Steve Jobs was the most popular American entrepreneur, business magnate, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, majority shareholder, and CEO of Apple and Pixar. Apple is currently the largest revenue-making company in the world with a market value of around $2.5 trillion. Unfortunately, he died in 2011 due to cancer.

People remember the time when Steve Jobs launched Apple’s first products Mac and the iPhone. They were an instant hit in the market and now Apple is worth $3 trillion dollars in the market. 

Steve Jobs: Personal Life

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to Schieble and Jandali, but as parents were not responsible enough to give birth to a baby at a young age so they found adoptive parents for Jobs, Paul, and Clara Jobs. Schieble and Jandali were biological parents of Steve Jobs but they refused the responsibility of Jobs. At last, Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs who adopted him and paid for all his education. 

In the year 1989, Steve Jobs met Laurene Powell as a student while giving a lecture at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Since then they were really close to each other in the relationship and they frequently invited each other to dinner. In 1990, Jobs proposed to Laurene Powell and soon after that, they married each other. The first child of Jobs and Powell was Reed who was born in 1991. Soon after that Steve Jobs lost his father in 1993. Jobs and Powell gave birth to two more children, Erin, born in August 1995, and Eve born in May 1998.

Steve Jobs: Career

In September 1972, Steve Jobs took admission to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. It was quite an expensive college and his parents couldn’t afford its tuition fees, so Jobs dropped out of college within one year without telling his parents. He was more interested in computer science but not many universities were offering courses.

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.

Steve Jobs launched Apple in his garage along with his friend Steve Wozniak in 1976. The Apple 1 computer launched by Apple created a new generation of computers. Steve became a millionaire in 1978 when Apple went public at 23 years of age. He was worth $250 million by the time he was 25. He was one of the fewest young people to be listed on the Forbes list of rich people.

In April 1977, Steve Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II computer to consumers at the West Coast Computer Faire. It was the most successful computer in the history of Apple. It became one of the highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products in the world.

But besides, Apple computers, Steve was also developing a Macintosh in the 1980s which was extremely expensive and unable to compete with IBM computers at that time. The Macintosh had failed at that time leading to increasing strengthened Sculley’s position in Apple due to which Steve Jobs had to resign and sell all the Apple shares.

Then Jobs started his new venture NeXT, where he funded $7 million to produce a new set of computers to compete with IBM and Apple. Then Steve also joined Disney to sell Pixar which reports a massive net worth of Steve Jobs. The first film produced by Disney Pixar was Toy Story in 1995 which was an instant hit among children.

In 1996, Apple acquired NeXT for $427 million which brought Steve Jobs back to apple, and then became the CEO again in July 1997. Then Apple focused on bringing new profits for the company and eliminated all the rest projects. Soon, Apple launched Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone under Steve Jobs’ leadership which is still making strong profits for the company to date.

Steve Jobs: Net Worth

Apple just made over $100 million dollars in revenue within 5 years of launch. But in 1985, there was an internal fight in Apple, due to which Jobs resigned by selling all his stakes in Apple for around $100 million dollars. But then Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 although at that time he didn’t receive some extra shares from Apple as the CEO. If he didn’t sell any of his shares back then in 1985, today the amount value of shares would have been worth $600 billion dollars !!

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, his stake in Apple was about $3 billion while his stake in Disney Pixar was close to $8 billion dollars because he received 138 million shares when Pixar was sold to Disney. When Steve Jobs died, all of his stakes in the companies were given to his wife Lauren Powell and today she is the 20th richest woman in the world with a worth of $15 billion dollars. She sold some of the shares that Steve Jobs held in Disney which were around $8 billion dollars in 2017. She also receives $160 million dollars yearly from Apple stock and $105 million dollars yearly from dividends.

After Steve Jobs joined Apple, he started a new series of iPhone products, which completely changed the game. Apple broke record sales of iPhone each year and soon after that Apple crossed the $100 billion dollars revenue mark. Steve Jobs was also working on Pixar which was later sold to Disney. Steve had a majority of his stake in Disney as compared to Apple. The Toy story made by Disney Pixar was a super hit film and Jobs received a lot of credit for it.

On August 24th, 2011 Jobs resigned from Apple, because his health was in a very serious condition. Unfortunately, he died on October 5, 2011, due to cancer in the pancreas. He was replaced as CEO by Tim Cook and all his net worth went to her wife Lauren Powell Jobs.