[mikeash]

You can be confident and self assured without being an asshole.

You mention Steve Jobs. What about Woz? Without Woz, Apple never would have gotten off the ground. I suspect most of us would agree that Woz is not only a 10x engineer, but probably a 100x. At least, he was in the early days of Apple, before the plane crash. And he’s a super nice fellow.

One thing being an asshole helps with is becoming famous. Everybody knows who Steve Jobs was. Approximately nobody outside the tech community knows about Woz. So naturally, if you go looking for examples, you’ll find lots of assholes. That doesn’t mean assholery correlates with (let alone causes) success.