In the last 24 hours, many have lauded Steve Jobs as a visionary, a genius, a fearless leader. Although all of those are certainly true, there are those who point out that he was also an unabashed capitalist and even kind of a jerk.

But as Dan Mitchell pointed out in SF Weekly, Jobs’ jerkiness was not the kind that the Occupy Wall Street people are protesting. Jobs was admittedly more a fan of profit than of philanthropy, but he never pretended otherwise. And perhaps more important, Jobs made it clear that what he was really striving for was greatness. Greatness through innovation and technology, which also happened to bring him huge amounts of money. But his primary goal was never richness for the sake of being rich.

So the reason Jobs comes out ahead of the Wall Street types, Mitchell explained, is because “the Occupy people aren’t calling for an overthrow of the capitalist system; they’re calling for the greedheads, the famewhores and the powermongers to be stripped of their outsized influence over our culture, our government and our economy. They’re calling on us to reshape our values. To have values. To care.” –BF

Dan Mitchell in SF Weekly:

Many of my Facebook friends who expressed profound grief over Jobs’ death also have been expressing support for the Occupy demonstrations. It’s really something to witness — the depth of emotion all these left-wingers feel for the head of a giant American corporation. Jobs was one of the most successful capitalists of our time, and yet he’s hailed as a hero by left and right alike. This is because his goal was simply to create products that were Insanely Great. In a world where few people — particularly in business — truly care about what they do, he truly cared. By thinking that way, he became Insanely Rich, and when he died, his company had an Insanely Large cash balance in the tens of billions of dollars. But few begrudged either Jobs or Apple for their wealth, because their priority wasn’t to get rich — it was to achieve Insane Greatness. Getting rich was a byproduct. That’s how capitalism should work.

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