In the American Business Hall of Fame, the founder of Apple stands alongside Thomas Edison. An entrepreneur, inventor, and industrial designer who prioritized the philosophy of product development, he went down in history as the creator of one of the first personal computers with broad commercial potential, a pioneer of the information technology era, and a charismatic leader often called a “self-centered maniac of Silicon Valley.” His success organizing profitable projects and promoting cutting-edge technologies led commentators to call the minimalist billionaire a “role model for all executives” while also dubbing him “the toughest boss in America.” Nonconformist, hippie, Zen Buddhist, pirate, tyrant, perfectionist, aesthete, ascetic, and visionary—Steve Jobs imagined the future and actively shaped it. He famously said he didn’t rush to where the puck was, but to where it would be.
The Rejection of Genius
The promising prodigy was born on February 24, 1955, out of wedlock to young scientists who felt they had to give the baby up for adoption. His biological mother, Joanne Schieble, came from a Catholic family of German immigrants and was earning a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin, while his father, Syrian-born Abdulfattah (John) Jandali, worked there as a teaching assistant. To avoid upsetting her family, who disapproved of the relationship, the 23-year-old mother hid her pregnancy, gave birth at a private clinic in San Francisco, and placed the child with a childless couple.
Steve Jobs’ adoption kept his whereabouts secret from his biological parents; he met his sister and his birth mother only after the death of his adoptive mother—31 years later. He didn’t blame his biological mother and said he was grateful she had allowed him to be born, though learning he’d been given up at birth caused him considerable distress. He maintained friendly relations with Joanne Schieble and his sister Mona, who became a writer, while largely ignoring his biological father, who had left Joanne.
Jandali left the university to open a restaurant. He once boasted to his daughter that he ran a café in Silicon Valley “where Steve Jobs himself used to come.” When Jandali later discovered that the generous tipper had been his son, he tried to contact him. Jobs, who was already a millionaire by his mid-20s and wary of blackmail, declined to meet. “To me, these people are just sperm and egg donors,” Steve said, distinguishing them from the people who raised him.
Steve Jobs’ Parents
The Garage Wunderkind
Joanne Schieble insisted the adoptive parents have higher education; Paul and Clara Jobs did not have degrees, but they signed a written commitment to pay for the boy’s college. Paul Jobs worked as a mechanic and repaired old cars in the family garage to sell, helping pay for Steve’s education. He also sparked his son’s interest in hands-on work and introduced him to the basics of electronics. Clara Jobs worked as an accountant at a high-tech company in Silicon Valley.
When the family moved to Mountain View from San Francisco five years later, Steve began taking apart and reassembling televisions and radios—he was more interested in that than in school. Teachers had to bribe him with snacks and DIY kits to keep him interested. He did so well on tests that he was ready to skip from fourth grade to seventh; his parents instead enrolled him in sixth grade at Crittenden Middle School, which turned out to be a poor fit because of the rough neighborhood.
To escape bullies, the Jobs family bought a house in the more affluent part of southern Los Altos. Steve later attended Homestead High School in Cupertino while his father worked as a mechanic at a laser manufacturing company in Silicon Valley. A neighbor who was an engineer introduced Steve to a research club at Hewlett-Packard, where he saw a personal computer and a programmable calculator for the first time—both made a big impression.
Hungry and Reckless
Club members worked on their own projects, and Steve began assembling a digital frequency meter. For parts, 13-year-old Jobs simply called Bill Hewlett; the call not only got him parts but led to a summer job on HP’s assembly line after his first year at Homestead. He also delivered newspapers and worked in a warehouse at an electronics store. By age 15 he already had his own car, which he modified and later traded for a red Fiat.
Soon Jobs was listening to Bob Dylan, mingling with hippies, smoking marijuana, and experimenting with LSD—an experience he later called one of the most important of his life for “expanding consciousness” and for finding creative people. In his youth he met his future friend and partner, Stephen Wozniak. In 1971 they began collaborating by building and selling a homemade device that hacked phone systems.
After getting into trouble with the police over the homemade Blue Box device, the friends stopped making the boxes. That episode, however, laid the groundwork for their future partnership: Wozniak would invent brilliant hardware, while Jobs would figure out how to market it for maximum profit (not all the earnings were shared equally; Jobs saw his own contribution as decisive). Jobs adopted the motto “stay hungry, stay foolish.”
Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs, 1969
The Path to Success
After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Oregon in 1972 but left after just six months. He stayed with friends in the dorms and survived by collecting bottles and making long trips to a Krishna temple for free Sunday meals. Between scavenging for food he took a calligraphy course that would later influence Apple’s typography and design.
In 1975 Jobs and his Reed friend Daniel Kottke traveled to India seeking spiritual enlightenment; Jobs returned influenced by Buddhism, wearing traditional Indian clothes and a shaved head. Zen Buddhism had a profound effect on his aesthetic: he favored simplicity and minimalism in both personal style and product design. Most of his 43 patents were for design elements rather than pure technological breakthroughs, and he often relied on intuition when making decisions.
