You're talking about other people's motivations. But DJB minus ego wouldn't be some other person, he'd still be DJB; just "DJB if you cut a certain part of his brain out." And I don't think that that person would have any other motivation-generating part of his brain left. His works specifically seem entirely ego-driven. DJB minus the ego probably wouldn't have had any interest in becoming an information-worker at all. (I'd like to think he'd become a janitor, like the protagonist of Flowers for Algernon. :P)

I concede this point. May I modify my original statement? I wish DJB took motivation from non-ego sources, so that we could have the wonderful things he’s made, but even more wonderful because they were made by someone who knew they were fallible.

Almost everyone who has worked really hard to be great at something has an ego about it. In most cases, they really wanted to be better than (often some specific) others.

To pick some well know people, I'd say Feynman and Einstein both had massive egos. They "knew" they were smart. They also had reputations for being really nice and humble.

It would be simpler to just admit that you think DJB is a bit of a jerk. Linus Torvalds is a bit of a jerk too, in most people's estimation. Brilliant jerks, we call them.

They can make great workers and are always terrible leaders.

There’s a big difference between self-assessed qualifications, and ability to admit fallibility. Good scientists know they know a lot. Great scientists know that they don’t know a lot, and admitting that you might be wrong is critical for the scientific method to work.

So DJB is brilliant, but if he admitted that he could make mistakes (or even that a compiled could mis-compile his flawless code), then he might have put in failsafes like unreachable code assertions that would have meant that we wouldn’t be discussing this today.

I don’t think he’s a jerk. I don’t know enough about him; maybe he’s the nicest, kindest guy around. I do think the evidence suggests that he’s arrogant, though, and that’s not a good look on anyone.