Steven Paul Jobs was an American entrepreneur and inventor who co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak in 1976, was forced out of the company in 1985, and returned in 1997 to lead one of the most consequential turnarounds in business history, overseeing the creation of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad before his death from pancreatic cancer in 2011.
Between his two stints at Apple, he founded the computer company NeXT and purchased the animation studio that became Pixar, guiding it to become one of the most successful studios in Hollywood before selling it to Disney in 2006. Jobs died at 56, having served as Apple’s chief executive for less than 15 years across two separate periods, yet his design philosophy and product decisions remain foundational to how consumer technology is built and marketed today.
Quick Facts
| Quick Fact | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Steven Paul Jobs |
| Date of Birth | February 24, 1955 |
| Date of Death | October 5, 2011 (age 56) |
| Place of Birth | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Profession | Entrepreneur, inventor, designer |
| Known For | Co-founding Apple; leading its 1997 to 2011 turnaround; the iPhone, iPod, and iPad; Pixar |
| Education | Reed College, Portland, Oregon (attended 1972, withdrew after one semester) |
| Companies | Apple Inc. (co-founder, former CEO); NeXT (founder, former CEO); Pixar (former chairman and majority shareholder) |
| Major Position(s) | Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc.; Founder, Chairman, and CEO of NeXT; Chairman of Pixar |
| Spouse/Partner | Laurene Powell Jobs, married 1991 |
| Children | Four, including Lisa, Reed, Erin, and Eve |
| Net Worth (at death) | Estimated at approximately $10.2 billion in 2011 (see Net Worth section) |
Who Is Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures in the history of personal computing and consumer electronics. He co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in a family garage in 1976, helping introduce the personal computer to a mainstream consumer audience, before an internal power struggle led the company’s board to sideline him in 1985.
Jobs spent the following twelve years building NeXT, a computer company whose technology would later become the foundation of Apple’s modern operating systems, and separately transformed a struggling computer graphics division he purchased from Lucasfilm into Pixar Animation Studios, producer of Toy Story and a string of subsequent critical and commercial hits. He returned to Apple in 1997, when the company acquired NeXT, and went on to lead one of the most celebrated corporate turnarounds in business history, overseeing the launch of the iMac, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, and iPad before stepping down as CEO in August 2011, weeks before his death from complications of pancreatic cancer that October.
Early Life and Childhood
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to two University of Wisconsin graduate students, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, who placed him for adoption shortly after his birth. He was adopted by Paul Jobs, a machinist, and Clara Jobs, an accountant, who raised him in Mountain View, California, an area that would later become the heart of Silicon Valley.
Jobs showed an early interest in electronics, working alongside his father in the family garage on projects that involved taking apart and reassembling household electronics. At around age thirteen, he met Steve Wozniak, then eighteen and already deeply immersed in electronics, through mutual friends; the two bonded over a shared fascination with technology and began collaborating on early projects, including building and selling illegal “blue boxes” that could manipulate telephone networks to place free long-distance calls.
Education
Jobs attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, where he participated in the school’s electronics club alongside other future engineers of Silicon Valley’s formative generation. Following his graduation, he enrolled at Reed College, a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, but withdrew after a single semester, finding he lacked clear direction for what he wanted to study, though he continued informally auditing classes that interested him, including a calligraphy course he later credited as an influence on Apple’s later attention to typography and design.
Jobs never completed a college degree. After leaving Reed, he traveled to India in 1974 in search of spiritual insight, studying Zen Buddhism, an experience that shaped both his personal philosophy and his design sensibilities for the rest of his career.
Early Career
Following his return from India, Jobs took a position as a technician at Atari, the video game company, where he worked on game design projects, including an assignment on the game Breakout that he enlisted Wozniak’s help completing. This period gave Jobs direct, practical experience within the electronics and consumer technology industry, distinct from Wozniak’s more purely technical and engineering-driven background.
By 1975, Wozniak had begun independently designing his own computer circuit board, driven by his own desire to own a personal computer, work he shared with fellow members of the Homebrew Computer Club, an early hobbyist group central to Silicon Valley’s developing personal computing culture. Jobs recognized commercial potential in Wozniak’s design that Wozniak himself had not initially considered pursuing as a business.
