After working there for a bit the most amazing story I heard is that he would lease a new car every six months so that he wouldnt need to get a plate put on it so he could park in the handicap spot without getting ticketed.

Three questions:

1) How does not having a plate let you park in the handicapped space? The regulation is probably written such that you are required to have the handicapped plate or placard, and displaying no plate would be probable cause here.

2) Why not just have Apple reserve a parking space for the CEO or Steve Jobs outright? There's no regulations against reserving parking spaces in such a manner that I'm aware of.

3) Why is there so much worship in the tech industry of complete assholes like this?

1) I don't think it lets him park there, but it's hard to write a ticket without a plate number.

2) Agreed. This story makes no sense, although there is a picture of his car in a handicapped spot, so maybe he just did it once?

3) Lots of brilliant and successful people are assholes. Most people admire the first two qualities and not the third.

I thought the handicapped spot story and the every-six-months-new-car-for-no-plates story were separate. Steve didn't want a license plate on his car because he thought it messed up the aesthetics. He was also a jerk and parked in the handicapped spot because he could.

They’ve always been separate stories to me too and I’ve heard the same “aesthetics” point a bunch too (which doesn’t make it “true”, but sounds plausible anyway).

Unfortunately, people sometimes idolize the assholery because they associate it with being brilliant and successful. You can be kind and visionary!

I was always under the impression this was less about being cheap, but more about being really idiosyncratic about the way license plates look on cars.

Leasing a new car every 6 months is not cheap. It literally costs 6x as much as leasing the exact same car every 3 years (the industry norm).

I'm sure they made him a deal. Besides, the dealer could sell the car to somebody else later on at a markup because of its provenance.