How Steve Jobs treated his daughter, for example, is between him and his family. Diminishing his business accomplishments because of that is simply small-minded.
If I should respect someone's opinion or success in life, well that respect needs to come from someplace. And in my eyes its just harder to earn it compared to your viewpoint - excellence in 1 singular aspect isn't cutting it.
There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect. The others, not so much.
Or they've just managed to successfully hide their feet of clay, or you've just decided that you like their awesomeness so much you're going to overlook their peccadilloes.
Name any accomplished person, and you'll find haters.
Huge impacts are complicated, but being a good person is something I expect of everyone. If a person cannot be empathetic and kind to others around them, in my estimation, they have failed at their purpose here on earth.
Jobs hasn't benefited me much in any significant way. I've never been an Apple fanboy, never worked for Apple, never got rich off Apple stock, don't care much for Toy Story. I have an Apple mini, but used it only for porting D to it.
But I enjoy real life rags-to-riches stories, and Jobs is one of them.
> If a person cannot be empathetic and kind to others around them, in my estimation, they have failed at their purpose here on earth.
When Jobs passed, he left behind a lot of people who loved him (I'm not talking about fanboys, but people who were his friends and family.)
I recently attended the memorial of a close friend who died. Nearly a hundred people showed up, all trading stories about him. He left behind quite a lot of people who loved him, too.
Then you probably should be reading about his work in a science text book rather than a history book. For history books, the background and context of the people and events is as important as the events themselves.