Magic & Madness: The Legends of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, & Michael Jordan

LEGENDS

There's a fine line between magic and madness—legends are defined by it. Full of contradictions, this potent combination fuels era-defining legends like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Michael Jordan. And it comes at a price.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

The newly-released book Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is aesthetically beautiful—it had to be. It's a generous timeline of his life and work filled with highlights from his speeches, interviews, and emails. In the magical beauty of a scroll, it's easy to miss what's not there: much of the madness—a legend of this magnitude cannot be fully captured in his own words.

That it succeeds as an archival amalgamation is precisely what makes its primary inspirational aim feel abrasive. This would be Jobs' life if it were a product that belonged on a shelf in the Apple store—a sterile wrapper on what it promises to reveal: how he approached his life and work. It falls flat because a complex human was reduced to a neat package with a questionable post-mortem filter.

The handbook, as The Steve Jobs Archive calls it, has a disclaimer that its contents have been edited for privacy. Inside: "He treasured his privacy, saying of his public persona, 'I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It's not me.'" For anyone who treasures privacy, the loss of anonymity is brutal—the sense of constantly being watched by strangers will change how anyone moves in the world. It will also change the shape of what anyone wants to share with the world in their own words.

THE PRICE OF PERSPECTIVE

The most memorable tribute to Jobs isn't in the archive yet. It comes from Bob Belleville, Apple's first director of engineering, in this clip from Alex Gibney's two-hour documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Belleville:

"He’s seducing you, he’s vilifying you, and he’s ignoring you—you’re in one of those three states."

Anyone who's worked with a legend like this will say the magic and the madness is an exhausting whiplash between exhilarating and infuriating. In the next breath, they'll also say three things: they never worked harder, never did work they're more proud of, and never paid a higher price. Legends always pay a price—and the people around them always pay it too.

Walter Isaacson, the writer of Jobs' exclusive biography, describes this point following dozens of interviews for the book and notes:

"Steve was a real jerk to other people.✂️ Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Wozniak, everybody who worked with him in the early days said, 'The question you have to answer is: Why were you so unkind? Did you have to be so unkind?'"

The subject of Isaacson's next biography is Elon Musk, a living legend with a similar narrative following him. In documentaries about the early days of SpaceX and episodes of the BBC's The Elon Musk Show, the same tearful stories from former employees are there. The BBC trailer ends with Musk saying, "Sure hope it was worth it."

LOVE & LEGENDS

Bless anyone who's loved and been loved by a legend, undoubtedly paying the price through emotional labour—in the oscillation of exhilaration and infuration that lingers in the air they breathe. The love of a legend is especially paradoxical for women—their protector is the very reason they're so exposed; their talent and relevance are forever eclipsed and qualified by the men who love them.

Laurene Powell-Jobs, who was married to Jobs for 22 years, epitomises what author Kate Braestrup wrote about marriage following the death of her own husband:

"A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself."

The handbook is truthful and loving. But as the standalone piece launching the archive, it strikes as a disingenuous indulgence to propagate the billionaire businessman's tightly-controlled highlight reel even after his death. Did he really want to be remembered in his own words with such a polished lens?

ZEN-ISH

Powell-Jobs on the importance of Zen Buddhism to Steve said it shaped his sense of time and place in the universe. Isaacson, in his biography of Jobs, writes:

Unfortunately his Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm or inner serenity, and that too is part of his legacy. He was often tightly coiled and impatient, traits he made no effort to hide.

Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. “My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it,” he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.

Musk has described Jobs as someone he admired but noted: "He was super rude to me" when Musk tried to talk to Jobs at a party after being introduced by Google co-founder Larry Page. In the same interview, Musk goes on to describe Jobs this way:

"The guy had a certain magic about him that was really inspiring."

THE DARK TRIAD

Isaacson continues in his biography of Jobs:

Even his family members wondered whether he simply lacked the filter that restrains people from venting their wounding thoughts or willfully bypassed it. Jobs claimed it was the former. “This is who I am, and you can’t expect me to be someone I’m not,” he replied when I asked him the question.

But I think he actually could have controlled himself, if he had wanted. When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness. 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.

The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible.”

The flywheel of magic and madness. Again:

Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible.

Perhaps Jobs believed that this kind of manipulation and callousness were the means that justified the ends—features of Machivallianism, which is a trait—along with subclinical narcissism and subclinical psychopathy—forming what is called the Dark Triad in psychology, a nonpathlogical theory of personality.

If Isaacson is correct in his assessment of Jobs, the unkindness sounds more like malice—a defining characteristic of all three traits in the Dark Triad. Top leaders may score higher on these Dark Triad traits because of the positive implications in business.

WIRED DIFFERENTLY

In an interview last month, Isaacson noted both Jobs and Musk were wired differently. Isaacson also responded to questions about "cruelty" at the hands of both men while noting Musk describes himself as having Asperger's and the ability of someone on the autism spectrum to show empathy is different. "And Elon Musk does not have, intuitively, the empathy gene to care that much," Isaacson concludes.

In contrast, Musk's ex-wife, actress and author Talulah Riley, who married and divorced him twice between 2010 and 2016, described him this way on The Elon Musk Show:

He has a kind of innocence to him. What I mean by that is that he feels with incredible purity the emotion that he is feeling at the time—whatever that emotion is.

He feels things very, very deeply. I've heard it said that he's cold and emotionless, and that that could not be further from the truth. He is the most emotional person I know.

THE LAST DANCE

Michael Jordan, considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time, gives a parallel way to imagine the possibility of a different ending for Steve Jobs in his own words. In this clip from The Last Dance, Jordan is asked off-camera:

Question: Through the years, do you think that intensity has come at the expense of being perceived as a nice guy?

Jordan: "Winning has a price. And leadership has a price. ✂️ When people see this [The Last Dance], they're going to say: ‘Well, he wasn't really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ No no no, that's you because you never won anything.”

While answering, Jordan gets emotional and begins gesturing defensively with both hands as if to say "stop."

Jordan: "It is who I am. That's how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don't wanna play that way, don't play that way."

CODA

The Last Dance scene ends with Jordan choking up and calling for a break. The viewer is left wondering if there's a sense of resentment or regret that an inherently inspirational career full of winning comes down to a question about him being "a nice guy."

Magic and madness go together. With perspective, the complexity and contradictions of legends like this can still be inspiring. With more time, one wonders if the coda to Steve Jobs in his own words could have taken a more reflective tone.

Rarely is there magic without the madness. Legends pay for it, and so do those around them. And it seems the price of being legendary might come down to the last dance when a legacy is highlighted and the last question is, "But was he a nice guy?"