Wealth & Money Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is picking a fight with the most comforting myth in corporate life: that innovation is a line item you can fatten. He’s not denying that research costs money; he’s denying that money behaves like a guarantee. The IBM-vs.-Apple comparison is the dagger because it flips the expected hierarchy. The giant with a hundred times the spend should win, yet the scrappy upstart ships the Mac. The point isn’t accounting, it’s humiliation: scale can buy activity, not imagination.

The subtext is pure Jobs-era Apple. “R&D dollars” stands in for bureaucracy, committees, and safety-first thinking - the kind of environment where smart people are deployed to defend existing products rather than endanger them. By contrast, “the people you have” is a recruitment pitch and a warning: talent only matters if it’s paired with a leadership style that concentrates taste, urgency, and decisiveness. “How you’re led” is the quiet claim that management isn’t a neutral function; it’s a creative force, capable of either liberating a team or sanding it down into compliance.

Then there’s the loaded phrase “how much you get it.” Jobs frames innovation as comprehension, almost empathy: understanding what a computer should feel like to a person, not just what it can do on paper. In context, this is also brand theology - Apple as a company that “gets it” when rivals merely fund it. The quote works because it turns a technical contest into a moral one: innovators aren’t richer, they’re clearer, tougher, and more willing to bet their identity on a product.