On February 24, 1955, Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California. The biological parents of the baby were Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble. Steve Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. His adoptive father, Paul Reinhold Jobs, was a Coast Guard mechanic, who married Clara Hagopian in 1946 after leaving the Coast Guard.
Clara grew up in San Francisco as the daughter of Armenian immigrants. After the Coast Guard, Paul worked on cars as a “repo man”. Clara had an ectopic pregnancy, and the young couple were unable to have children of their own. Paul and Clara adopted his sister Patricia in 1957.
In 1959, the family moved to Mountain View, California. Paul built a workbench in the garage so he could pass on his love of mechanics and engineering to his son. By the time he was 10, Steve Jobs was really into engineering and he made friends with most of the engineers who lived near him. He found school difficult. He did not function well in a classroom environment, and he often failed to achieve impressive results. He was also suspended from the school a number of occasion. His parents did not have much money during these years so it is as well that Steve was such an exemplary student; he bypassed the fifth grade.
However, he was transferred to Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View for sixth grade. Jobs said that he was often bullied in middle school, and called himself a loner during this period of his life. By halfway through seventh grade, he was sick of all the things happening in school and gave his parents an ultimatum:
He wanted to change schools, or he would drop out. Although the Jobs family was not particularly well off, they pulled together all their savings and bought a new house So that Steve could change schools in 1967.
Steve Jobs family’s new home was in the much better Cupertino School District. When Jobs was 13 in 1968, Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard hired him for a summer job. It was because of his audacity in cold-calling Hewlett with a request for parts to work on an electronics project that he had no money for. Jobs started high school at Homestead High School when he was 13, in 1968. He met Bill Fernandez at this time, who introduced him to Steve Wozniak.
During high school Jobs was following both electronics and literature. In his senior year as a junior, his two best friends were Wozniak and Woz’s girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan. Wozniak enrolled at the near-by University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1971 and Jobs visited him almost every weekend. That was Jobs’s senior year in high school and he was taking college freshman-level English with his friend and AT&T co-worker Freni at Stanford.
Around this time Apple co-founder Woz designed what he called a brown box, an inexpensive digital device that would create a series of tones which could exploit the telephone switching network to allow free long-distance telephone calls. Jobs then decided to produce and sell the boards and split the proceeds in half with Wozniak. This was what led Jobs to conclude that it might not be just profitable but fun to make a career in electronics.
Steve Jobs began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. In 1971, 12, Jobs went to Homestead High School13 and attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there as well, and decided to drop out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, after six months15. He applied to only one school, despite the high price.
After a semester at Reed, Jobs left, though he didn’t inform his family. He didn’t want to waste his parents’ money on a degree that felt pointless. Jobs audited classes, slept on the floors of his friends’ dorm rooms, recycled Coke bottles for food money, and walked seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the local Hare Krishna temple.
Personal Life of Steven Paul Jobs
Steve Jobs was married to Laurene Powell in 1991. They met when she was a graduate student at Stanford University. He had been delivering a guest lecture. Powell is a businesswoman and the founder of the Emerson Collective, which promotes a variety of causes. (Jobs had four kids, including author Lisa Brennan-Jobs, who was the child of painter and writer — and Jobs’ high school girlfriend — Chrisann Brennan. Steve’s sister, Mona Simpson, is an acclaimed author.
He was portrayed by Michael Fassbender in the 2015 biographical film Steve Jobs. He was portrayed by Ashton Kutcher in the 2013 movie Jobs. Jobs was posthumously honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022.
In April 2023, The Steve Jobs Archive released “Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs In His Own Words,” a posthumous memoir published eleven years after Jobs’ death.
Apple And Steven Jobs
In 1974, Steve Jobs moved back into his parents’ Los Altos, Calif., home and took a job as an Atari technician, reportedly proving himself to be brilliant but difficult. When his friend Steve Wozniak created the first Apple I computer two years later, he persuaded Wozniak to sell it commercially. With Ronnie Wayne, one of the founding members, Jobs started Apple Computer on April 1st, 1976, in a garage he grew up in.
Their first big deal was when they were reportedly persuaded by San Franciscan retailer Paul Terrell to purchase 50 of their Apple I units, which laid the foundation for the overwhelmingly successful Apple II.
Apple’s revenue had grown from $175,000 in 1976 to $117 million by 1980, when the company went public, and hundreds of workers became millionaires. After a string of losses, Jobs took a risk by going out next to nothing with the Macintosh in 1984, launched through a famous “1984” Super Bowl ad — but disappointing sales led to his ouster the following year.
Steve Jobs would go on to start NeXT and buy part of Pixar from George Lucas in 1986. Its feature film debut, Pixar’s 1995 hit Toy Story, turned it into an international powerhouse that was eventually sold to Disney for $7.4 billion.
Apple finally purchased NeXT in 1997, and Jobs returned. He then introduced the world to Apple and went on to change it with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV—imagining new possibilities for creative design that not only transformed his company but also defined a generation’s relationship to technology.
Steve Jobs Net Worth 2025
The late Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur and business magnate who had a net worth of $10.2 billion at the time of his death in 2011. He was most known for being the co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc. and also became the chief executive at Pixar (a business he would sell to Disney).
Steve Jobs was already a millionaire by the time he was 23, in 1978, and became a multimillionaire after Apple went public with an initial offering of $22 per share in 1980, which grew to over $250 million at that point. Oddly, the bulk of his fortune at his death didn’t come from Apple but rather from Disney stock.
More Interesting
Steve Jobs stepped down in 1985, following a bitter clash with the board of Apple, and sold stake in the company — almost 20%. He received an estimated $100 million. He held onto a single share to maintain his status as a shareholder. He returned in 1996 after Apple bought his new company, NeXT, and was quickly restored to the top spot. He was awarded a generous stock options package, eventually securing 5.5 million Apple shares.
By 2011, that stake was worth roughly $2 billion and came on top of his Disney stake — from selling Pixar in 2007 — which was valued at $8 billion; those shares surpassed the holdings of any other individual shareholder at Disney. His wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, later sold some of the Disney shares for $7 billion in 2017.
Steve Jobs retained his initial 20% share in Apple, it would be valued at a stunning $400 billion today. Both the Apple and Disney holdings were inherited by Laurene Powell Jobs, whose current net worth is about $30 billion, making her one of the 20 wealthiest people in America.
