Shoutout to Steve Ballmer
Friday, January 5, 2018 :: Tagged under: culture management. â° 2 minutes.
Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! đ
On why Steve Ballmer is cooler than Steve Jobs:
Can you believe it? Plug âHow to be Steve Jobsâ or âSteve Jobs lessonsâ into Google and youâll get page after page of tips. One trite homily after another explains how to imitate a few of the great dictatorâs tics. Switch âJobsâ for âBallmerâ and you get almost nothing.
I bet you could learn a lot from Steve Ballmer. More than you can learn from Jobs. Youâre not like Jobs. Jobs was a handsome lustrous-haired genius who hooked up with another genius in his early 20s and formed a new, globally important (and immediately successful) company. Ballmer was a funny looking bald non-genius who joined a growing company as employee 30. Which is more like you?
Jobsâ net worth at death was $10 billion. Ballmer today is worth $22 billion. He worked at Microsoft for 34 years solid. He wasnât fired once.
If youâre a non genius who hasnât formed a globally important company in your early 20sâââand especially if youâre funny lookingâââyouâll probably learn more from Ballmer than you can from Jobs.
I'm sure Ballmer will have a ton to answer for when the guillotines come, and I recognize he can only be this way because of his privilege, but goddammit if we're going to be subject to a plutocracy I'm glad at least some of them can be entertaining.
More reading:
- "non-genius" is a bit reductive in light of of Ballmer's pre-Microsoft achievements.
- A longer profile, wherein he appears to be a more typical billionaire.
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