So, looking into it a bit more, iLike ended up selling for $20m to Myspace roughly a year after this story happened. It sucks for Steve Jobs to say you're full of BS, but really, if there's a mistake here, the mistake is simply not taking the $50m. Ali probably could have called up corp dev the next day and said, ha ha wasn't it funny that Steve called me a bullshitter in that meeting, anyways I accept your offer.

Was it a mistake? In retrospect it would have made Ali more money, but I don't know, maybe iLike still had some chance of succeeding on its own at that point. Maybe it was just a calculated risk that didn't pan out.

Maybe the perfectly charismatic negotiator could have squeezed an extra 10% out of Apple but that just isn't that important compared to the decision of "should we sell the company for approximately 50m, or not?"