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But what is the "best outcome" when you have your house paid off and ample savings? He got ripped off by Jobs early on, but Jobs also let him do the work he wanted -- it's rare to have someone as good as Woz was also understand marketing. Jobs is deified too much, but he did bring something to the table in their business relationship.

Anyways, he seems to have protected himself well later on, was able to do good (stories of him giving stock to ppl left out early on, that kind of thing) -- people hyperfocus on one very specific thing (Jobs ripping him off in the atari days) when it's a small point in a much larger life.

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Woz would have been able to do the work he wanted regardless. We would likely live in a much more open source world hardware wise if Woz had just done what he was already doing.

And people say he's naïve...

He got (maybe) ripped off by Jobs, but at the end of the day, what did that get Jobs? Jobs is dead, and Woz is still here, apparently perfectly happy.

Steve Jobs is the reason Wozniak could give away tens of millions and still have $10M and multiple houses. Otherwise he would have been a good engineer and lived a nice quiet life, but nothing like the world-touring adventure he got.

Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.

Tangential, but you don't need anywhere near millions to have a 'world-touring adventure'. The nice thing about the ability to earn money online now a days is that the cost of living in the overwhelming majority of the world is a small fraction of what you pay in the US/EU.

And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.

Making that jump is obviously scary, but I think many people could find much greater contentedness (not a fan of seeking "happiness", as it's something that I think should be seen as liminal, not a desired constant state) if they only realized that the world is their oyster.

Steve Wozniak's world-touring adventure wasn't as an English teacher. He toured the world as a technology celebrity.

Steve Jobs corralling him into starting a company made him an engineering hero, technology celebrity, and rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Reread the link, or even the title. He gave away all of his Apple money away, because "wealth and power are not what I live for... it was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness.. " Celebrity, in general, is awful. You never realize how pleasant it is to be able to go somewhere without being fawned over until you have that latter experience yourself, and then you proceed to avoid that place like the plague unless you have some specific engagement.

You reread the link?

He had the privilege of giving away a fortune, to causes he cares about, largely thanks to Steve Jobs.

He's never worried about money and has millions in the bank and multiple houses, thanks to Steve Jobs.

Some people love their celebrity. I've met more than a few, including Wozniak. He seems to genuinely love it, which doesn't mean it doesn't also get tiring at times.

I've never been able to find that elusive "easy to find" online work people keep speaking of.

Am I being gaslighted or am I looking in the wrong places? In the EU in my entire 15 year carreer there have been exactly 0 companies or even vacancies offering fully remote.

You're definitely looking in the wrong places. A large number of companies are basically entirely remote at this point, for instance I know chess.com is, and they have vacancies at this very moment. You can also go indie or freelance. If you can think of something you would want to buy, somebody else probably would too. You might not make much off of it, but even a little is a lot in places outside the EU/US.

There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour, which is quite lucrative in most of the world, and you'll generally have less prep and other meta-issues to deal with.

Similarly you can also sell skills. For instance there's a huge market for chess coaching. And while I haven't tried this myself, I'm fairly certain there's some market out there for teaching/tutoring people in coding. Also if you excelled in mathematics or whatever, there's another possibility. And doing this stuff at a school, or even university, is also completely viable - in most places a bachelors is acceptable for teaching at a university.

This is really what I mean with the world being your oyster. There's so much out there but most people just don't realize these possibilities even exist.

I think GP makes it sound far easier than it really is, but there’s also clearly not “exactly zero” such roles. (I have team members based in EU working remotely. Retention is high and we get a lot of applicants when we open new roles. Those are good for the employer side but negative for individual applicants.)

In my experience, it's much easier as a freelancer. Usually what is meant to be a couple weeks gig turns out to be a couple months or year-long business relationship.

I've worked in 3 places that were fully 100% remote. I'm from Barcelona, ES. They are not the modt common but they do exist if you look for them and there are quite a lot.

Check out Who's Hiring? threads on HN. How I got into Citus & my life was much improved

//And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.

What typed of jobs is this referring to, besides teaching English ?

The obvious one is definitely teaching, though not just English. For online teaching, English is a major lingua franca and any skill you might want to teach, from chess to calculus - there will be plenty of online students available in English, even if that may often not be their native tongue.

For in person teaching it's the same thing. Most countries have a system of bilingual schools, international schools, and then university type schools. And all of these offer English language instruction in everything from PE to Calculus. The major difference between a bilingual school and an international school is that the latter will generally pay much more and expect much more with certification a stated requirement, though in practice it often is not.

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Outside of that there's endless odd jobs available that are in need of English speakers. I have friends working in everything from marketing to rehab. A good idea there would be to pick a country you're interested, find the common job boards there (which LLMs may be excellent for, though I have not used them for this myself - yet) and simply search for 'English' or other such keywords. You'll be surprised.

Absolutely bonkers to think Jobs could have found the same success without Woz. Woz gave him access to a world and community ahead of its time.

Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil. He was on that train until he nearly lost his own life flying a plane.

Woz didn’t need the fame and prestige that Jobs afforded him, but he definitely didn’t say no or walk away until his plane accident.

Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil.

You clearly know nothing about the history of these two. Or, maybe even more likely, you want this to be true so you can feel better about your life being relatively unimportant in comparison to Steve Jobs' life. Seems to be very common.

