Two years before he returned to rescue Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Steve Jobs argued that hiring "only A players" is the single biggest lever in tech.

What Happened: In a newly resurfaced clip of a 1995 interview for the Computerworld Information Technology Awards, clipped by Startup Archive, the then NeXT Computer chief said, "the difference between good people and great people in software is 50‑to‑1."

Jobs maintained that while taxi drivers or cooks vary by a factor of two or three, "the difference between the best person and the worst person [in software] is about 100‑to‑1 or more." He saw his personal job as "to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high … the goal of having only A players."

Jobs conceded that the strategy carries a human cost. "It's very painful when you have some people that are not the best … and you have to get rid of them," he said, but insisted the payoff in innovation justifies tough calls.

See also: Are Left-Handed CEOs Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates And Mark Zuckerberg Wired For Innovation? New Research Says They Lead More Creative, Profitable Companies

At the time, Jobs was steering NeXT, the workstation maker he founded after leaving Apple in 1985. The company's advanced NeXTSTEP operating system later became the technical foundation of Mac OS X when Apple bought NeXT for roughly $429 million in cash and stock on Dec. 20, 1996 -- a deal that brought Jobs back to Cupertino and ultimately to the CEO chair.

Why It Matters: Elon Musk watched the clip a while back and quickly agreed with Steve Jobs on the need to hire only "A‑players." Musk has followed that playbook while building PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and co‑founding OpenAI, now a frontrunner in artificial intelligence.

Jobs maintained that once leaders gather top‑tier talent, the team largely runs itself. He dismissed the idea that experience alone signals quality: in a 1985 interview, he blasted Apple's early "professional" managers, saying, "Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. And so if you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can't learn anything from?"

Image via Kemarrravv13/ Shutterstock

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