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When I read about Steve Jobs’s life, I can’t help but feel a little sick. Of all our tech luminaries over the last 50 years, he is the one I relate to the most. His sense of product, his love of the humanities, his obsession with quality—it’s all part of an ethos by which I’ve tried to conduct my own life.
What makes me sick about Jobs is that he was also objectively cruel. Time and time again, he demonstrated a capacity for brutal coldness that is hard to stomach. He abandoned his daughter and casually discarded the people he once regarded as friends. It is hard to reconcile the extremes of his life.
Jobs isn’t the only complicated billionaire. In my studies of famous tech founders, I have found people who did great things at terrible costs. This disparity gave me an urgent need to find someone who had obviously led an exemplary life by the standards I think are important: marriage, children, moral quality, and career. So I did what every fool and drunkard has done before me: I tweeted a loaded question.
Source: X/Evan Armstrong.
Dear reader: Many, many people had ideas.
I got hundreds of DMs. The thread drove 1.5 million impressions. I was called a capitalist pig and a communist bastard. And, perhaps surprisingly for internet discourse, I got lots of useful feedback.
Many folks were eager to share the stories of billionaires who struck them as good people. I’ve spent the last week going through these names, fact-checking sources, and trying to build a final list.
Along the way, I struggled with deciding on a metric that would help me define morality. People get divorced for good reasons, have ungrateful kids, or face other unforeseen difficulties in life. Maybe Jobs was just afflicted with bad personal relationships, and maybe he’s forgivable. But as the wealthiest people in our society, billionaires, more than anyone else, have the power that comes with access to tremendous amounts of capital. The unreasonably powerful should be held to unreasonably high moral standards, too.
While my initial goal was to find people who obviously cleared the bar on all five metrics, I became more flexible during my research, as it was almost impossible to accurately analyze and judge each billionaire. The good news is there is at least one person who I think deserves this title. The rest, depending on the gradients of your moral compass, might get filtered out.
Marc Andreessen is the startup savior and liberal boogeyman (the purity problem)
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