The Most Important Man in the World

Steve Jobs recently retired as CEO of Apple, having finally accepted that his mysterious illness will not allow him to continue as head of the company.

The situation is serious. It’s not the future of Apple, whose annual sales approach $100 billion dollars — twice the size of Uruguay’s economy — that worries me: Either the team Jobs created will perform well, or the competitive market will fill the vacuum with other visionaries like him. It doesn’t even worry me that the share price may go up or down, because in the medium- to long-term that only depends on the company’s merits.

No, the situation is serious because of the symbolism. Among the four or five imaginative leaders in the world, Jobs was the one who was the most imaginative. In a moment in which our dull leaders lack the imagination to resolve the messes for which they are responsible, saying goodbye to the man who imagined the most is an uninspiring thing.

Jobs ruled that sector of U.S. society that refutes that the country has entered an irreversible decline. Although the financial and political decline is undeniable, Jobs, from whose individual imagination came no less than 313 patents, offered irrefutable proof that the U.S. was still the innovative vanguard of humanity. This doesn’t change because Jobs is no longer at the wheel of Apple. But his absence makes more conceivable the disconcerting possibility that this, one day, will change.

The ability to imagine, to translate the imagined into the material and to turn this creative “hey presto” into a worldwide business — turning what doesn’t exist one evening into a daily necessity by the next morning — had made Jobs the symbol of North American leadership in innovation and entrepreneurship. Both are the essence of the U.S., where they exist in greater quantities than in any other part of the word, and they are what maintain the country at the forefront of the world.

If the elites of the medieval world had been like Steve Jobs, the French Revolution never would have happened. Nobody guillotines a person who abandons their university studies, closes themselves in a garage to design the personal computer, founds a company that later throws him out, only to go back to it 12 years later when it’s failing, to convert it through the development of fantastic products with magical names — iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad — into the late fulfillment of the old longing of May 1968: to bring power to the imagination.

This year, 2011, hardly a year and eight months after it was launched on the market, the iPad will earn more for Apple than all of its Mac computers (a line dating back to 1984). Today, who could possibly conceive of a world in which, in order to communicate, produce, trade, learn and entertain ourselves, we lack the latest Apple products?

Apple will keep being Apple, or it won’t. But the retirement of Jobs brings me certain anguish.