People don't just tolerate him for being negative, because he's really not all that negative. He's helpful if people actually need help. However, if he trusts you to not be stupid, and you break his trust, he's going to get mad.

He needs to be able to trust people because he needs to merge thousands of patches and make sure nothing bad gets in.

This is the only reason you should ever do what Jobs or Torvalds have done: trust.