The missing piece of data that distinguishes what happened to nerds and to finance bros is that nerds got sold on post-religious cults like Landmark, The Secret, or the metastasized principles thereof (see also Silicon Valley s01’s guru, the marketing for Devs, the documentary The Institute, et al.) — but finance bros were insulated against this because their employers and industry had rigorous belief systems already in place centered around money, profits, and self-confidence; and, most importantly, a much higher tolerance for arrogance.

So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.

There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.

To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the needy), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)

Most nerds lacked both the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Jobs against the belief grifters and the innate confidence that insulated Woz, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.

Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).