“Thousands that gained income employment and maybe the opportunity to better their lives”

Let’s take this from the realm of the abstract to that of the concrete, and talk about a specific group of “thousands,” i.e. the several hundred thousand workers in the Shenzhen Foxconn factory who assembles a huge portion of Apple’s products. They gain “income” as you say: $3 an hour. But to say Apple gives them an opportunity to “better their lives” is absurd. They work 12 hours a day six days a week. They have no lives. Their entire lives consist of generating profit for people like Tim Duncan and Apple’s shareholders.

Putting aside the issue of whether the relationship between Apple and its employees or contractors is moral, let’s turn to the question of whether Jobs was particularly special. Assuming that we accept the premise that certain people possess rare talents that make them deserving of exorbitant compensation, did Jobs really even fit that criteria?

Often asked about Einstein’s brain, the biologist Stephen J. Gould once wrote “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Not to deny that Jobs had some degree of intelligence, but you can’t swing a dead cat in San Francisco without hitting a programmer of equal ability and vision who, if given the same chance, could do everything Jobs did and possibly do it better. It’s statistically likely that there are several thousand people in that Foxconn factory who could have been Steve Jobs were it not for the unfortunate circumstances of their birth.

Every single tech billionaire you can name started out from a position of relative privilege, and all just happened to be at the right place at the right time. Take Bill Gates. His grandfather was wealthy, and his mother raised funds to buy him access time on a mainframe as a teen. At a time when maybe .000001 percent of people had access to a computer, Gates was learning to code on a mainframe. Likewise, Zuckerberg was born to an upper-middle class family and his father hired a private tutor to teach him coding.

This is not to say they didn’t work hard or weren’t talented, but what raised them to the heights they achieved was luck and an advantageous position, not microdosing LSD.

Also, I’ve known lots of really brilliant people in my life, and none of them gave themselves pancreatic cancer from eating nothing but fruit. Just saying.