Almost 23 years ago, an employee at Apple described Steve Jobs to me as one of the world’s few “rock star CEOs.” At the time, I didn’t understand why anyone would talk about the head of a company in that way. A rock star was an artist who defined the cultural moment and attracted a legion of rabid fans. A CEO was just a CEO, right?
In my defense, I was young. I knew little about Jobs’s personal background or his impact on tech sector—this was just over a year after Apple had introduced the original iPod, and the device hadn’t yet completely taken over the world. Still, I smiled and nodded appropriately. After all, the rockstar CEO’s company had just hired me in a sales role.
However, over the next five years that I worked for Apple, I came to understand what that person meant. My job at Apple was low-level and non-technical—nothing anyone would find too interesting. Yet when someone discovered that I worked for the company, their eyes lit up, and one of their first questions was, inevitably, “So, what is Steve Jobs like?”
I never met Jobs personally, but I once saw him inside Caffe Macs—Apple’s employee cafeteria at 1 Infinite Loop. I recall relaying this mere fact to someone who had asked me if I met him, and to this day, I remember their reply: “Count yourself lucky. Very few people will ever be in the same room with a historical figure.” They went on to explain that listening to their iPod mini was often the best part of their day—and asked me to tell Jobs, if I ever did meet him, that they were thankful there was someone like him inventing such cool devices.
That’s when I realized that Jobs really was a rock star—revered even by complete strangers. Now, 20 years after that encounter, having witnessed how technology has infiltrated every facet of our lives in ways even he probably couldn’t have foreseen, I have come to believe Steve Jobs will likely be the last nearly universally beloved tech leader the world will ever have.
And that’s probably a good thing.
The Musk Factor
This realization didn’t just come out of the blue. I’d been thinking about tech CEOs a lot lately—one in particular: Elon Musk.
I’ll fully admit that back in the early 2010s, I was a big fan of Musk. I admired how he was bringing electric vehicles to the masses and popularizing more climate-friendly means of transportation and energy distribution. It seemed that his products could genuinely change the world for the better.
It also struck me that he was, in my then-opinion, the most charismatic tech leader since Jobs. When he spoke, people listened. Like Jobs, he appeared to be a visionary—and that was inspiring. During the early 2010s, I was convinced that he would be the world’s next Steve Jobs—a tech luminary who would change the world just as Jobs did and, like Jobs, be nearly universally beloved for it.
Boy, was I wrong.
I’ve never been in the same room as Musk, much less met him, so I won’t try to explain what has seemingly happened—why he changed so much over the past few years (or decided to reveal his true self). However, seeing furious people across the world picketing at his stores, I am certain that he will never be the next Steve Jobs.
And there is no other tech CEO in the running, either. And I believe there are two main reasons for this.
Big Tech—and its role in the world—has changed
For one thing, Big Tech has become fairly toxic since Steve Jobs died in 2011. Silicon Valley used to inspire the general public. Every month in the early 2000s, it seemed like some new product or service was launched that truly improved our lives. However, in the last 15 years, many people feel that Big Tech has begun to cause more harm than good
For all their convenience, e-commerce giants like Amazon undermine small businesses, which can be a contributing factor in their closure. When that happens, local communities become more barren, and people struggle to pay the bills. That breeds resentment towards Big Tech—not love of their billionaire CEOs.
Similarly, while social media was once touted as a democratizing force that would unite people and facilitate the sharing of ideas, it is now widely recognized to have negative implications for individuals’ mental health, serve as a breeding ground for bullying, and is today a significant way misinformation and political polarization spreads. As Pew Research noted, most people also think social media giants have too much influence in politics. Again, none of this is going to endear the CEOs of these companies to the population at large.
And the latest tech revolution—artificial intelligence—isn’t generating a lot of love from the general public, either. AI is likely to eliminate millions of jobs over the next three years alone. It’s also taking the humanity out of art. No wonder a YouGov poll last year found that the majority of Americans were cautious, concerned, and skeptical of AI. If you’re the CEO of a company that works on a technology that most people are leery of, you’re not going to find a lot of universal adoration.
Yet there’s another reason why today’s tech leaders will likely never achieve Jobsian status. Big Tech is now inextricably entwined with politics and power in a way it never was in Jobs’s time. Elections are fought and won on social media, wars are carried out with the help of the hardware and software Silicon Valley builds, and Big Tech is spending tens of millions of dollars a year in political contributions and lobbying efforts in an attempt to influence government policy on everything from taxes to regulations—not to mention curry favor with politicians.
Politics and power are, by their very nature, divisive. And America is more polarized today by orders of magnitude than during Jobs’s early-2000’s professional prime. If you love that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were honored guests at President Trump’s latest inauguration, you can bet that at least half the nation hates it.
The Steve Jobs legacy
All this is not to suggest that Steve Jobs was a saint, of course. It’s been well-documented that he could be difficult to work with and short-tempered in his pursuit of creative perfection.
He was beloved as much as he was because he operated in a world before Big Tech was viewed as a Big Villain. And, unlike many of today’s tech leaders, Jobs chose to—or could afford to—keep his politics private.
And he was beloved because nearly all of the products he helped unleash seemed to bring joy to the majority of their users, like the individual I met two decades ago who was grateful to Jobs for the simple everyday pleasure he derived from using his iPod mini.
Given how the world—and Big Tech’s role in it—has changed since Jobs’s passing, I don’t believe we’ll ever have another tech leader as beloved as he was. And, again, I think that is probably a good thing.
As much of a fan as I was of Jobs, the deification of any one individual is dangerous—especially in today’s environment, where modern tech leaders already wield significant influence over the platforms we use, the narratives we encounter, and even public policy itself.
But in Jobs’ time, it was much more palatable—and harmless. The person who explained to me that Steve Jobs was a historical figure is now correct. Jobs was a product of a bygone era: a beloved leader in tech.
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