Global

Steve Jobs

Apple · Palo Alto, USA

Adopted son of working-class parents. Got fired from his own company at 30 — and came back to build the most valuable company in history.

TasteReality-distortionProduct obsession

Company

Apple

Journey

Moves that mattered.

Struggles

Bankruptcy at NeXT. Pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Lived knowing time was short.

Family

Adopted. Found biological sister Mona Simpson as an adult. Married Laurene; three children.

Related on Empire

Around the web

External links open in a new tab. Empire is not affiliated with these publishers.

The full story

Ch 01
Adopted, dropped out, broke in
Steve Jobs was given up for adoption at birth and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs in Mountain View. He dropped out of Reed College after a semester but kept attending a calligraphy class that would later define the Mac's typography. The myth starts with the garage. The reality starts with that classroom.
Ch 02
The first Apple
With Steve Wozniak, Jobs turned a hand-built circuit board into the Apple I, then the Apple II — the first computer that looked finished. Apple went public in 1980. Five years later, the board he had built fired him.
Ch 03
NeXT and Pixar
Between 1985 and 1997 Jobs ran two companies most people forget: NeXT, an aspirational workstation business that almost broke him, and Pixar, an animation studio that almost broke him. Toy Story changed Pixar. NeXTSTEP became the foundation of macOS. The wilderness years were the operating system years.
Ch 04
Coming back
Apple acquired NeXT in 1997. Within five years Jobs killed dozens of products, brought back the OS team, shipped the iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Store, and started designing the iPhone in secret. Each release compressed a category. Each launch was a manifesto.
Ch 05
Reality distortion, real outcomes
By the time Jobs died in 2011, Apple had become the most valuable company in the world. The cliché — that he saw the future first — is wrong. He saw the present clearly when everyone else was distracted by the future.