Steve Jobs was basically a salesman. A brilliant one. Nothing bad in that; I just wouldn't call him a "tech leader" - he was involved with technology only incidentally.
Steve Jobs was hacking on electronics in the 1970s and building the most advanced personal computing devices from then until his death.
He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.
Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.
Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.
I might be mistaken, but I was under the impression that in the early days of Apple, it was Wozniak who was the tech guy and did most of the tech stuff.
As far as I know, you're right: "Jobs never did a lick of engineering in his life. He had me snowed," Alcorn later recalled. "It took years before I figured out that he was getting Woz to 'come in the back door' and do all the work while he got the credit."
No one would look very technical next to Woz. And it's not surprising Jobs farmed out the work to his badass friend.
> "At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester...."
But this is a very biased way of describing two people working on a technical project. To call one an "engineer" and the other a "breadboarder" as if he sat quietly contributing nothing.
Just because one person is playing second fiddle to a truly gifted technical genius doesn't magically make them non-technical.
If you want to argue Steve Jobs isn't technical, you'll have to set the bar lower than "as good as Woz" or almost none of us will make the cut!
They created the Apple II together. Woz did most of the hard engineering but it was Jobs that shaped it into a product for regular people through a thousand technical decisions.
You cannot create the company or products that Steve Jobs did without being technical. That doesn't mean you have to write the firmware on the wifi chip. It does mean you have to understand thousands of deeply technical concepts about computers.