Entrepreneurial Journey
Jobs proposed that he and Wozniak start a company to sell Wozniak’s computer board, and Apple Computer Company was formally founded on April 1, 1976, after Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak’s employer at the time, formally declined to pursue his design itself. The two funded their first production run of the Apple I by selling Jobs’s Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak’s programmable calculator, assembling early units in the Jobs family garage.
The Apple II, released in 1977, became a significant commercial success and helped establish Apple as a serious computing company rather than a hobbyist project, aided by Jobs’s early recognition that the personal computer could appeal to a broad consumer audience rather than remaining a niche interest for electronics enthusiasts.
Major Companies and Ventures
Apple Inc.: Co-founded by Jobs and Wozniak in 1976, Apple grew rapidly through the late 1970s and early 1980s, going public in December 1980 in one of the most significant IPOs of the era. Jobs served as chairman and, following a 1985 internal power struggle with CEO John Sculley, was pushed out of any operational role at the company he had co-founded. He returned in 1997 following Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, serving as interim CEO before becoming permanent CEO in 2000, a position he held until resigning in August 2011 due to declining health.
NeXT: Founded by Jobs in 1985 after his departure from Apple, funded with approximately $12 million of his own money. NeXT developed high-end workstation computers aimed at university and research markets and, more significantly for Apple’s later history, developed the NeXTSTEP operating system, which became the technical foundation for Mac OS X following Apple’s 1997 acquisition of the company.
Pixar: Jobs purchased the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm in 1986 for $10 million, renaming it Pixar and serving as its chairman and majority shareholder. Under Jobs’s ownership, Pixar released Toy Story in 1995, the first feature-length computer-animated film, followed by a string of critically and commercially successful films. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 for approximately $7.4 billion in an all-stock transaction, making Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder and a member of its board of directors.
Technology and Innovation
Jobs’s most significant and consistent contribution to technology was not primarily as an engineer but as a product visionary and design leader, someone who paired deep attention to industrial design and user experience with an unusually direct, hands-on involvement in product development decisions. During his second tenure as Apple CEO, he championed the iMac (1998), which combined distinctive colorful design with ease of use to help revive the company’s consumer appeal, followed by the iPod (2001) and the iTunes Store (2003), which together transformed how consumers purchased and listened to digital music.
The iPhone, launched in 2007, combined a mobile phone, an internet communications device, and a music player into a single touchscreen product, fundamentally reshaping the mobile phone industry and establishing the smartphone as a distinct, dominant product category. The iPad, introduced in 2010, similarly helped define the modern tablet computer category. Across each of these products, Jobs was known for an intense, hands-on involvement in design details that many colleagues and biographers have described as central to their commercial success.
Major Products, Projects and Achievements
The Macintosh, launched in 1984 with a landmark television commercial that aired during that year’s Super Bowl, introduced a graphical user interface and mouse-driven navigation to a mainstream consumer audience, technology that, while not invented by Apple, was popularized and commercialized under Jobs’s direction in a way that significantly influenced the broader personal computing industry’s subsequent design direction. Pixar’s Toy Story, released in 1995, similarly represented a landmark achievement in computer animation technology.
The iPhone stands as Jobs’s most commercially significant achievement, having generated a substantial majority of Apple’s revenue in the years following its launch and establishing a product category that reshaped the telecommunications, software, and consumer electronics industries simultaneously. By the time of Jobs’s death in 2011, Apple had become, for a period, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, a position built substantially on the iPhone’s commercial success.
Leadership and Management
Jobs was widely known for an intensely demanding, perfectionist management style, frequently described by colleagues, biographers, and journalists using the term “reality distortion field,” referring to his ability to convince employees that seemingly impossible deadlines and design standards were achievable through sheer force of persuasion and personal conviction. This approach produced both fierce loyalty among some colleagues and significant friction with others, including instances of public criticism of employees’ work that some former Apple staff have described as harsh.
