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The Ten Most Terrible Tyrants of Tech

As a favor to Valleywag/Gawker, since this one is so hard to find (from Aug 2008). Very, very dated and not fact-checked at all. Read at your own risk :)

Here's to the screaming ones. The chair-throwers. The death-threat makers. The imperious gazers. The ones who see things differently — and will stare you down until you do, too. They're not fond of rules, especially those outlined by the human-resources department on "treating your employees with respect." And they have no respect for conversational decibel levels. You can cower before them, hide from them, quote them behind their backs, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they're so damn loud. They've worked at Google. Apple. Microsoft. AOL. They've ruled the industry — or they've failed, loudly. Below, we present you tech's 10 most tempestuous bosses — the ones who scream different. While some see them as sociopaths, Valleywag sees genius.

Steve Jobs: It's worse when he's not yelling

Steve Jobs's hot temper is as notorious as it is well-documented. The Apple CEO parks in handicapped spots. He'll fire employees in a tantrum. But more fearsome yet is Jobs's indifference. Even calm, calculated words can shrivel his underlings' spirits. He's created a cold atmosphere at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, one former employee tells us:

"No one greets him or says hi to him. Low ranking employees are afraid of him. I remember him walking around the campus one time and groups of people in his way would just split and let him walk through."

"My boss," says our source, "She's been with Apple since 1979. But she's only talked to Steve Jobs twice. She did a presentation for him when he was 24. He showed up half an hour late and without shoes. She needed money to start up a team. Steve Jobs listened to her presentation for an hour, said no and just got up and walked away." Another former employee told Variety in 2006: "Steve is always the smartest guy in the room and he knows it."

Eric Schmidt : Why companies need divas like Jobs to build brilliant products

Rob Glaser: screams to make the pain stop

Rob Glaser, the CEO and founder of RealNetworks, likes to scream. One former employee tells us that his abuse is so virulent that at it's common for RealNetworks execs to leave the company only one or two months before they're scheduled to receive bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our source says: "Another example was a buddy CEO at a startup back in the heyday of bubble 1.0."

"Real and Rob were expecting to make a strategic investment in a startup, only to lose out to Microsoft at the last minute. [That sent Glaser] screaming, throwing things, and ultimately slamming the door on the way out of the CEO's office knocking and breaking a picture on the wall."

Marc Benioff: Flowers ... and handcuffs

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is a charmer, which is also a nice way of saying he's a smarmy manipulator. Blowing off call after call with a Time contributor, he might send flowers and leave a long voicemail explaining himself. But when the Wall Street Journal wanted to write a story about Benioff's Hawaiian vacation home, the Salesforce.com CEO went off the handle, writing the wife of Dow Jones's CEO a letter, flying to New York to berate a Journal editor, and then, finally ordering ordering construction workers and local police to detain a Journal reporter checking out the property. So a warning to Salesforce.com employees: better hope the boss's smile keeps working.

Diane Greene: Her only mistake was working for another tyrant

Reports the Register:

[VMware] employees have talked to us about going into meetings with [cofounder Diane] Greene and crawling into their foxholes, hoping to avoid being struck by criticism or worse, a tirade.

These same employees describe Greene as "a hard-driving perfectionist who loves nothing more than to get her way." But despite her flaring temper, VMware cofounder Diane Greene's underlings loved her as the head of their company, especially as her dictatorial management style helped send its stock through the roof. But the stock eventually faltered, and Greene's tempestuous attitude threatened Joe Tucci, CEO of VMware's parent company, EMC. Greene and Tucci never got along, and so when Tucci got the chance, he pushed Greene out of the company.

Ex Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg: hot head, hot lead

Jason Goldberg, the fired CEO of Jobster, now runs social news site Social Median. He still has a problem with his verbal filter. He thinks things, it seems, and even if he shouldn't, he'll say them. For example, there's the YouTube video embedded above. Goldberg impolitely rips Jobster's rival, Monster.com, calling it a "crap product." Takes a lot of testosterone to say that about the market leader — especially when no one's heard of Jobster. But that's not the worst of it. No, that'd probably be the time Goldberg told an employee he was going to put a bullet in her head because she allegedly leaked news of an executive poaching.

