The logic of the standard biography-a formative event leads to an epiphany that creates the great man-doesn’t quite work when the greatness doesn’t have much to do with the man at all. The speed with which tech giants make their fortunes, the seemingly arbitrary distinctions between competing startups, and the mostly ephemeral and debatably useless nature of many of their products make the typical tech success story a lot harder to tell-at least in any honest way. But at least Lee Iacocca, for instance, had a Ford Mustang to show for his efforts, and a spate of competitors who did, in fact, need to be vanquished. The same, of course, could be said about all business biographies: nearly every story of fortune comes down to luck and timing. But what really separated all the losers from those who had been able to amass a large fortune was a whole lot of lucky breaks in a row. Most of them, it turned out, were far more broke than they let on. Once you get past all the wealth, the erratic habits, and the self-mythologizing, how does a responsible author account for the subject’s success? Earlier in my career, I wrote quite a bit about the poker world, and after a while I came to the realization that, for the vast majority of so-called geniuses, there wasn’t some magical system that allowed them to print money at casinos or sports books. The tech mogul presents the same biographical problem as the professional gambler.
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