Martin van Nijnatten

I don't know how many of you realize that history is repeating itself. But what's happening to Jensen Huang looks a lot like what happened to Steve Jobs. A founder who built the most important company of his era. A board meeting to decide whether he should go. And an entire system that thinks this is a great idea. What's pretty funny is that today, in my opinion, if Steve Jobs were still alive, he'd be fighting everything Bill Gates stands for. Let me explain. To understand, you have to go back to the late 70s and early 80s. Back then, computing belonged to IBM. Big Blue. The gray giant, the dark suits, the processes, the hierarchy. In corporate America, everyone repeated the same line: nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. And on the other side, there was a kid from Cupertino who had started his company in a garage. In late 1983, Jobs went on stage and asked his people the question: will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right? A few weeks later, during the Super Bowl, Apple aired "1984," directed by Ridley Scott. A gray hall. Rows of shaven-headed men in uniforms, marching in lockstep. On a giant screen, Big Brother recites a speech about uniformity. Suddenly, an athlete bursts in, chased by the thought police. She spins a hammer. She throws it. The screen explodes. Then a line on a black screen: Macintosh is coming, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984." It wasn't an ad for a computer. It was a manifesto. The individual against the system. The creator against the bureaucratic machine. And Jobs fought that fight his whole life. Against a lifelong rival: Bill Gates. Jobs didn't just accuse Microsoft of copying. He accused it of a worldview. One line summed it up: the problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. No taste, no vision, no soul. Products designed by committees, for committees. Because that's what Jobs hated more than anything: bureaucracy. In 2010, on stage with Walt Mossberg, he asked the audience a question. Do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. Apple is organized like a startup. The biggest startup on the planet. Zero committees. One person accountable per product. Ideas, not hierarchy. Now look at what Bill Gates has become. A foundation shaping health, agriculture and energy policy in dozens of countries. One of the largest funders of the WHO. Global conferences, task forces, expert committees, public-private partnerships. A world where nobody builds anymore, they coordinate. Where nobody launches products anymore, only programs. Where nobody voted for the people making the decisions. Bill Gates has become the perfect embodiment of everything Steve Jobs hated. That's why I'm convinced Jobs would be on the other side today. Not in the committees. Not in the agencies. On stage, throwing the hammer. Because the battle of 1984 never ended. It just changed cast. On one side, the bureaucrats. A Democratic Party that wants licenses, pauses and federal agencies to decide who gets to build. Bill Gates and his global committees. Soros and his billion a year poured into NGOs, campaigns and institutions. On the other, the builders. Elon Musk. Jensen Huang. Palmer Luckey. Travis Kalanick. And they all have one thing in common with Jobs: the system tried to throw them out. Jobs was fired from his own company by a board, in favor of a manager brought in from Pepsi. Kalanick was pushed out of Uber by his investors. Luckey was fired from Facebook over a political donation. Musk has been fighting regulators for twenty years. And Jensen is living through the exact same thing, in real time, right in front of us. None of them stopped. Jobs founded NeXT and Pixar, then came back to save Apple. Luckey founded Anduril. Musk built rockets the entire establishment said were impossible. And the day Apple fired Jobs, nobody imagined he'd come back twelve years later and turn it into the most valuable company in the world. Keep that in mind as you watch what's happening to Jensen. Today, the giant screen isn't called IBM anymore. It's called licenses, committees, federal agencies, moratoriums. And the question Jobs asked on stage is back, more urgent than ever. Was Orwell right? The answer depends on one thing. Whether anyone will still be allowed to throw the hammer.