Steve Jobs is the father of Apple, one of the most popular personal computer brands in the world.
While Jobs may not have invented the home computer, he innovated computer science to allow computers to be more beginner-friendly.
Even to this day, Steve Jobs’s company prides itself on being easy enough to understand that everyone can use its products.
From young children to the elderly, millions of customers can take advantage of the simplicity that Jobs strived to achieve.
Was Steve Jobs Born Rich?
No, Steve Jobs was not born rich. Instead, he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs into a lower-middle-class family.
He was born to Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali on February 24th of 1955.
Shortly after Paul and Clara Jobs adopted the future innovator, they moved to the suburban town of Mountain View, California, located in Santa Clara county.
Soon after Jobs was born, this area welcomed multiple semiconductor companies and would eventually become known as Silicon Valley.
With this new slew of jobs sweeping the area, plenty of engineers began filling up the neighboring homes, and many of his new neighbors allowed the young boy to tinker with the extra gizmos and electronics they had sitting in their garages.
It was his mentoring neighbors who helped shape Steve Jobs’s interests from an early age.
Tinkering as a hobby became an even bigger deal to him when 13-year-old Jobs met 18-year-old Stephen Wozniak.
Not only did Wozniak share many of the same interests as young Jobs, but he was also fun to hang out with.
When the boys weren’t tinkering with the latest gadget they could get their hands on, they were playing pranks around their neighborhood.
At 18 years old, Steve Jobs decided that he wanted to attend Reed College, which was a liberal arts school that was known for being expensive.
Although his parents couldn’t afford it, they had promised Jobs’s biological mother that they would give their son a college education and decided to help him go to his dream college.
Jobs would only attend Reed College for a single semester before dropping out.
Instead of going to school, Jobs joined a hippie commune and spent his days growing apples before returning home a few months later.
Why Did Steve Jobs’s Biological Parents Put Him Up For Adoption?
Steve Jobs’s biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, were forced to put their child up for adoption by Schieble’s father.
According to Jandali, Schieble’s father was extremely conservative, and he had no plans of allowing his daughter to marry the man who impregnated her out of wedlock.
Abdulfattah Jandali was born in 1931, where he lived under the roof and rules of his self-made millionaire father.
Although his father was wealthy enough to own “several entire villages,” he was incredibly strict and controlled every aspect of his children’s lives.
When Jandali told his father that he wanted to study law at Damascus University, his father forbade it and told his son that there were too many lawyers in Syria.
To follow his dreams and break away from his father’s tight grasp, Abdulfattah Jandali moved to Lebanon to attend the American University of Beirut.
While attending university, Jandali became an activist and protested for the independence of Algeria.
After spending time in prison and with the protests becoming more rampant, Jandali was forced to flee Beirut and went to live with a relative named Najm Eddin al-Rifai who served as Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Thanks to his connections and previous education, Jandali was able to attend Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin while earning his Ph.D. in Economics and Political Sciences.
It was while he was attending the University of Wisconsin that he met a young American girl of German-Swiss Catholic descent named Joanne Carole Schieble.
Soon after they began dating, Schieble became pregnant with their first child, Steve Jobs.
When Schieble’s father found out that Jandali was Muslim, he refused to let his daughter marry into the family or culture.
Jandali left Schieble shortly before the birth of their son.
Despite having been adopted, Jobs never felt abandoned, and instead, he felt special.
Does Steve Jobs Have Any Siblings?
Yes, Steve Jobs has a sister named Mona Simpson who is a successful American novelist.
Jobs hadn’t met his sister until he was 27 years old and began to share a close relationship with her from that point on.
After Abdulfattah Jandali’s father had passed away, Jandali had more freedom to do as he pleased and quickly ran back to Joanne Schieble to marry her.
A year into their marriage, Mona Simpson was born.
Although Jandali was finally married to the woman of his dreams, life was not all that he thought it would be.
Jandali was forced to work a variety of jobs in order to afford his family’s needs.
Eventually, Jandali returned to Syria to work as a director for an oil refinery.
While he was in Syria, Jandali divorced Schieble.
This left Schieble and their daughter to scramble to find a way to support themselves.
Joanne Schieble eventually remarried, and her daughter Mona ended up taking her stepfather’s last name.
Steve Jobs eventually tracked Mona Simpson down after learning about his biological parents.
The pair immediately became close friends and would call each other every few days to check in with one another.
After establishing a close relationship with her brother, Simpson became a major role model for Jobs’s daughter, Lisa, and the two have remained incredibly close.
