Steve Jobs may have built arguably one of the most successful companies of his generation, still active to this day. But he probably would have been a lousy stock market investor.
1. Warren Buffett’s style of investing requires patience. A quality Jobs sorely lacked. Jobs would bully and intimidate his employees into achieving seemingly impossible goals. Jobs pushed and pushed until reality bent to his will. That perhaps works in the world of product design but not even Steve Jobs could bully the stock market into doing his bidding.
2. A successful investor must keep calm in the face of Mr. Market’s mood swings. But Steve Jobs was a mood swing incarnate. He took his perfectionism to an extreme. That same manically obsessive approach applied to stock market investing would have crushed him.
3. Jobs wanted to change the world. In contrast, Buffett bets on a world that does change much. Jobs would dismiss such an approach as pointless.
Steve Jobs had a big influence and changed the world with his products, but Warren Buffet made far more money on Apple stocks than Steve Jobs ever did.
Sven Franssen