Keep your hands off of my stack.
The Carnegies, the Mellons, the Rockafellers, the Buffetts… They all made scads of money in their chosen careers. They all founded foundations and gave away scads of money in their later years. Nowadays, Carnegie (to pick one example) is probably better known for his libraries and university endowments than he is for how he made his money (steel manufacturing and union busting).
In our modern media world, wealthy philanthropists can’t get a break: they get criticized for how much they give, or how often, or to whom, or how long it took them to get around to giving. Bill Gates may be beloved now for the work he and his wife Melinda do through their foundation, but for most of the 1990s-2000s he was lambasted as a nerdy capitalist who famously argued that spam would come to an end by 2007.
What makes Steve Jobs different is that he in the same league as these wildly successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, but he seems to have gone out of his way not to give anything away via his company, Apple Inc., or any foundation he has attached himself to.
Will that change now that health concerns have spurred him to retire as CEO of Apple?
The early money says ‘no’, because Steve Jobs has had chances to develop philanthropic arms at both Apple and NeXT but he has instead chosen to amputate them.
Andrew Ross Sorkin has a well-researched, insightful, and heartfelt article on the ‘Dealbook’ website of The New York Times that traces Steve Jobs’s public philanthropic role (a non-existent one) in light of his possible anonymous efforts and statements on the issue. Mr. Sorkin speculates (with contextual evidence) that Steve Jobs has never needed the image-polishing that others have hoped to enjoy after some timely philanthropy (for example, Mark Zuckerberg’s gifts just before the movie The Social Network tarnished a bit of his luster).
More importantly, Jobs sees his job as improving the company he runs and building the family he has.
Two of his close friends, both of whom declined to be quoted by name, told me that Mr. Jobs had said to them in recent years, as his wealth ballooned, that he could do more good focusing his energy on continuing to expand Apple than on philanthropy, especially since his illness. “He has been focused on two things — building the team at Apple and his family,” another friend said. “That’s his legacy. Everything else is a distraction.”
Though a touching and wholly-reasonable sentiment, Jobs and Apple can be stunningly tight-fisted about the money they have – and claim not to care about. Sorkin also reminds us that Apple had a philanthropic presence when Jobs returned to the company in 1997, but he shut it down in the name of returning to profit first. Profits were made hand-over-fist by 2000, but no philanthropic efforts returned.
Moreover, Apple’s policies toward mobile-app development are strikingly antagonistic toward apps designed to assist offering donations. In other words, Apple and Jobs seem not to be indifferent to corporate philanthropy, they appear hostile toward it.
Then again, some of the biggest giving by the richest individuals came after they left the day-to-day work of their companies.
