‘He Learned to Ride the Animal’

‘He Learned to Ride the Animal’

Jean-Louis Gassée on Steve Jobs:

When I first met Steve, in February 1981, he was sitting cross-legged on a credenza in the Apple board room, picking his toes. Since then I’ve watched with glee as he went against received wisdom, causing pundits to have fits at every turn. I picture them as a gaggle of eunuchs standing around the caliph’s bed, braying in high-pitched voice: ‘Steve, you’re doing it wrong!’

For a long time, I’ve seen him as having an animal inside him, the one with the desires, the instinct, the drive. In 1985, that animal threw Steve to the ground. He picked himself up at Pixar — you’d be a captain of industry for doing no more — and NeXT. Then, in 1997, armed with Pixar’s success and Next’s technical prowess, he came back to run Apple and make it really his.

He had learned to ride the animal.

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