A great man retires.
Steve Jobs has retired as CEO of Apple.
As a boy I used to absorb everything I could about the greatest capitalist of all time, John D Rockefeller. When my schoolmates were watching cricket or rugby, I was boning up on the minutiae of Rockefeller’s life. At his peak, one of every three dollars of US GDP went into his pocket. And for every mention of slave labor, poor wages and brutal monopolistic practices, there is the counter argument that the man probably created more jobs and more wealth than any individual in modern times. The child of the oil hand laborer on Rockefeller’s rigs saw vistas of opportunity which would otherwise not have existed.
I am no stranger to great capitalists, having immigrated to the United States in 1977 with a net worth of minus $4,000, borrowed from friends to get me on my way. In a succession of positions, some not so good, I have had the extraordinary privilege of working for not one, not two, but three great capitalists.
The first was William E. Simon, once US Treasury Secretary when that job meant something, who created what we now know as the leveraged buyout. I worked for Bill in Los Angeles and still treasure mightily the dedication in his book, to this ingenue, with the most warm and generous words I can recall. Having admired him for years the opportunity to work for Bill – one both inspiring and frightening – saw me quit my job at some dumb ass big bank and join the next day.
The second was Art Nicholas who created a great asset management firm in San Diego. I was lucky to be one of Art’s partners during the great growth years of that business and learned more from him than I can ever relate.
The third was Larry Bowman, himself a graduate of the Cupertino pressure cooker, who welcomed me to his eponymous technology hedge fund during the internet boom (and subsequent bust!) where I lived maybe two lifetimes in but five short years. Larry, by a considerable margin, is the smartest businessman I have known and walking proof that the best money managers end up at hedge funds, often of their own creation.
These men were not mere heroes to me. I was very lucky to call them my friends. Each, in his own unique way, made me aware of my limitations and of my potential.
While I scrabbled for crumbs at the tables of these great men each gave me far more than material reward. They afforded me free education and infinite opportunity made possible only in a free capitalist society.
So it is an easy matter for me to assemble a short list of great capitalists whom I revere, the three I have worked for and the likes of Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Charles Tyson Yerkes, Bill Gates and, of course, Steve Jobs.
A young and beautiful Steve Jobs.
In January I wrote a rather churlish and small minded piece titled Goodbye, Mr. Jobs, and Good Riddance. You see, one of the deep seated cultural mindsets inculcated in me during my days in an English public school was an abiding dislike of bullies. And, without a doubt, all these men I so admire had their share of faults. But dwelling on faults when the other side of the coin is so replete with what is best about the American system and American generosity of spirit is churlish indeed. And for this avid photographer, Jobs and his Apple Computer made transparent and predictable the mechanical aspects of the process of making images from files.
My first Mac, bought a decade ago for what now seems a small fortune, the brilliant ‘screen on a stick’ iMac G4 was truly a revelation, in the same way that my first Leica or first Porsche or first Patek Philippe was a revelation. As a mechanical engineer by training it did not take much digging to realize that all these machines were so superior to anything else because they were as beautiful – as engineered – inside as outside. There was no compromise when it came to making the hidden bits. They were as gorgeous and as fully finished as the bits you could see.
But what is so special about Jobs in the pantheon of great capitalists is how successful he was in so many disparate endeavors.
The original Apple ][ computer, the graphics interface of the Macintosh, the fabulous NeXT machine I used in San Diego, the towering genius of OS X – Unix for regular people, the iPod and the revolution that shook the music industry, the iMac, Pixar (whose sale made Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney) and, in what is probably his most lasting legacy, his touch screen devices, the iPhone and iPad. Our son is growing up in a world of computing soon to be dominated by touching and speaking, not typing. Transduction is increasingly a matter of speech and touch rather than hitting idiotically disposed keys on keyboards designed around the mechanical limitations of a bygone age. Jobs’s world is one where you take your computer with you and think nothing of its neglible weight, its instant-on capability, its always-connected status. Jobs wanted to change the world. He succeeded in spades. He did not so much create as refine. Refine, refine, refine ad infinitum until it Just Worked.
I’ll leave you with two favorite quotes:
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.
I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. [Triumph of the Nerds, 1996]
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]
I am not saddened by Jobs’s departure but rather I am happy that he will be able to spend time with his family in a less stressful life.
Thank you, Mr. Jobs.
