In the end Steve Jobs’ contempt for human life did not exempt his own. He sacrificed himself thoughtlessly in one final and meaningless act, an act of radical branding so brave and revolutionary the media listed the cause of death as pancreatic cancer.

Of course, as we learn in Steve Jobs, to attribute Steve Jobs’ death to pancreatic cancer is to libel the cancer. In 2003 Steve Jobs had a pancreatic cancer scare that turned out to be a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, an extremely rare and slow-growing condition that accounts for only 1 percent of pancreatic cancer cases. It was the best-case scenario. His wife told Isaacson she remembered his doctors “tearing up with joy” when they learned the good news.

But then Steve Jobs refused to have surgery, once again putting all his faith and bullying, reality-blind certitude into his insufferable brand of sanctimonious veganism. This wasn’t a matter of passing up radiation and chemo; this was a matter of passing up every cancer patient’s dream of not even having to go through radiation and chemo.

“The big thing,” his wife explained to Isaacson, “was that he really was not ready to open his body,” as if such a move might jeopardize his manufacturer’s warranty. Then, burrowing into the depths of reality distortion, she added: “It’s hard to push someone to do that.”

WHAT IN KRISHNA’S NAME WAS HE DOING GETTING A BIOPSY THEN?!

But like all the other internal contradictions that seem to endlessly fascinate the punditry elite about Steve Jobs, this apparent conflict between Jobs’ profound affinity for technology and his bizarre unwillingness to allow it to save his life is another pointless straw man that only serves to further elide the very Jobsian simplicity that lies beneath:

There once lived one of those really obstinate assholes who will constantly tell you he couldn’t change his assholic ways if it killed him. It killed him.

There once lived a pathological liar who convinced the world his particular habits of lying were the foundation of his astonishing business success. That turned out to be a lie.

There once lived a drug dealer named Toxic Bob who taught Steve Jobs how to emit noxious fumes and lie about it. Toxic Bob made billions extracting riches from the earth and leaving the toxins behind for the government to clean up. Toxic Bob now resides in Singapore, where chewing gum is against the law.

Both men stayed very true to their brands.