Woz and Jobs were best friends as teenagers and loved each other. And like many good friends they had their issues but loved and respected each other until the end.

Woz wasn't doing a deal with the devil. He was co-founding a startup with his extremely ambitious and abrasive best friend.

Almost everyone that ever worked closely with Steve Jobs came away with enormous respect for him and deeply appreciated their time together. Yes, they also say that he was sometimes an asshole but that's how people are: complicated.

There's a very good chance more than a few people think you're an asshole at times.

Steve Jobs is the reason Apple, Next, and Pixar made their mark on history. No amount of envy and revisionist history can change this.

The way you have discounted Wozniak's talent, one can also discount Steve's ambition. There are thousands of people same or more ambitious than Jobs. Being ambitious doesn't guarantee anything, neither does being as good as wozniak only work when combined with ambition.

Steve Jobs brought a hell of a lot more to the table than just raw ambition.

I just meant to contrast the level of ambition between the two. Wozniak was extremely unambitious and Jobs pushed him into starting a company, with great difficulty.

Nothing is guaranteed in life but I've certainly met more than a few people that I predicted would be successful and then they were. There are character traits that incline people toward success.

I disagree. Woz was a rare talent that would have found great success in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Would he have been as famous as he is now? Maybe not. But here he is at the end telling us that happiness was the point, not fame or billions.

He’d have found great success by his own measures if HP just let do more of the things he found interesting. Those measures wouldn’t have shown up in his bank account, but I think he’d have been happy.

Well, he had a good-paying job as a youngster at HP and if he stuck with that, retired, and by now would be worth about the same.

That’s cool, but it wouldn’t have changed much about how woz seems to perceive life.

You are so mistaken. Google universal remotes.

On the contrary, I know all about that. Wozniak's company was self-funded with his Apple money (thanks Steve Jobs). It was innovative but not terribly so and was a complete failure as a business.

The death of anyone from a disease like cancer is tragic.

Agreed. I think the point was that Woz was definitely less rich than Jobs(not poor though) and seems to have had a far happier life than Jobs. In some sense, Woz had what Jobs never had. Woz was blessed with having enough.

Yes that's what I don't understand about most of the ultra-rich. They keep wanting more despite having enough to spend millions every day for the rest of their lives. Tesla can't stop throwing tens of billions in bonuses at Musk. But what can he do with that money that he couldn't already?

I think the “wanting more” you describe is less driven by wanting more purchasing power but rather as an outcome of seeking the accomplishment of measurable goals. It becomes about the number rather than what the number represents.

Why does a track star strive to run faster when they can already easily a 4:00 mile and running a 3:42 would be of no practical difference in their life? It’s for the drive not the result.

"Money is just a way of keeping score." - attributed to oil baron H. L. Hunt.

One might just as well ask why the person with the largest collection of toasters (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-c...) wants them since there's a limit to how much toast he can consume. Soime people have passions and they work to realize them, whether it's something silly toasters or something crass like as wealth and power.

It's a selection bias, the ones you're thinking about wouldn't be ultra-rich if their greed had an end. And at this level of wealth, money buys you power, not things.

> But what can he do with that money that he couldn't already?

Go to Mars.

These people end up changing the world. Often for the better sometimes not. There happiness isn’t found by being content with what they have but the desire for total domination.

As these people drive progress forward and most of us benefit from the side effects. Just don’t get too close.

One of my favorite episodes of Some More News: Are the Rich OK? https://youtu.be/IP2EKTCngiM?si=p3-Mdp4wBRUd2Kkh

It is about keeping score with the other billionaires. Bigger market cap and bigger yacht = more status. Personally, I think you have to be some sort of sociopath to prioritise your billionaire ranking over all the good you could do by giving some of that money to good causes. But I guess being a sociopath is probably helpful if you want to be a billionaire.

Especially when it was caught early on, and was one of the few variations of a horrible cancer type that could have been successfully treated at that stage, but that treatment plan was refused.

And to reinforce/expand on that earlier observation: were it not for Jobs' personality, he likely would not have died of that cancer.

So which personality worked out better in the end?

(Rhetorical question, not a disagreement with anyone)

It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this. People do it all the time with Steve Jobs as if it's okay because he could be a jerk at times.

It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.

Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.

Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.

Especially when it's curable and you decide you know more than your doctor.

Have you seen anyone being "cured" of cancer, the shit they have to go through?

That's not a cure, it's business, creating return customers.

I've seen what happens to the people not cured of cancer. Too many times.

> But what is the "best outcome" when you have your house paid off and ample savings?

I don't know, you'd probably have to ask a billionaire that's ruining the lives of other people to earn their second (or tenth) billion.

Not all of them actively do that, but a large number very actively pursue that sort of thing.

I highly doubt any self-made billionaire who keeps pushing for more is actually pushing for more money specifically. It seems to me that more money is a side-effect of whatever they're addicted to doing.

They've got home offices full of MBA/finance people. It runs itself.

Humans like number go up

I'm not sure I buy it. You don't get to be a billionaire by being net harmful, you do it by selling goods and services that people want, at scale, and capturing a portion of the wealth you created.

There are quite a few businesses that made a lot of money selling net harmful goods. Tobacco and Oxycontin come to mind.

But even selling things that help people doesn’t absolve or prevent someone from doing evil things before or after they hit some specific valuation.