Q Another person who has a certain mythology about him is your friend Steve Jobs. Everybody seems to believe they know the book on Jobs: heis brilliant but hard-driving, overly sensitive. Do you and he ever talk about that?
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A We almost decided to wear T-shirts: "The Mercurial Steve Jobs" and "The Arrogant Larry Ellison."
Steve Jobs is my best friend, and I love him dearly, and heis one of the most remarkable people on this planet. You watch him create Apple, then in one of the worst human-resources mistakes in the history of Silicon Valley — the only thing worse was when the French fired Napoleon — they fire Steve Jobs and Apple almost completely disintegrates. Then he comes back and he saves a company that was on life support.
I never see this quoted about Steve, but they once asked Andy Grove who he most admired in the PC industry, and he said, "One guy: Steve Jobs. He invented the PC industry."
You know, we live in a very egalitarian world. We donit like heroes. And Steve is one of these heroic guys whose accomplishments are of such epic proportions, and it gnaws away at our egalitarian sense of the world.
The rest of the interview is also extremely interesting, and includes a few questions dealing with Mr. Ellisonis thoughts on Bill Gates and his drive to make Oracle a bigger company than Microsoft. We recommend it as a very good read.
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