[bribroder]

> The neighbors next door worried about the teenage Lisa, and one night, when Mr. Jobs was out, they moved her from his house and into theirs. Against Mr. Jobs’s wishes, the neighbors paid for her to finish college. (He later paid them back.)

> Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes her father’s frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her. “Sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute,” she writes, “walking out of restaurants without paying the bill.” When her mother found a beautiful house and asked Mr. Jobs to buy it for her and Lisa, he agreed it was nice — but bought it for himself and moved in with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.

> Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she wrote “Small Fry” in part to figure out why he withheld money from her even as his wealth ballooned, and as he spent it more freely on the children he had with Ms. Powell Jobs. She said she now sees it was about teaching her that money can corrupt.

It's almost as if whenever financial support was involved, he went out of his way to actually embody the moral corruption and decadence of wealth. It's an extraordinarily Spartan and hard-bitten way to teach these lessons. One must marvel at the mental fortitude required to keep coming back to him with such obvious love. She seems to have taken it as an almost Islamic lesson in peace-through-surrender, requiring the same absolute faith without recompense.

[badrequest]

Or maybe he wasn't sacrificing his natural humility to teach his daughter an important lesson on the toxicity of wealth, and he was just an asshole.

Which explanation is simpler?

[meowface]

Especially considering he treated only one of his children this way, and not the rest (at least to such an extreme extent). If his motives were really to teach them a lesson in fiscal responsibility and greed, I don't think he would subject only one of his children to such cold-hearted "education".

[bribroder]

Oh I didn't mean to imply any humility or positive traits in Jobs, I was thinking more about how it must have felt for his daughter and how she had to rationalize it.

[projectramo]

Her explanation follows the last passage you quote:

> Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she wrote “Small Fry” in part to figure out why he withheld money from her even as his wealth ballooned, and as he spent it more freely on the children he had with Ms. Powell Jobs. She said she now sees it was about teaching her that money can corrupt.

> The ethos “felt true and kind of beautiful and kind of enlightened for somebody like that,” she said. Still, the question was “why he would have taken that value system and applied it so severely to me.”

[grappler]

Regarding the house, it's almost as if the message is “Don't make financial requests of me. If you do I'll find a way to use them against you.”