So, so true.
What a loss to humanity it would have been if Jobs had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to figuring out how to give his billions away, instead of doing what he does best.
We’d still be waiting for a cell phone on which we could actually read e-mail and surf the web. … We’d be a decade or more away from the iPad, which has ushered in an era of reading electronically that promises to save a Sherwood Forest worth of trees and all of the energy associated with trucking them around. …Without Steve Jobs we’d be years away from a user-friendly mechanism for getting digital music without stealing it, which means we’d still be producing hundreds of millions of CDs with plastic cases. We would be without Pixar. …
We would be without the 34,000 full-time jobs Apple has created, just within Apple, not to mention all of the manufacturing jobs it has created for those who would otherwise live in poverty.
We would be without the wealth it has created for millions of Americans who have invested in the company. …
Last year Change.org wrote of Steve Jobs, “It’s high time the minimalist CEO became a magnanimous philanthropist.”
I’ve got news for you. He has been. What’s important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we give our money away. What’s important is the energy and courage we are willing to expend reversing entropy, battling cynicism, suffering and challenging mediocre minds, staring down those who would trample our dreams, taking a stand for magic, and advancing the potential of the human race.
On these scores, the world has no greater philanthropist than Steve Jobs. If ever a man contributed to humanity, here he is. And he has done it while battling cancer. …
Steve Jobs has traded his time for human progress. Not for personal pleasures. This is not a man who spent his time building homes or custom yachts or who otherwise obsessed with how to spend his billions on himself. …
Werner Erhard used to say that he wanted his gravestone to say, “Burned out.” By all appearances, Jobs has burned out just about every ounce of fuel he was given trying to bring new possibilities into this world.
Once in 7th Grade my social studies teacher was saying something bad about Bill Gates, and how he should give away his money. I think I made some comment how Bill Gates could hire more people with his money to work. My thinking wasn’t full developed, but I was on the right track. Wealth creates prosperity by creating more wealth.