I tend to look at track records. Jobs started Apple, Pixar, and came back to fix Apple 2.0.
That's three unicorn-grade successes. Within those, he had similar streams of successes, like OS-X and the iPhone.
That's genius.
Two footnotes:
- I'm not sure genius is a good reason to worship someone or treat them as a hero; it's to me, it's more about what you do with that genius. For example, Hitler was a genius speaker, and Stalin was a genius administrator. Many geniuses I've met are not-nice people.
- Jobs had one major failure: NeXT. NeXT was still pretty brilliant, even if it didn't do well in the market.
That's just hero worship, like with Jobs; there's zero evidence to believe he's Einstein or Feynman or Knuth (which I would say are legit "geniuses").
He's a smart guy with a South African emerald fortune.