Some of Simpson’s best-known works include Anywhere but Here from 1992, The Lost Father, and A Regular Guy.
Anywhere but Here became so popular that it was eventually turned into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.
A majority of Simpson’s stories are based on her personal life experiences and those experienced by her loved ones.
A Regular Guy was actually completely based on her brother’s life and what her parents went through to be together.
Did Steve Jobs Ever Get Married?
Yes, Steve Jobs married Laurene Powell on March 18th of 1991.
They were married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.
The couple originally met in October of 1989 when Jobs gave a lecture called View from the Top at Stanford Business School, where Powell was a student working on her MBA.
Powell had arrived late to the lecture and was forced to sit in the front row.
Jobs was unable to take his eyes off of her.
Afraid that she had upset him for being late, Powell made a point to speak with him after the lecture.
During their conversation, Laurene Powell actually mixed up Steve Jobs with Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Before their conversation, Powell had barely known who Jobs was and simply wanted to hear what he had to say as a successful entrepreneur in the computer industry.
By the end of their conversation, Jobs asked Powell out on a date.
They dated for a few months before Jobs proposed to Powell on New Year’s Day of 1990.
After Powell agreed to marry him, Jobs completely stopped talking about their engagement until he presented her with a wedding ring in October of that year.
The following spring, the couple were married in Yosemite National Park with about 50 people in attendance.
Their wedding was conducted by Kōbun Chino Otogawa, a Zen Buddhist monk, who lit incense for the ceremony and hit the ceremonial gong.
After the wedding ceremony, the guests were treated to a vegan wedding cake shaped to look like Half Dome, a granite rock formation located at one end of the Yosemite Valley, so named because of its distinctive shape.
Rather than dancing or drinking the night away, the newlyweds and their guests went for a hike in the snowy mountains.
How Many Kids Did Steve Jobs Have?
Steve Jobs had one son and three daughters: Reed, Lisa, Erin, and Eve.
Although Jobs was known for being a family man, his relationship with each of his children was wildly different and heavily based on how much work he was doing at a particular time and their individual circumstances.
When Jobs married his wife, they were already expecting their first child together.
After Reed Jobs was born, Jobs took his role as the child’s father extremely seriously.
Rather than going out to socialize with the celebrity circuit after work, Jobs would return home to spend time occupied with work projects at home or with his family.
Jobs quickly found that he preferred the quiet family life he had built over socializing.
However, Reed was not the first child that Jobs had.
Jobs’s eldest child is actually Lisa, whom he didn’t even acknowledge as his child until his sister made him reconsider his decision in his early 30s.
When Jobs first learned that his ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan had a child who could have been fathered by him, he was quick to deny it and refused to pay for Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s care.
Jobs would not even acknowledge his daughter until a DNA test proved that Jobs was indeed her father.
After he began paying child support, it took years before he would have a decent relationship with his eldest daughter.
It was his sister, Mona Simpson, who would help bring the father and daughter together.
His second-oldest daughter and second child with his wife was Erin Jobs.
Unlike her siblings, Erin was quiet and often forgotten by Jobs.
Luckily, his youngest child, Eve Jobs, held her father’s attention thanks to her strong will and spitfire temper.
Eve had the most similarities with her father of all the siblings.
Why Did Steve Jobs Always Wear The Same Outfit?
Steve Jobs always wore the same outfit while working because he fell in love with the uniforms he had seen Japanese employees wearing and wanted to implement the same practice at Apple.
However, Jobs ended up being the only one in favor of implementing a company-wide uniform.
Rather than ditch the idea entirely, Jobs simply implemented a work uniform for himself.
By wearing the same outfit every day, Jobs didn’t have to worry about what he’d wear to work the next day or worry about how other people may perceive him by his outfit.
Steve Jobs had a lot to think about on a daily basis, between all of his work projects.
Having to prepare a new outfit every day for the next day would simply take up his free time, so he decided to simply wear what he wanted to and wear that same outfit every day.
When Jobs would work with others, his iconic outfit made him incredibly easy to identify in a room and would eliminate the need for other people to access what he was wearing.
Jobs’s simple uniform still managed to capture the attention of Apple fans and became a part of Jobs’s personal branding.
Although Steve Jobs only wore blue jeans and a black turtleneck, this outfit was enough to make him feel confident and comfortable at the same time.
It can be difficult for some people to extrude confidence while their clothing is picking at them and making them uncomfortable.