Bill Gates: Doesn't even love his mother

These days, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is known as the most charitable person in the entire world, giving away billions of dollars through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But for years, Gates was known first for his money and second for a mean streak that flared particularly with women, starting with his mom. In an article bidding farewell to the now-retired top executive at Microsoft, Wired ran down the highlights:

• 1967: Gates, a difficult sixth grader, asks his mother, "Have you ever tried thinking?"
• 1977: On several occasions, Gates's secretary enters the Microsoft building to find him crumpled on the floor, asleep. He continues to live on pizza and is a demanding boss, often fighting with colleagues. Among his favorite responses: "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
• 1985: Gates reportedly abuses a female executive so badly that she asks to be transferred.
• May 13, 1990: Gates schedules a retreat for Microsoft company executives — on Mother's Day.

Ex-AOL sales chief David Colburn - Prepared to get biblical on your ass

Back when he ran ad sales at AOL in the late '90s, David Colburn earned himself quite the nickname. The peons called him God — you know, the guy who turns water to blood and rains locusts down from the heavens. Once, at a holiday party in December 1999, Colburn called three rabbis up on stage and told them to pray for AOL's success, promising to donate $1 million to any Jewish cause if AOL's stock hit certain levels. The rabbis agreed, startling offended partygoers. But according to author Alec Klein, who recounts the anecdote in his book Stealing Time, none of them were about to say anything.

Who wanted to incur the wrath of David Colburn? There was so much to David Colburn, all of it so outrageous and comical and scary and brilliant and successful and charitable, that he almost defied human description. And yet there he was an open book, a raging, exploding caricature of a personality, a combustible force of nature.

A source who used to sit on the other side of the negotiation table from Colburn tells us that the ex-AOLer was an "evil f**r" who "scared the shit out of me, back in the day." Klein describes Colburn's negotiation tactics in a similar vein:

His was a bone-jarring negotiating technique that was filled with swearing and threatening. During one phone call in his office, he was heard yelling at someone, belittling him, tearing him down, screaming, "Don't be a f**g idiot!"

Someone, who happened to be passing by, asked another bystander whom Colburn was talking to.

"A client," came back the answer.

"David had such a reputation that you could always use his presence as a threat," said Neil Davis, a former senior vice president. "It was like, 'If we can't get over this issue, we have to get David on the phone' I could always invoked David as teh court of appeals."

"His presence just caused a ripple of fear," said an AOL official who worked for him. "You could always hear him coming."

Once worth an estimated $250 million, Colburn in May settled an SEC lawsuit alleging he and other former AOL execs schemed in 1990s to overstate AOL's earnings by some $1 billion.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington: Doesn't discriminate — he holds everyone in contempt

Michael Arrington's temper is as bad as everyone assumes. Says a former employee:

He yells at anyone and everyone, including his staff, and including [TechCrunch CEO] Heather [Harde]. I'd note though that it's not just the yelling, it's the tone he takes as well. Maybe a cultural thing, but I'd never talk to people the way he does. Everyone is beneath him, and he holds most people in contempt. But oddly enough it's always in short bursts. If you remember Loren [Feldman]'s Arrington puppet videos [embedded above], that's pretty close to what he's like. He'll be mid-sentence then stop and yell at someone else, then revert to the original conversation like he had never stopped. Weirdest thing I've seen. Perhaps a need to put others down to boost his own ego, or a complete lack on empathy for anyone other than himself.

Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg: He'll yell at Larry and Sergey, too

Google's Mountain View campus is a happy primary-colored wonderland where no one ever screams or yells. Except for SVP Jonathan Rosenberg. A Google employee tells us that at the Googleplex Rosenberg is known as "a shitkicker" who "likes to crack the whip." Google lore has it that Rosenberg likes to yell so much, he even hollered during his hiring interview, presumably with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

People were like what the f is going on in that conference room? And then someone was like someone is interviewing, and it's the interviewee who's doing the yelling. He just literally likes to yell.

His broken volume dial hasn't hurt his career: Rosenberg is one of a handful of execs who's allowed to participate in Google's quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Would like to "kill" Google and its "pussy" CEO

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer loses it all the time, but nothing beats the story of when former Microsoft engineer Mark Lucovsky went into Ballmer's office to say he'd been poached by Google. After Google hired away Microsoft executive Kai Fu-Lee, Microsoft sued and eventually, Lucovsky ended up telling the story under oath. A telling excerpt:

At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: "Just tell me it's not Google." I told him it was Google. At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: "F**g Eric Schmidt is a f**g p**. I'm going to f**g bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f**g kill Google."

Elon Musk the Entertainer, by Walter Isaacson

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