During his second tenure as CEO beginning in 1997, Jobs dramatically simplified Apple’s product lineup, famously reducing a sprawling and confusing range of computer models down to four core products, a decision credited with helping stabilize the company’s finances and sharpen its brand identity during a period when Apple had been widely regarded as approaching potential failure.
Investments and Business Interests
Beyond Apple, NeXT, and Pixar, Jobs’s personal investment activity was comparatively limited relative to several other major technology figures of his era, reflecting his primary focus on direct operational leadership of the companies he founded or led rather than a diversified outside investment portfolio. His most significant financial position outside Apple came through his Disney shareholding, received when Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, which at the time of his death represented the largest single component of his overall net worth, exceeding the value of his relatively modest remaining Apple stock, most of which he had sold following his 1985 departure from the company.
Awards and Recognition
Jobs received the National Medal of Technology from President George H.W. Bush in 1985, one of the United States’ highest honors for technological achievement. In 2022, more than a decade after his death, President Joe Biden posthumously awarded Jobs the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, recognizing his contributions to American innovation and technology.
He was named Fortune magazine’s “CEO of the Decade” in 2009, recognition of Apple’s transformation and sustained commercial success under his second tenure as chief executive, and received numerous other industry design and business awards over the course of his career recognizing both Apple’s product design and the company’s broader turnaround under his leadership.
Personal Life
Steve Jobs had a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, born in 1978 to his then-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan; Jobs initially denied paternity, a period of estrangement that lasted several years before he eventually acknowledged Lisa and built a closer relationship with her later in life, one he described with some regret in interviews during his final years. He married Laurene Powell in 1991, and the couple had three children: Reed, Erin, and Eve. Jobs was also close to his younger biological sister, writer Mona Simpson, whom he discovered as an adult; Simpson later delivered a widely circulated eulogy at his memorial service.
Jobs was diagnosed with a rare, typically slower-growing form of pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer in October 2003. He initially pursued dietary and alternative treatment approaches for approximately nine months rather than immediate surgery, a decision he later said he regretted, before undergoing surgery in 2004. He received a liver transplant in 2009 as his condition progressed.
Philanthropy and Social Impact
Jobs was notably private and, by most published accounts, comparatively limited in his direct, publicly documented personal philanthropic giving during his lifetime relative to some other major technology figures of his era, a pattern that drew occasional criticism from philanthropy commentators given the scale of his wealth. He did not sign the Giving Pledge, and Apple itself did not have a significant corporate philanthropic matching program under his leadership, a policy the company changed shortly after his death under his successor, Tim Cook.
Jobs’s most significant social impact has generally been understood as flowing through his products and company rather than direct charitable giving, including Apple’s design accessibility features and the broader economic and cultural influence of the products developed under his leadership. Following his death, his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, became an active, large-scale philanthropist in her own right through the Emerson Collective, directing much of the wealth she inherited toward education, immigration, and journalism-related causes.
Controversies and Criticism
Jobs’s management style drew sustained criticism throughout his career, with numerous former colleagues and biographers, including his authorized biographer Walter Isaacson, describing instances of harsh public criticism of employees’ work and a demanding, sometimes volatile temperament that created a difficult working environment even during periods of significant company success.
Apple faced a stock option backdating investigation during the mid-2000s, acknowledging that some option grants, including some benefiting Jobs, had been improperly dated to increase their value; an internal investigation concluded Jobs had been aware of the practice on some occasions but had not personally benefited financially from the specific grants in question, and the SEC did not pursue charges against him personally, though it charged two other former Apple executives. Separately, Apple’s supply chain, particularly its relationship with manufacturer Foxconn in China, drew significant scrutiny during Jobs’s final years as CEO over working conditions, including a series of worker suicides in 2010; Apple stated it took the reports seriously and worked with Foxconn on subsequent audits and reforms.
Steve Jobs Net Worth
Steve Jobs’s net worth at death in October 2011 was estimated at approximately $10.2 billion, according to Forbes, making him one of the wealthiest individuals in the world at the time, though the figure, like most net worth estimates, reflects an approximation rather than a fully audited total. More than 90 percent of this wealth came from his Disney shareholding, received when Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 for approximately $7.4 billion in stock, rather than from Apple, since Jobs had sold nearly all his original Apple shares following his 1985 departure, retaining only a modest position by the time of his death.
