There was a Walter Isaacson-authored biography which was extremely open and honest. Jobs wanted everything fully exposed, to include how terrible he was to his children, how intimidating he was to his employees, and how overpowering he was in business meetings.
It regularly referred to a "distortion effect" he could create, by essentially "gaslighting" (to use a common turn-of-phrase) people into doing things they thought they couldn't - often at great emotional expense. Essentially, he was somehow able to become a target of hatred, causing his employees to team up together "against him". It was extremely effective, but created a lot of copycats who just ended up abusing the hell out of their employees without getting the desired effect.
Realistically, he's just the only person we're getting a truly honest tell-all from. I'm not sure he's really that much worse than most people, I think we're just all judging him much more surgically.
I encourage anyone who is fascinated by Jobs to study the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
There's a good argument that FLW was a supercharged version of Jobs - wildly charismatic, visionary, uncompromisingly obsessive about the most minute of details, and could be manipulative and cruel. What we see w/ Jobs and Lisa, FLW was even worse as in 1909 he just up and abandoned his family of 7, seemingly out of the blue, to travel through Europe w/ his mistress. This was a national scandal at the time.
In his houses, he did all decorations (including providing art from his large personal stash) and built all the furniture and would go on tirades against his clients if he found out if they moved or replaced anything after they moved in, usually cutting off all further ties if they did not give into his demands. Also a fun fact is FLW had an obsession w/ Japanese woodblocking, similar in a way to Job's thing w/ calligraphy.
On top of that, their life took a similar arc where each had incredible success early in life that eventually crumbled under their own ambition, spent a time out in the wilderness, then went through a resurgence toward the end that greatly eclipsed their early success. Regardless, throughout his lifetime he maintained he was the best architect in the world, perhaps in history.
FLW actually wrote an autobiography during his time in the 'wilderness' (basically running an architecture cult in the desert) in the early 30s, and much of it is fanciful bluster, a bunch of half truths and exaggerations, almost as a means to save his legacy. You read it and kinda feel sorry for the guy. Yet, five years later as he turned 70, he created Fallingwater which led to so much work, that the last 20 years of his life he produced over twice as many commissions than he had done to that point. In fact when he died he was in the middle of actively working on 60 projects, most notably overseeing the construction of the Guggenheim.
There's plenty of WTF things you'll find upon digging in, such as his partner and her children (and other friends) being axed to death by a servant at one of his early compounds, and his time in Japan building the Imperial Hotel to be earthquake resistant - only for it to be hit by a 7.9 on its opening day, and being one of the few structures to survive mostly intact in all of Tokyo.
And with Fallingwater, after lying to his client that the design was complete, the client basically said, “great, I’m coming over.” Wright hadn’t produced anything - it was all in his head. According to his assistants, he worked feverishly over the next couple hours, putting the design to paper with virtually no mistakes - floor plans, elevations, scale drawings, site modifications - so that by the time the client arrived, it looked fully realized. A project of that scope would normally take months of work and dozens of revisions, but Wright had spent the better part of a year building it entirely in his mind, mostly on site visits just staring at the waterfall for hours at a time.
It regularly referred to a "distortion effect" he could create, by essentially "gaslighting" (to use a common turn-of-phrase) people into doing things they thought they couldn't - often at great emotional expense. Essentially, he was somehow able to become a target of hatred, causing his employees to team up together "against him". It was extremely effective, but created a lot of copycats who just ended up abusing the hell out of their employees without getting the desired effect.
Realistically, he's just the only person we're getting a truly honest tell-all from. I'm not sure he's really that much worse than most people, I think we're just all judging him much more surgically.