"You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it, because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that's happened to me"
About this Quote
Jobs is doing what he always did best: rerouting the conversation away from the thing everyone thinks they’re supposed to care about and toward the thing he wants to be true. Calling the “money thing” humorous isn’t coy modesty so much as a power move. Humor lets him belittle the public’s fixation without sounding defensive; it frames wealth as a shallow news cycle obsession, not a meaningful scorecard.
The intent is to reassert a hierarchy of value. For Jobs, the currency that mattered was insight: taste, judgment, the ability to bend technology into something people didn’t know they needed yet. By describing money as “hardly the most insightful or valuable thing,” he’s insisting that the real story is creative agency and purpose, not net worth. It’s also a subtle rebuke to Silicon Valley’s most enduring myth: that financial success is proof of moral or intellectual superiority. Jobs is separating cause from effect. The money is fallout; the work is the event.
The subtext carries a familiar Jobsian paradox: he dismisses money while speaking from the safety of having it. That privilege makes the line ring both sincere and strategic. In the late-20th-century American imagination, especially around tech founders, wealth becomes the headline because it’s the easiest metric to digest. Jobs is arguing that the metric is lazy. He’s not rejecting ambition; he’s rejecting the idea that a bank balance is the best summary of a life, or even a company.
The intent is to reassert a hierarchy of value. For Jobs, the currency that mattered was insight: taste, judgment, the ability to bend technology into something people didn’t know they needed yet. By describing money as “hardly the most insightful or valuable thing,” he’s insisting that the real story is creative agency and purpose, not net worth. It’s also a subtle rebuke to Silicon Valley’s most enduring myth: that financial success is proof of moral or intellectual superiority. Jobs is separating cause from effect. The money is fallout; the work is the event.
The subtext carries a familiar Jobsian paradox: he dismisses money while speaking from the safety of having it. That privilege makes the line ring both sincere and strategic. In the late-20th-century American imagination, especially around tech founders, wealth becomes the headline because it’s the easiest metric to digest. Jobs is arguing that the metric is lazy. He’s not rejecting ambition; he’s rejecting the idea that a bank balance is the best summary of a life, or even a company.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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