9 things you didn’t know about the life of Steve Jobs
9 things you didn’t know about the life of Steve Jobs
For all of his years in the spotlight at the helm of
Apple,
Steve Jobs in many ways remains an inscrutable figure — even in his
death. Fiercely private, Jobs concealed most specifics about his
personal life, from his curious family life to the details of his battle
with pancreatic cancer — a disease that ultimately
claimed him on Wednesday, at the age of 56.
While the CEO and co-founder of Apple
steered most interviews away from the public fascination with his
private life, there's plenty we know about Jobs the person, beyond the
Mac and the iPhone. If anything, the obscure details of his interior
life paint a subtler, more nuanced portrait of how one of the finest
technology minds of our time grew into the dynamo that we
remember him as today.
1. Early life and childhood
Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. He was adopted
shortly after his birth and reared near Mountain View, California by a
couple named Clara and Paul Jobs. His adoptive father — a term that Jobs
openly objected to — was a machinist for a laser company and his mother
worked as an accountant.
Later in life, Jobs discovered the identities of his estranged
parents. His birth mother, Joanne Simpson, was a graduate student at the
time and later a speech pathologist; his biological father,
Abdulfattah John Jandali,
was a Syrian Muslim who left the country at age 18 and reportedly now
serves as the vice president of a Reno, Nevada casino. While Jobs
reconnected with Simpson in later years, he and his biological father
remained estranged.
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| Reed College |
2. College dropout
The lead mind behind the most successful company on the planet never
graduated from college, in fact, he didn't even get close. After
graduating from high school in Cupertino, California — a town now
synonymous with 1 Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters — Jobs enrolled in
Reed College in 1972. Jobs stayed at Reed (a liberal arts university in
Portland, Oregon) for only one semester, dropping out quickly due to
the financial burden the private school's steep tuition placed on his
parents.
In his famous
2005 commencement speech
to Stanford University, Jobs said of his time at Reed: "It wasn't all
romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends'
rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to
get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."
3. Fibbed to his Apple co-founder about a job at Atari
Jobs is well known for his innovations in personal computing, mobile
tech, and software, but he also helped create one of the best known
video games of all-time. In 1975, Jobs was
tapped by Atari to work on the
Pong-like game
Breakout.
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| Breakout for the Atari |
He was reportedly offered $750 for his development work, with the
possibility of an extra $100 for each chip eliminated from the game's
final design. Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak (later one of Apple's other
founders) to help him with the challenge. Wozniak managed to whittle the
prototype's design down so much that Atari paid out a $5,000 bonus —
but Jobs kept the bonus for himself, and paid his unsuspecting friend
only $375, according to Wozniak's own
autobiography.
4. The wife he leaves behind
Like the rest of his family life, Jobs kept his marriage out of the
public eye. Thinking back on his legacy conjures images of him
commanding the stage in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans, and
those solo moments are his most iconic. But at home in Palo Alto, Jobs
was raising a family with his wife, Laurene, an entrepreneur who
attended the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton business
school and later received her MBA at Stanford, where she first met her
future husband.
For all of his single-minded dedication to the company he built from the ground up, Jobs actually
skipped a meeting
to take Laurene on their first date: "I was in the parking lot with the
key in the car, and I thought to myself, 'If this is my last night on
earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this
woman?' I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner
with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we've been together ever
since."
In 1991, Jobs and Powell were married in the Ahwahnee Hotel at
Yosemite National Park, and the marriage was officiated by Kobin Chino, a
Zen Buddhist monk.
5. His sister is a famous author
Later in his life, Jobs crossed paths with his biological sister while
seeking the identity of his birth parents. His sister, Mona Simpson
(born Mona Jandali), is the well-known author of
Anywhere But Here — a story about a mother and daughter that was later adapted into a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.
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| Joan Baez |
After reuniting, Jobs and Simpson developed a close relationship. Of his sister, he told a
New York Times interviewer: "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days.''
Anywhere But Here is dedicated to "my brother Steve."
6. Celebrity romances
In
The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, an unauthorized biography, a friend from Reed reveals that Jobs had a brief fling with folk singer Joan Baez. Baez
confirmed
the the two were close "briefly," though her romantic connection with
Bob Dylan is much better known (Dylan was the Apple icon's favorite
musician). The biography also notes that Jobs went out with actress
Diane Keaton briefly.
7. His first daughter
When he was 23, Jobs and his high school girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan
conceived a daughter, Lisa Brennan Jobs. She was born in 1978, just as
Apple began picking up steam in the tech world. He and Brennan never
married, and Jobs reportedly
denied paternity
for some time, going as far as stating that he was sterile in court
documents. He went on to father three more children with Laurene Powell.
After later mending their relationship, Jobs paid for his first
daughter's education at Harvard. She graduated in 2000 and now works as a
magazine writer.
8. Alternative lifestyle
In a few interviews, Jobs hinted at his early experience with the
psychedelic drug LSD. Of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jobs said: "I
wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit
narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to
an ashram when he was younger."
The connection has enough weight that Albert Hofmann, the Swiss
scientist who first synthesized (and took) LSD, appealed to Jobs for
funding for research about the drug's therapeutic use.
In a
book interview,
Jobs called his experience with the drug "one of the two or three most
important things I have done in my life." As Jobs himself has suggested,
LSD may have contributed to the "think different" approach that still
puts Apple's designs a head above the competition.
Jobs will forever be a visionary, and his personal life also reflects
the forward-thinking, alternative approach that vaulted Apple to
success. During a trip to India, Jobs visited a well-known ashram and
returned to the U.S. as a
Zen Buddhist.
Jobs was also a pescetarian who didn't consume most animal products,
and didn't eat meat other than fish. A strong believer in Eastern
medicine, he sought to treat his own cancer through
alternative approaches and specialized diets before reluctantly seeking his first surgery for a cancerous tumor in 2004.
9. His fortune
As the CEO of the
world's most valuable brand,
Jobs pulled in a comically low annual salary of just $1. While the
gesture isn't unheard of in the corporate world — Google's Larry Page,
Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt all pocketed the same 100 penny salary
annually — Jobs has kept his salary at $1 since 1997, the year he became
Apple's lead executive. Of his salary, Jobs
joked in 2007: "I get 50 cents a year for showing up, and the other 50 cents is based on my performance."
In early 2011, Jobs owned 5.5 million shares of Apple. After his death, Apple shares were
valued at $377.64 — a roughly 43-fold growth in valuation over the last 10 years that shows no signs of slowing down.
He may only have taken in a single dollar per year, but Jobs leaves
behind a vast fortune. The largest chunk of that wealth is the roughly
$7 billion from the sale of Pixar to Disney
in 2006. In 2011, with an estimated net worth of $8.3 billion, he was the 110th richest person in the world, according to
Forbes.
If Jobs hadn't sold his shares upon leaving Apple in 1985 (before
returning to the company in 1996), he would be the world's fifth richest
individual.
While there's no word yet on plans for his estate, Jobs leaves behind
three children from his marriage to Laurene Jobs (Reed, Erin, and Eve),
as well as his first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
