‘Steve Jobs’ buys into Silicon Valley's aggressive optimism, suggesting that unpleasant visionaries may be worth tolerating because of the products they create
Farhad Manjoo / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
Farhad Manjoo's take on the 'Steve Jobs' film arrives months after an unforgiving documentary portrait of tech's most complicated man, and both land at the high-water mark of founder mythology — the moment when Silicon Valley still treated difficult genius as the price of world-changing products.
The column has since aged into a live argument rather than a settled one: New Republic traced the market-values-plus-humanitarianism fusion behind that mythology to a 1960s generational shift, while 2025 coverage describes a harder-edged, AI-dominated Valley where the perks-era optimism Manjoo defends is visibly thinning.
First-order effects
- The film hands Silicon Valley's defenders a canonical cultural text for the 'products excuse the person' position, sharpening an ongoing debate over how much abrasion boards, employees, and journalists should tolerate from visionary founders.
Second-order effects
- Critics now have a concrete foil: the same week-to-week coverage that warns leaders chasing short-term alignment may imperil their companies (Wired's argument about tech figures embracing Trump) can cite the Jobs hagiography as the archetype of tolerance that outlives its usefulness.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every technology cycle re-runs this test — each era produces its own difficult geniuses and its own reconciling biographies, so the real question is whether the AI-dominated 'hard tech' generation inherits the Jobs-era bargain or finally rejects it.
The trend: Silicon Valley periodically rehabilitates its difficult founders through celebratory storytelling whenever a new technology wave needs its heroes, making each hagiography a bellwether for how much bad behavior the industry will trade for product breakthroughs.