Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur and inventor best known for being the chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., which developed products like the iPod.
Net Worth: Jobs net worth was around $7 billion at the time of his death (Forbes 2011)
Childhood: Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, and was adopted at birth. With Jobs' adoptive father Paul Reinhold Jobs working as a mechanic, he would show Steve how to work electronics in his garage, sparking his interesting in technology. Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. Here he became friends with Bill Fernandez and Steve Wozniak, who had similar interests in technology.
Wozniak and Fernandez had started developing a computer board with, which Jobs soon got involved with. After high school, Jobs attended the expensive Reed College in Portland, Oregon which his family struggled to afford. He soon dropped out of college, but still attended creative classes such as calligraphy and slept on the floor of friends' dorms.
Career: Jobs took his first steps into the world of computing in 1972 when Atari offered Jobs a job as a technician after he presented them with a version of the game Pong that Steve Wozniak made, with them thinking Jobs had made it. In 1976, Wozniak invented the Apple I computer, which Jobs suggested they sell, so they and Ronald Wayne formed Apple Computer. Wayne soon left the company making Jobs and Wozniak the main co-founders of the business.
In the early 80s, Jobs took an interest in Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface and later Apple Lisa was born. Jobs was later fired by Apple's board of directors but remained chairman, giving Jobs little incentive to go to work and so he later resigned entirely. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after founding NeXT Computer and buying Pixar, and Apple subsequently bought NeXT with much of the technology finding its way into Apple products. Apple would expand with innovative products such the iPod and the iMac computer.
Personal Life: Steve Jobs was known to be an eccentric character. Many of the Apple employees recognised him as a persuasive and charismatic director of Apple, although some described him as erratic and temperamental. After returning from travels in India during the mid-1970s, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later describing the use of them as one of the most important things he'd done in his life.
Jobs saw his adoptive parents as more his parents than his biological parents, referring to his biological parents as: 'My sperm and egg bank. That's not harsh, it's just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more', although he tracked down his birth mother Joanne Schieble Simpson and through her he met his biological sister Mona Simpson, who he had a close relationship with.
Jobs passed away in the early hours of the morning on October 5, 2011, from a relapse of his islet-cell neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer, causing a respiratory arrest.
Biography by Contactmusic.com