At the time, Jobs was steering NeXT, the workstation maker he founded after leaving Apple in 1985. The company's advanced NeXTSTEP operating system later became the technical foundation of Mac OS X when Apple bought NeXT for roughly $429 million in cash and stock on Dec. 20, 1996 — a deal that brought Jobs back to Cupertino and ultimately to the CEO chair.

Why It Matters: Elon Musk watched the clip a while back and quickly agreed with Steve Jobs on the need to hire only "A‑players." Musk has followed that playbook while building PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and co‑founding OpenAI, now a frontrunner in artificial intelligence.

Jobs maintained that once leaders gather top‑tier talent, the team largely runs itself. He dismissed the idea that experience alone signals quality: in a 1985 interview, he blasted Apple's early "professional" managers, saying, "Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. And so if you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from?"