On April 1, 1976, 20-year-old Steve Jobs and engineer-programmer Stephen Wozniak founded a company to build their own computers—Apple Computer (the company began operating in 1977). Many believe that without Jobs’ commercial instincts, Wozniak’s Apple I might have remained an unmarketable garage project. The Apple II became the company’s first mass-market product. The name “Apple” was a marketing choice: friendly, nonthreatening, and likely to appear ahead of competitors in phone directories.
Apple Computers: I, II, III
Jobs’ Philosophy
Before founding Apple, Jobs had worked on a fruit farm in Oregon. The apple appealed to him as a symbol of inspiration and knowledge on one hand, and of simplicity and accessibility on the other—the first company logo showed an apple under a tree. Designer Rob Janoff gave the logo a bite to make the fruit clearly recognizable, and there was a playful echo between “bite” and the computer term “byte.”
“Creativity is just connecting things,” Jobs said. “When you’re a creator and someone asks you how you did something, you feel a little shy and even guilty because you didn’t really create anything; you just saw something and connected different pieces of your experience to synthesize something new.” He cared more about the philosophy of making products than about material rewards—he famously took a formal CEO salary of $1.
The First Apple Logo
Like other American computer startups competing with IBM, Apple started in a garage and wooed its first investors with a few prototypes displayed against a backdrop of empty boxes. Jobs was willing to poach talent and borrow ideas—”It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy,” he once said, and he even flew a black pirate flag over Apple’s main building. Ten years after its founding, the company employed around 4,000 people, was valued at roughly $2 billion, and had become a leader in the personal computer market.
The Greatest Business Achievement
When Jobs saw the commercial potential of a mouse-driven graphical interface, it led to machines like the Apple Lisa and the Macintosh. For a long time Jobs exercised enormous influence at Apple without always holding a formal managerial title, and he amassed huge personal wealth in the process. After losing a power struggle with the board in 1985, he left the company he had started and founded NeXT, a company building a computer platform for universities and businesses.
Apple Lisa Computer
A year later he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm and turned it into Pixar, which went on to produce box-office hits such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Pixar later became part of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, and Jobs joined Disney’s board and became a major shareholder. In 1997 Jobs returned to Apple, took control of the company, and helped pull it back from the brink of bankruptcy. Apple began turning a profit again within a year—one of the most celebrated corporate turnarounds in business history.
Over the next decade Jobs oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, introduced consumers to the MacBook Air, and expanded retail and digital stores such as the Apple Store, iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore. Those products and services delivered years of steady financial growth and helped Apple become the world’s most valuable company by 2011. A magnetic presenter, Jobs turned product launches into artful, must-see events.
The Human Side of Genius
At the same time, Jobs’ complex personality, authoritarian leadership, perfectionism, and frequent clashes with colleagues drew heavy criticism. He could fire thousands of employees in a year, including people many respected, and he could also spare those with whom he disagreed for business reasons. To employees he was blunt: “Complete crap.” That statement often meant, “Prove this is the best solution.” He was accused of fostering a cult of personality (when Wozniak held employee number 1, Jobs took number 0 to avoid being second), of brutal competition with rivals, and of wanting total control over products even after customers bought them—he famously limited what users could access on Apple devices.
Jobs was often in legal fights and arguments, and he combined charisma, charm, bravado, calm, and determination to create what colleagues called a “reality distortion field,” convincing people the impossible was possible—about both production tasks and product capabilities. He also used team metaphors: “My role model is The Beatles—greatness in business is never created by one person; it is achieved by a team,” and he warned that if Apple lost to IBM or Microsoft, “dark times will come for the computer industry.”
When Jobs recruited Pepsi president John Sculley to run Apple, he used blunt hyperbole: “Do you want to spend your whole life selling sweet water, or will you come with me and change the world?” Ironically, two years later Sculley played a role in Jobs’ ouster from Apple. Years after, Jobs would say at the Smithsonian Institution that Sculley had “destroyed Apple by arming the company’s employees with false values,” accusing him of replacing people with the right principles with those who cared more about making money than about the company and its users.
Steve Jobs’ Spiritual Views
Looking back, Jobs called his ouster “the best thing that ever happened to me.” “I got rid of the baggage of a successful person and rediscovered the lightness and doubts of a beginner. It freed me and marked the beginning of my most creative period,” he said. Embracing the Think Different concept, Jobs built ad campaigns around images of figures who inspired him—Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi, and others. “By showing who our heroes are, we communicated our values,” he explained.
Genius Bar at the New York Apple Store
In 2011 Forbes estimated his net worth at about $7 billion—roughly 5.5 million Apple shares (about $2.1 billion) and 138 million Disney shares (about $4.4 billion)—placing him among the richest Americans. Yet his spiritual practices led him to a simple lifestyle: he was a committed vegetarian who fasted occasionally, lived in a sparsely furnished house, and applied Zen and Bauhaus principles to his private life.