Jobs left the substantial majority of his estate to his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, who has since grown her inherited fortune considerably through her own investments, reaching an estimated net worth in the tens of billions of dollars in subsequent years. His daughter from his relationship with Chrisann Brennan, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, received a separate, considerably smaller inheritance reported at approximately $20 million. Laurene Powell Jobs has publicly stated she does not intend to pass the bulk of the inherited fortune on to her and Jobs’s children, describing a philosophy, which she has attributed to her late husband as well, opposed to large-scale intergenerational wealth accumulation.
Final Years and Death
Jobs’s health declined significantly over the final years of his life following his 2003 cancer diagnosis, though he continued to lead Apple through the launch of the iPhone, iPad, and other major products during this period, taking medical leaves of absence in 2004, 2009, and 2011 while retaining his title and, during the two earlier leaves, returning to active leadership. His 2009 liver transplant addressed complications from his cancer treatment, and he resumed his CEO duties following a period of recovery.
On August 24, 2011, Jobs formally resigned as Apple’s chief executive, writing to the company’s board that he could no longer meet his duties and expectations in the role, and transitioning to the position of chairman while handing chief executive responsibilities to longtime Apple operations executive Tim Cook. Jobs died less than seven weeks later, on October 5, 2011, at his home in Palo Alto, California, at age 56.
Legacy and Influence
Steve Jobs’s influence on consumer technology and product design remains foundational to the industry, having established design and user-experience standards, through the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, that competitors have continued to reference and, in many cases, directly emulate since his death. The iPhone in particular reshaped mobile telecommunications, software, and consumer electronics simultaneously, establishing the smartphone as a defining technology of the following decade and beyond.
His unusual career arc, building Apple, being forced out, building two more successful companies during his time away, and returning to lead one of the most celebrated corporate turnarounds in business history, has also become a widely referenced case study in leadership education. Assessments of his legacy continue to weigh his transformative product achievements against the more difficult aspects of his documented management style, a duality biographers, including Walter Isaacson, have generally presented as inseparable components of the same driven, uncompromising temperament that produced both his achievements and his conflicts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur who co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak in 1976 and later led the company’s turnaround after returning as CEO in 1997, overseeing the creation of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
When was Steve Jobs born and when did he die? He was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, and died on October 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, California, at age 56, from complications of pancreatic cancer.
What company did Steve Jobs found? He co-founded Apple in 1976, founded NeXT in 1985, and purchased and led Pixar Animation Studios as chairman from 1986 until its sale to Disney in 2006.
What is Steve Jobs known for? He is known for co-founding Apple and leading its development of the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and for his distinctive product design and leadership philosophy.
What was Steve Jobs’s net worth? At the time of his death in 2011, his net worth was estimated at approximately $10.2 billion, the large majority of which came from his Disney shareholding rather than Apple stock.
Where did Steve Jobs study? He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but withdrew after one semester and never completed a college degree.
Was Steve Jobs married? Yes, he married Laurene Powell in 1991, and the couple had three children. He also had an older daughter, Lisa, from a previous relationship.
Why did Steve Jobs leave Apple in 1985? He was pushed into a marginalized role and effectively forced out following a power struggle with CEO John Sculley and Apple’s board, after the Macintosh’s early sales fell short of expectations.
Sources
- Britannica Money, “Steve Jobs | Biography, Education, Apple, & Facts”
- Biography.com, “Steve Jobs: Biography, Apple Cofounder, Entrepreneur”
- Computer History Museum, “Steve Jobs: From Garage to World’s Most Valuable Company”
- Wikipedia, “Steve Jobs”
- IDN Financials, “Eve Jobs did not inherit Steve Jobs’ US$13 billion fortune” (October 2025)
- Yahoo Finance / lovemoney.com, “Who are Steve Jobs’ four children and how do they make their money”
- Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs (2011 authorized biography)