Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.

Steve Jobs made this remark in the mid-1990s, during a period when he was defining his values publicly after being forced out of Apple (1985) and while leading NeXT and Pixar. In interviews from this era, Jobs repeatedly contrasted financial success with the deeper satisfaction of building excellent products and doing meaningful work. The line is commonly cited from a 1993 PBS documentary interview, where Jobs frames his motivation as the pride of having created something “wonderful,” rather than accumulating wealth or status. The cemetery image underscores the futility of riches at life’s end and reflects Jobs’s broader emphasis on purpose, craft, and legacy.

The quote draws a sharp distinction between extrinsic measures of success (money, rank, being “rich”) and intrinsic fulfillment (the quiet conviction that one’s work mattered). The “richest man in the cemetery” is a deliberately absurd goal: wealth cannot be enjoyed after death, so it cannot be the final metric of a life well lived. Jobs instead elevates the daily, private reckoning—going to bed satisfied—as a truer standard. In effect, he argues that meaning comes from creating, improving, and contributing, not merely possessing. It also hints at legacy: what endures is the quality and impact of what you make, not the size of your fortune.

1) “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful—that’s what matters to me.”
2) “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters.”
3) “It’s not about being the richest man in the cemetery; it’s about going to bed at night knowing we did something wonderful.”