Jobs wore a comfortable uniform of a black Issey Miyake turtleneck, Levi’s jeans, and New Balance sneakers. He drove a silver Mercedes-Benz without license plates; under California law he could delay getting plates for six months, so he reportedly leased a new SL 55 AMG every six months. He declined reserved celebrity parking spots out of modesty, though he sometimes took disabled parking spaces, prompting the wry joke: “Park differently!”
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, 2007
Steve Jobs’ Personal Life
Jobs often struggled to contain his emotions, especially in relationships. His personal mistakes sometimes became public and brought criticism. One notable example was his early fatherhood and his long refusal to acknowledge his first daughter—after whom the project Lisa was named—which became a source of controversy for him and for Apple.
Unable to explain the newborn’s connection to the computer’s name, Apple’s PR team had to scramble for explanations, even suggesting the backronym “Local Integrated System Architecture,” which spawned many parodies (the most famous being “Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym”). Lisa Brennan was born in May 1978 to Chrisann Brennan, a woman Jobs had been involved with since the spring of 1972. In their youth the two had lived in a mountain cabin above Los Altos.
Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, 1972.
Chrisann was painting while Jobs tried his hand at poetry and guitar. They both practiced Zen, experimented with LSD, worked odd jobs, hitchhiked, and traveled to India seeking enlightenment. They returned separately and broke up; a few months later Chrisann became pregnant. Jobs at first acted as if it did not concern him, though he persuaded Chrisann not to put the child up for adoption—the same fate his mother had chosen for him—and named the girl Lisa.
Learning from Mistakes
A year later a genetic test confirmed Jobs’ paternity (the probability reported was 94.41%), and he agreed to pay child support. He rented an apartment in Palo Alto for his daughter and her mother and paid for Lisa’s education. For four years Lisa lived with Jobs’ family while attending school and had a warm relationship with her father. Jobs later acknowledged he had handled things poorly and said he would change his behavior if he could. “I just wasn’t ready for such changes in my life back then, but now it would be different,” he said.
Later relationships improved Jobs’ public image. A romance with Barbara Yassinsky helped him look like a successful businessman—she worked at an ad agency that provided services to Jobs’ company. They were together until 1982, after which Jobs dated folk singer Joan Baez for about three years; Baez was older and that relationship was reported to be linked through shared musical connections.
The most beautiful woman in his life, by Jobs’ account, and his first true love was Tina Redse, whom he met in 1985. Redse was a computer consultant who, like Jobs, sought harmony. They had a passionate relationship, but she refused his marriage proposal, saying she could not bear to watch him mistreat others. “I couldn’t live with that, but I wouldn’t take on the task of reforming a legend,” she said.
Steve Jobs’ Marriage
Jobs’ only wife was Laurene Powell, a bank employee eight years his junior. They met by chance in October 1989 when she attended his lecture at Stanford Business School. On January 1, 1990, Jobs proposed, then for several months failed to stay in touch because of work, which hurt her. She considered leaving, but he gave her a ring and took her to Hawaii, where she became pregnant.
Steve Jobs’ Family
They married in the spring of 1991 in Yosemite National Park in a ceremony led by Jobs’ Zen mentor, monk Kobun Chino Otogawa. The marriage was a source of happiness for Jobs. In September they welcomed a son, Reed; four years later they had a daughter, Erin; and three years after that Laurene gave birth to a third child, Eve. By all accounts Jobs loved his children and tried to be present for them. Their son Reed is said to resemble his father but to have a softer temperament.
Jobs found new meaning in family life, which gained urgency after his October 2003 diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He had surgery to remove a tumor and later received a liver transplant; doctors gave him a few more years during which he continued to work and unveil Apple products. In January 2011 his health declined; he took an indefinite medical leave, and in August he stepped down as CEO, saying, “The time has come.”
Illness and Death
Health problems might have been less severe had Jobs not delayed recommended surgery for nine months—he resisted invasive treatment and later regretted that choice. He tried alternative therapies, relying on herbal remedies, a plant-based diet, acupuncture, and other nontraditional methods. During that time the tumor metastasized to his liver, and he eventually began chemotherapy in secret. To avoid a market reaction, Jobs kept many details private and presented optimistic updates.
Reports about his condition were sometimes described as treatment for a “common viral infection” or a “hormonal imbalance.” In reality he had lost weight, was no longer helped by painkillers, and grew depressed and without appetite. Few believed the upbeat statements about his condition. The situation was complicated by an erroneous pre-prepared obituary that Bloomberg accidentally published on August 28, 2008. Jobs spent a lot of time thinking about death, which did not make his fight easier.
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose,” Jobs told Stanford graduates in 2005. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” Steve Jobs died in his California home, surrounded by his wife, children, and sister, at about 3 p.m. on October 5, 2011. An autopsy was not performed. According to those present, his last words were exclamations of wonder: “Wow! Wow! Wow!”
