You could argue that Steve Jobs was a product of very Californian circumstances: Born to parents of very different cultural backgrounds, raised in a hotbed of electronics development (and new age spirituality), started a company in an area full of enthusiasts and venture capitalists…
Jobs did a lot of useful things, but he was not an inventor and so has nothing to show. He was really good at forcing people to perfect the inventions of others which is a useful thing. Cray-1 is an invention, and better known than the inventor. So it is the right decision for both.
You can of course debate which is better and there are hundreds of other choices that could be put on either coin - both humans and inventions. I would probably pick different things (not people) for both - but this is a reflection of my biases and not some universal truth.
Jobs was arguably the first product manager in personal computing - meaning he had a clear vision for the consumer and product and worked to carry that out.
The intent here is to get people's attention, and an arguement over "which is best" is exactly the outcome desired. I won't step into it except to say regardless of the subject and reasoning, the design of the Jobs one is pretty dumb. It looks like the gave a prompt focused on hippy-spirtual-big-thinker to AI and said "design a coin".
bc theyre going for the aspect of the innovation that the most people in the relevant political constituencies will recognize. in some cases the inventor, in others the invention.
