Brilliant Jerks Success

Strong-personality-assholes have been making successful things for a very long time now (Linus, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, come to mind).It's probably not that being an asshole is good. It's that if you are a genius/visionary and nice, your genius gets diluted by the people around you. Let's build a genius/asshole map:1. Genius, non-asshole: You start a genius-level thing, it is brilliant and awesome. As it progresses, less brilliant people get involved. They start

The article is paywalled, so I may be off-base about the article's premise, but my take is that the "brilliant jerks" of our industry (first ones that come to mind are Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds) not only get a pass because due to results, but that their personality is worth emulating. The idea I think is that we need to push back, and call being a jerk what it really is: a character flaw, not an asset.

That's not only with Jobs. There are some brilliant people who are assholes - and many brilliant people that aren't. But the assholes get the headlines. So people decide "I want to be brilliant, why don't I start with being an asshole? Seems like the easiest way..."

Are there any good counter-examples of uber-successful tech CEOs who aren't/weren't jerks?

It is possible to be successful without being a jerk.

It seems less like coattails when you consider Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jack Welch, John Rockefeller, etc. In fact, anecdotally it seems being a "narcissistic asshole" is an asset rather than a hindrance.

well according to the article it does; both "givers" and "assholes" have a u-shaped distribution curve: they tend to do either very well or very badly. Jobs and Patton could have been givers with the same results, or even better. And the article even points out that Jobs had significantly reduced his asshole tendencies during the more successful part of his career."Being nice" doesn't get you anywhere, but that's not the same as being a giver.

I too believe those 2 sets of qualities are separable. I'm less concerned about that fact that Linus' exist as I am about the fact that some of those traits are often correlated with success, and people idolize the successful ones without separating the 2 qualities. I've seen people emulate Steve Jobs to the point of dressing like him and using his mannerisms during presentations, and then also lash out at colleagues for not meeting some arbitrary quality bar with vague comments a

I agree, it sends the wrong message about key traits Steve Jobbs was good at. Anyone successful at being a jerk has 1 of 2 things the rest won't have:1. They have something tangible to offer every single person that has to deal with them.2. They are able to build bridges at least as fast as they're able to burn them down.If the behavior isn't sustainable then I think its safe to say we have a problem, not an asset.

What about people who are successful because they are jerks or in spite of that.