Steven Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California, the biological son of Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, and was adopted at birth by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View. He grew up in Cupertino, California, in the neighborhood that would soon become Silicon Valley. As a teenager he cold-called William Hewlett to ask for spare parts and landed a summer job at HP. He dropped out of Reed College in Portland after one semester, auditing a calligraphy class that — as he told Stanford graduates in 2005 — would later find its way into the Mac's beautiful typography. In 1974 he worked at Atari, then travelled to India seeking spiritual before returning to California. In April 1976, in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, he and Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer. The Apple II (1977) was the first successful mass-market personal computer; it made Apple a Fortune 500 company by 1983, faster than any company in history at that time. The Macintosh launched in January 1984 with a single television ad during Super Bowl XVIII that invoked Orwell — and it announced that computing had a new aesthetic center. Jobs was ousted from Apple in May 1985 after a board confrontation with CEO John Sculley. Rather than retreat, he founded NeXT Computer and, in 1986, purchased the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million. That graphics unit became Pixar. Under Jobs as CEO, Pixar produced Toy Story in 1995 — the first fully computer-animated feature film — and went public the same week, making Jobs a billionaire before Apple ever would. Apple bought NeXT in December 1996 for $429 million, and with it came Jobs. He was named interim CEO in September 1997. The iMac (1998), iPod (2001), iTunes Music Store (2003), iPhone (9 January 2007), and iPad (2010) followed in a sequence unprecedented in consumer electronics history. The iPhone alone redefined the mobile industry: by making a phone that was primarily a pocket computer with a multi-touch screen and a real operating system, it destroyed the market positions of Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry, and Palm within four years. Jobs announced he had been diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004; he had a liver transplant in 2009. He resigned as Apple CEO on 24 August 2011, writing to the board: 'I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know.' He died on 5 October 2011 in Palo Alto. Apple's market capitalization on the day of his death was $351 billion; by 2022 it had crossed $3 trillion, the highest valuation in the history of publicly traded companies.
All Figures
Co-founder of Apple · Founder of NeXT · CEO of Pixar
Steve Jobs
1,955 CE – 2,011 CE
The visionary dropout who co-founded Apple in a garage, got fired, came back, and gave the world the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad — reshaping five industries in a single lifetime.
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