21 People Besides Kanye Who Are Just Like Steve Jobs

Kanye West, whose new album Yeezus leaked onto file-sharing portals late last week, before making its official debut last night, sees himself a visionary and world-changing figure—but it’s not as if his greatness is incomparable. “I think what Kanye West is going to mean,” he told the New York Times last week, dropping into the third person, “is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump.”

It was actually the second time in the interview that Kanye described himself as Jobs-like. In an earlier exchange, he grappled with his own tendency to compromise his artistic vision on occasion by musing that “even a Steve Jobs has compromised.” And in a rather dark bit of braggadocio, he suggested that the death of Steve Jobs last year created a metaphorical torch-passing moment similar to the shift in rap following the death of the Notorious B.I.G., which cleared the way for Jay-Z’s ascendency. Implicit here was the notion that the Apple founder’s passing opened the door for Kanye to become the Steve Jobs of, well, everything.