From his Playboy interview, aged 29: Playboy: What does the money actually mean to you? Jobs: I still don't understand it. It's a large responsibility to have

From his Playboy interview, aged 29: Playboy: What does the money actually mean to you? Jobs: I still don't understand it. It's a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime--and I feel I have to spend it. If you die, you certainly don't want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values. Playboy: So what do you do? Jobs: That's a part of my life that I like to keep private. When I have some time, I'm going to start a public foundation. I do some things privately now. Playboy: You could spend all of your time disbursing your money. Jobs: Oh, you have to. I'm convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar. Playboy: Could that be an excuse to put off doing something? Jobs: No. There are some simple reasons for that. One is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy--there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can't succeed or fail, it's really hard to get better. Also, most of the time, the people who come to you with ideas don't provide the best ideas. You go seek the best ideas out, and that takes a lot of time. Playboy: If you plan to use your visibility to create a model for people, why is this one of the areas you choose not to discuss? Jobs: Because I haven't done anything much yet. In that area, actions should speak the loudest. http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920287 http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1920287