Throughout history, we’ve seen many of the greatest thinkers give up their new or unique fashion in the name of saving some of their brain power for actual functioning.
With all the decisions that Jobs would have to make, the last decision he wanted to have to worry about was what he was going to wear each day.
Did Steve Jobs Work For Pixar?
Yes, Steve Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 and served as the animation studio’s CEO until 2006.
When Jobs first bought Pixar, it wasn’t even an animation studio at the time.
Instead, it was focused on creating animation software as a division of LucasFilm.
However, Jobs was ready to completely change the direction of Pixar after a pitch from John Lasseter for a fully computer-animated feature film, which would go on to become Pixar’s flagship film, Toy Story.
At the 1995 Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques annual convention, Jobs presented Pixar’s latest innovation in computer graphics, which was their feature-length film that was solely created using computer graphics.
Toy Story served as a major leap forward for animation, a technological leap that has been compared to Snow White’s Technicolor and the computer-generated special effects of Star Wars.
Without Steve Jobs’s direction, Pixar may never have become an animation studio, which would have led to countless hit films never being made.
Jobs would serve as Pixar’s CEO and own 50.1% of the company until Disney decided to acquire the company on May 5th of 2006.
After the acquisition, Jobs went on to become Disney’s largest shareholder at 7% and served as a member of Disney’s Board of Directors.
Once Pixar was on its feet and functioning healthily on its own as a company, Steve Jobs was ready to refocus his career on Apple.
Before leaving Pixar, Jobs felt that he had to get a blessing to leave from his dear friend and coworker John Lasseter.
Had it not been for Jobs’s financial support and his strong sense of leadership, Pixar might not have survived as a company.
Jobs was able to see the company’s skills being used in a way that nobody had ever considered before.
Did Steve Jobs Really Consider Becoming A Monk?
Yes, Steve Jobs nearly became a Buddhist monk after exploring India’s culture at barely 20 years old.
As a massive fan of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, Jobs was ready to explore the culture that had given his favorite musicians so much inspiration.
After his 1974 tour of India, Jobs was ready to convert to Buddhism.
Like his favorite musicians, young Steve Jobs was firmly anti-establishment and loved to experiment with psychedelic drugs like LSD in his early years.
Upon returning to California, Jobs began to meditate daily and made self-reflection a regular part of his routine.
During this time, Jobs would regularly meet with the Buddhist monk Kōbun Chino Otogawa, who later officiated Job’s wedding.
When Jobs got married to Laurene Powell in 1991, their wedding was set up more like a Buddhist wedding and included the traditional ceremonies performed by a monk.
Jobs continually met with Otogawa in order to help understand why he had such strong material needs despite his higher religious goals.
Although Jobs decided against giving up his job to pursue his religion further, he was adamant about making his religion’s ideologies the core of how he behaved as the leader of his companies.
Even in Job’s career, he wanted to focus on creating products that were simplistic, empathic, and mindful.
While Jobs strove for perfection in his personal life and his products, he understood that would realistically never reach such a goal and instead focused on the “process of becoming.”
It was his constant striving for perfection that pressed Apple forward.
What Did Steve Jobs Die From?
Steve Jobs was only 56 years old when he passed away after battling a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which is a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Only 7% of all pancreatic cancer patients will suffer from pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors which typically grow at a slower rate than exocrine tumors.
When Jobs was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he knew that his chances of survival were slim.
Only about 10% of those who suffer from pancreatic cancer will survive beyond five years, but Jobs was able to live with pancreatic cancer for eight years before passing away on October 5th of 2011.
Due to the rarity of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, treatment options for the cancer are severely limited, even for one of the most wealthy and innovative people in the United States like Jobs.
What makes treating pancreatic cancer even more difficult is that 53% of patients given this diagnosis don’t find cancer until after it has spread throughout the body.
Prior to his death in 2011, Jobs had been experiencing a variety of health issues that were beginning to take a toll on his life and even his beloved career.
In 2004, Steve Jobs had surgery to remove a pancreatic tumor, and he had a liver transplant only five years later.
Between the multiple surgeries he ended up having and the toll that cancer was taking on his energy levels, Jobs decided to step down as Apple’s CEO on August 24th of 2011 because he felt that he could no longer keep up with what his company needed from him.
When Jobs passed away, he left an estate worth about $7 billion for his wife, children, and sister.
Although it may have been more than a decade since his passing, the legacy of Steve Jobs will continue to carry on for generations.
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