCrashed showcases Neumann’s Svengali-like powers of salesmanship, which famously included convincing SoftBank’s technology-focused Vision Fund to eventually invest more than $17 billion in WeWork, even though the company was hardly a conventional tech play. “I call it ‘space as a service,’” he tells Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of SoftBank, in an effort to frame WeWork as a SaaS venture. “We’re building data systems to connect communities around the world.”

When it comes to such immense powers of personality, whether they are a blessing or a curse depends very much on what’s in the Kool-Aid. In Jobs’s case, his charismatic persuasiveness drove people around him to create products—the Macintosh, the iPhone, the iPad—whose elegant minimalism and user-friendly interfaces made true believers of a legion of consumers who hardly fancied themselves tech nerds. And yet, the approach he took to developing these goods, combining implacable standards of taste and personal performance with an otherworldly sense of what was possible, led many around him to see a kind of dark energy at work in his willfulness. (Coleman, for instance, compared him to Rasputin.)

Tragically for Jobs, his own sense of how the world was supposed to be—as well as, perhaps, his own indispensable place within it—were so adamant that they proved his undoing. When he was first diagnosed with a treatable form of pancreatic cancer in 2003, to the horror of intimates, Jobs delayed getting surgery, hoping to alleviate his condition with a series of remedies that might charitably be called “alternative medicine”—herbal therapy, acupuncture, a vegan diet that emphasized carrot and fruit juices, and even the consultation of a psychic. His friends implored him to have the tumor removed, but for nine months, Jobs was unbending. “I think Steve has such a strong desire for the world to be a certain way that he wills it to be that way,” one friend told Isaacson. “Sometimes it doesn’t work. Reality is unforgiving.”

It certainly is. Jobs died of cancer in 2011 at the age of 56.

The price Adam Neumann paid for his own preternatural sense of certainty was hardly so high. Like Jobs, he could bare his fangs when his will was being thwarted. (In the fifth episode of the series, he tells a competitor who refuses to sell out to him: “I’m going to crush you. I’m going to destroy your business and your soul.”) But for the most part, the pleasure of WeCrashed is watching two people get high on their own supply and vigorously pursue their downfall.

The pageantry of absurd self-importance reaches its zenith in the penultimate episode, when Adam accepts Rebekah’s offer to rewrite the S-1, the filing any company must make with the Securities and Exchange Commission when it intends to go public. Her infamous additions to the document, which began with the unusual declaration, “We dedicate this to the energy of we—greater than any one of us but inside each of us,” led New York University’s Scott Galloway to liken the filing in a Hulu documentary about WeWork to “a novel written by someone who was shrooming.”

Even beyond the psychedelic prose, however, the most remarkable innovation in WeWork’s S-1 was the stipulation that, in the advent of Adam’s demise, Rebekah would have the right to choose his successor, a prerogative that was greeted exactly as one might expect by WeWork’s board members.

“This is about to be a public company, not a monarchy,” one patiently tries to explain to Adam in the final episode of the series.

“Ahhhh, but it is like a monarchy,” Neumann says. “My family is the moral compass of this company.”

The board member persists. “See, you have to stop saying things like that.”

Adam Neumann didn’t, neither in the series nor in real life, not until an initial public offering whose potential value had been estimated as high as $96 billion crumbled under the weight of his antics. Shortly thereafter, Adam was forced out of the company he founded, wearing a golden parachute worth more than $1 billion, and when WeWork finally went public in 2021 via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, it was valued at just $8 billion.

Today, the company flirts with bankruptcy.

Mother Teresa meets King Midas

Near the end of the final episode of WeCrashed—which I finished shortly before midnight, two-and-a-half days after my television odyssey began—Cameron Lautner, a fictional character who has been brought in to take over WeWork after Adam Neumann’s ouster (in reality, two men assumed that role) delivers a speech that is by turns a cold shower and a cri de coeur for the shell-shocked staff at headquarters. “Like a magician,” he says, referring to his predecessor, “he’s tried to perform a sleight of hand over the entire financial world, crafted an illusion that you all were part of something bigger. What were you gonna do, raise the world’s consciousness, solve world hunger, care for all the world’s orphans? Excuse me, how the f——k is a shared-workspace company supposed to do any of that?”

He continues: “So I think it’s about time we got really honest about what we actually do here. We’re not here to raise the world’s consciousness. That’s not how capitalism works. We’re here to earn value for our investors, and we’re going to do that by providing high-quality shared workspaces at a competitive price. And what are you going to get in return? A fair wage and real profit sharing.”

The address is met with modest applause, a marked departure from the all-hands orations routinely delivered by Neumann. As a cinematic choice by the creators of WeCrashed, the lukewarm reception isn’t surprising. The story of American capitalism over the past decade has been a celebration of excessively grandiose ambitions, a spirit of “the sky’s the limit,” not “steady as she goes.” This is especially true of Silicon Valley, where it is not enough to get filthy rich; you must change the world while you’re at it.

Such world historical ambitions, a kind of “Mother Teresa meets King Midas” complex, helps to distinguish the Adam Neumanns of the world (and the Travis Kalanicks and Elizabeth Holmeses) from the aspiring alpha dogs of high finance. For whatever criticisms one might have of that second lot, a knack for self-deception isn’t among them. Investment bankers and hedge fund managers tend to be crystal clear about the measure and mission of their profession—to make as much money as possible. And though they may occasionally make a nod to “social purpose,” for the most part these gestures are not so much an afterthought as a fig leaf and a feint.

“It’s all about bucks, kid,” Gordon Gekko tells his protege in Wall Street. “The rest is conversation.”

By contrast, the conceit of the “make a dent in the universe” mantra is that the ambitions of an entrepreneur don’t end in a payout or even some great product. They are sociopolitical, teleological, or existential in nature. Less practical endeavors than the labors of enlightenment, such ventures are the stuff of consciousness-raising meets creative destruction, undertakings bold enough to scorn the trifling constraints of case law and cosseted inclinations of middle-class morality. Forget filthy lucre—the stakes are so much bigger!

That such pretensions are often met with an eye roll and a chuckle is one reason all three shows are so thoroughly entertaining, though they also recall the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s gem, “In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbor.” If we find ourselves laughing at the characters in Super Pumped, The Drop Out, or WeCrashed, the correction intended is not to the belief that a ride-sharing service or a blood-testing device or a workspace-sharing company will change the world—they will not, not in any deep and abiding way, no more than an iPod—but to the license so often assumed by the adherents. For if one does indeed aim at nothing less than revolutionizing the world around us, what’s wrong with a little cruelty, a few lies, and a dash of self-aggrandizing kookiness?

The complex legacy of Steve Jobs, which includes some truly extraordinary accomplishments, raises such a question—just as those who show their immense admiration for him by drawing on the worst elements of his character plainly answer it.

Hal Weitzman: That’s it for this episode. To learn more, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you’re there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a 5-star review. Until next time, I’m Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.