Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Dr. Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (Arabic: عبد الفتاح الجندلي). Abdulfattah Jandali was born in Syria into a wealthy Muslim household, the youngest of nine siblings. After obtaining his undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, Jandali pursued a PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin. There, he met Joanne Schieble, an American Catholic of Swiss-German descent whose parents owned a mink farm and real estate in Green Bay. The two fell in love but faced opposition from Schieble's father due to Jandali's Muslim faith. When Schieble became pregnant, she arranged for a closed adoption, and travelled to San Francisco to give birth.

Schieble requested that her son be adopted by college graduates. A lawyer and his wife were selected, but they withdrew after discovering that the baby was a boy, so Jobs was instead adopted by Paul Reinhold Jobs and his wife, Clara. Paul Jobs, an American of German descent, was the son of a dairy farmer from Washington County, Wisconsin. After dropping out of high school, Paul Jobs worked as a mechanic, then joined the US Coast Guard. After he was discharged in San Francisco, Paul married Clara Hagopian, of Armenian descent, in February 1946, and they moved to Wisconsin, then to Indiana, where Paul worked as a machinist and later as a car salesman. Since Clara missed San Francisco, she convinced Paul to move back. There, Paul worked as a repossession agent, and Clara became a bookkeeper. In 1955, after having an ectopic pregnancy, the couple looked to adopt a child. Since they lacked a college education, Schieble initially refused to sign the adoption papers and went to court to request that her son be removed from the Jobs household and placed with a different family but changed her mind after Paul and Clara promised to pay for their son's college tuition.

In his youth, Jobs's parents took him to a Lutheran church. When Steve was in high school, Clara admitted to Steve's girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, that she "was too frightened to love [Steve] for the first six months of his life ... I was scared they were going to take him away from me. Even after we won the case, Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. …

I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money [...] There are people around here who start companies just to make money, but the great companies, well, that's not what they're about.

In February 1974, Jobs returned to his parents' home in Los Altos and began looking for a job. He was soon hired by Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California, as a computer technician. Back in 1973, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong and gave its electronics board to Jobs. According to Wozniak, Atari only hired Jobs because he brought the board to the company, and they thought he had built it himself. Atari's cofounder Nolan Bushnell later described him as "difficult but valuable", pointing out that "he was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that".

Jobs traveled to India in mid-1974 to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi ashram with his Reed College friend and eventual Apple employee Daniel Kottke, searching for spiritual teachings. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973. Then, they made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji.

After seven months, Jobs left India and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke. Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved, and he wore traditional Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life". He spent a period at the All One Farm, a commune in Oregon that was owned by Robert Friedland.

During this period, Jobs and Brennan both became practitioners of Zen Buddhism under the guidance of the Zen master Kōbun Chino Otogawa. Jobs engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the US. …

In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is very poor; however, Jobs stated that he had a rare, less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.

Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months, in favor of alternative medicine. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that." Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department, on the other hand, said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life ... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable ... He essentially committed suicide."

Biographer Walter Isaacson reported on Jobs's opposition to surgery, quoting Jobs as saying, "I didn't want my body to be opened, I didn't want to be violated in that way." According to Isaacson, "for nine months he refused to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer – a decision he later regretted as his health declined." "Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He was also influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, before finally having surgery in July 2004." He underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy (or "Whipple procedure") that appeared to remove the tumor successfully. Jobs did not receive chemotherapy or radiation therapy. During Jobs's absence, Tim Cook, head of worldwide sales and operations at Apple, ran the company.

In January 2006, only Jobs's wife, his doctors, and Iger knew that his cancer had returned. Jobs told Iger privately that he hoped to live to see his own son Reed's high school graduation in 2010. In early August 2006, Jobs delivered the keynote for Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. …

Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California on October 5, 2011, due to complications from a relapse of his previously treated islet-cell pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which resulted in respiratory arrest. He had lost consciousness the day before and died with his wife, children, and sisters at his side. His sister, Mona Simpson, described his death thus: "Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times. Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve's final words were: 'Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.' " He then lost consciousness and died several hours later. A small private funeral was held on October 7, 2011, the details of which, out of respect for Jobs's family, were not made public.

Both Apple and Pixar issued announcements of his death. Apple announced on the same day that they had no plans for a public service, but were encouraging "well-wishers" to send their remembrance messages to an email address created to receive such messages. Apple and Microsoft both flew their flags at half-staff throughout their respective headquarters and campuses.

Bob Iger ordered all Disney properties, including Walt Disney World and Disneyland, to fly their flags at half-staff from October 6 to 12, 2011. For two weeks following his death, Apple displayed on its corporate website a simple page that showed Jobs's name and lifespan next to his portrait in grayscale. On October 19, 2011, Apple employees held a private memorial service for Jobs on the Apple campus in Cupertino. It was attended by Jobs's widow, Laurene, and by Tim Cook, Bill Campbell, Norah Jones, Al Gore, and Coldplay. Some of Apple's retail stores closed briefly so employees could attend the memorial. A video of the service was uploaded to Apple's website.

California Governor Jerry Brown declared Sunday, October 16, 2011, to be "Steve Jobs Day". On that day, an invitation-only memorial was held at Stanford University. Those in attendance included Apple and other tech company executives, members of the media, celebrities, politicians, and family and close friends of Jobs. Bono, Yo-Yo Ma, and Joan Baez performed at the service, which lasted longer than an hour. …

Jobs was known to frequently appear barefoot in public, a habit that stemmed from his countercultural background, and was depicted in the movies Pirates of Silicon Valley and Jobs. It also had an impact on American corporate culture, and was adopted by some other entrepreneurs, most notably Adam Neumann.

In 1989, Jobs first met his future wife, Laurene Powell, when he gave a lecture at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a student. Soon after the event, he stated that Laurene "was right there in the front row in the lecture hall, and I couldn't take my eyes off of her ... kept losing my train of thought, and started feeling a little giddy". After the lecture, he met her in the parking lot and invited her out to dinner. From that point forward, they were together, with a few minor exceptions, for the rest of his life.

Jobs proposed on New Year's Day 1990; they married on March 18, 1991, in a Buddhist ceremony at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. Fifty people, including Jobs's father, Paul, and his sister Mona, attended. The ceremony was conducted by Jobs's guru, Kōbun Chino Otogawa. The vegan wedding cake was in the shape of Yosemite's Half Dome, and the wedding ended with a hike and Laurene's brothers' snowball fight. Jobs reportedly said to Mona: "You see, Mona [...], Laurene is descended from Joe Namath, and we're descended from John Muir".

Jobs's and Powell's first child, a son named Reed, was born in 1991. Jobs's father, Paul, died a year and a half later, on March 5, 1993. Jobs's childhood home remains a tourist attraction and is currently owned by his stepmother (Paul's second wife), Marilyn Jobs. Jobs and Powell had two more children, daughters Erin (b. 1995) and Eve Jobs (b. 1998), who is a fashion model. The family lived in Palo Alto, California. Although a billionaire, Jobs made it known that, like Gates, he had stipulated that most of his monetary fortune would not be left to his children.

Chrisann Brennan notes that after Jobs was forced out of Apple, "he apologized many times over for his behavior" towards her and Lisa. She said Jobs "said that he never took responsibility when he should have, and that he was sorry". By this time, Jobs had developed a strong relationship with Lisa and when she was nine, Jobs had her name on her birth certificate changed from "Lisa Brennan" to "Lisa Brennan-Jobs". …