Steve Jobs has an enormous reputation for eking out every last drop of performance from his talented employees, but even in the early days of Apple, that maniacal drive for success came with the huge trade-off of driving away his closest friends that built the Macintosh with him.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak gave a brief interview with the Milwaukee Business Journal claiming his relationship with Jobs has been portrayed inaccurately by the media. The Apple co-founders have always been friends and Woz says the two never had an argument, but Woz can’t say the same for the other top engineers at Apple.
In his interview, Woz says almost all of the the top engineers and designers that worked under Steve on the Macintosh project told him they would never work with Jobs again.
“Some of my very best friends in Apple, the most creative people in Apple who worked on the Macintosh, almost all of them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again. It was that bad.”
Woz goes on to explain how Jobs only respected “people who were really really brilliant,” and Woz was obviously one of those select few. He also reveals that while Jobs was friendly with Bill Gates, he never showed him the iPhone when it was in development, fearing Microsoft would pounce on the idea.
Little did Jobs realize one of his own board members was ready to snipe the ideas to become Apple’s new No. 1 enemy.
Here’s the full interview:
