For all of his years in the spotlight at the helm of
Apple, Steve Jobs in many ways remains an
inscrutable figure — even in his death. Fiercely
private, Jobs concealed most specifics about his
personal life, from his curious family life to the
details of his battle with pancreatic cancer — a disease that ultimately claimed him on Wednesday,
at the age of 56. While the CEO and co-founder of Apple steered
most interviews away from the public fascination
with his private life, there's plenty we know about
Jobs the person, beyond the Mac and the iPhone. If
anything, the obscure details of his interior life
paint a subtler, more nuanced portrait of how one of the finest technology minds of our time grew
into the dynamo that we remember him as today. 1. Early life and childhood Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24,
1955. He was adopted shortly after his birth and
reared near Mountain View, California by a couple
named Clara and Paul Jobs. His adoptive father — a
term that Jobs openly objected to — was a
machinist for a laser company and his mother worked as an accountant. Later in life, Jobs discovered the identities of his
estranged parents. His birth mother, Joanne
Simpson, was a graduate student at the time and
later a speech pathologist; his biological father,
Abdulfattah John Jandali, was a Syrian Muslim who
left the country at age 18 and reportedly now serves as the vice president of a Reno, Nevada
casino. While Jobs reconnected with Simpson in
later years, he and his biological father remained
estranged. 2. College dropout The lead mind behind the most successful
company on the planet never graduated from
college, in fact, he didn't even get close. After
graduating from high school in Cupertino,
California — a town now synonymous with 1
Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters — Jobs enrolled in Reed College in 1972. Jobs stayed at
Reed (a liberal arts university in Portland, Oregon)
for only one semester, dropping out quickly due to
the financial burden the private school's steep
tuition placed on his parents. In his famous 2005 commencement speech to
Stanford University, Jobs said of his time at Reed:
"It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room,
so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned
coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a
week at the Hare Krishna temple." 3. Fibbed to his Apple co-founder about a job at Atari Jobs is well known for his innovations in personal
computing, mobile tech, and software, but he also
helped create one of the best known video games
of all-time. In 1975, Jobs was tapped by Atari to
work on the Pong-like game Breakout. He was reportedly offered $750 for his
development work, with the possibility of an extra
$100 for each chip eliminated from the game's final
design. Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak (later one of
Apple's other founders) to help him with the
challenge. Wozniak managed to whittle the prototype's design down so much that Atari paid
out a $5,000 bonus — but Jobs kept the bonus for
himself, and paid his unsuspecting friend only
$375, according to Wozniak's own autobiography. 4. The wife he leaves behind Like the rest of his family life, Jobs kept his
marriage out of the public eye. Thinking back on
his legacy conjures images of him commanding the
stage in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans,
and those solo moments are his most iconic. But at
home in Palo Alto, Jobs was raising a family with his wife, Laurene, an entrepreneur who attended
the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious
Wharton business school and later received her
MBA at Stanford, where she first met her future
husband. For all of his single-minded dedication to the
company he built from the ground up, Jobs
actually skipped a meeting to take Laurene on
their first date: "I was in the parking lot with the
key in the car, and I thought to myself, 'If this is my
last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman?' I ran
across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have
dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town
and we've been together ever since." In 1991, Jobs and Powell were married in the
Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite National Park, and
the marriage was officiated by Kobin Chino, a Zen
Buddhist monk. 5. His sister is a famous author Later in his life, Jobs crossed paths with his
biological sister while seeking the identity of his
birth parents. His sister, Mona Simpson (born Mona
Jandali), is the well-known author of Anywhere
But Here — a story about a mother and daughter
that was later adapted into a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon. After reuniting, Jobs and Simpson developed a
close relationship. Of his sister, he told a New York
Times interviewer: "We're family. She's one of my
best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her
every couple of days.'' Anywhere But Here is
dedicated to "my brother Steve." 6. Celebrity romances In The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, an
unauthorized biography, a friend from Reed
reveals that Jobs had a brief fling with folk singer
Joan Baez. Baez confirmed the the two were close
"briefly," though her romantic connection with
Bob Dylan is much better known (Dylan was the Apple icon's favorite musician). The biography also
notes that Jobs went out with actress Diane Keaton
briefly. 7. His first daughter When he was 23, Jobs and his high school
girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan conceived a
daughter, Lisa Brennan Jobs. She was born in
1978, just as Apple began picking up steam in the
tech world. He and Brennan never married, and
Jobs reportedly denied paternity for some time, going as far as stating that he was sterile in court
documents. He went on to father three more
children with Laurene Powell. After later mending
their relationship, Jobs paid for his first daughter's
education at Harvard. She graduated in 2000 and
now works as a magazine writer. 8. Alternative lifestyle In a few interviews, Jobs hinted at his early
experience with the psychedelic drug LSD. Of
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jobs said: "I wish him
the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft
are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had
dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." The connection has enough weight that Albert
Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who first synthesized
(and took) LSD, appealed to Jobs for funding for
research about the drug's therapeutic use. In a book interview, Jobs called his experience
with the drug "one of the two or three most
important things I have done in my life." As Jobs
himself has suggested, LSD may have contributed
to the "think different" approach that still puts
Apple's designs a head above the competition. Jobs will forever be a visionary, and his personal
life also reflects the forward-thinking, alternative
approach that vaulted Apple to success. During a
trip to India, Jobs visited a well-known ashram
and returned to the U.S. as a Zen Buddhist. Jobs was also a pescetarian who didn't consume
most animal products, and didn't eat meat other
than fish. A strong believer in Eastern medicine, he
sought to treat his own cancer through alternative
approaches and specialized diets before
reluctantly seeking his first surgery for a cancerous tumor in 2004. 9. His fortune As the CEO of the world's most valuable brand,
Jobs pulled in a comically low annual salary of just
$1. While the gesture isn't unheard of in the
corporate world — Google's Larry Page, Sergey
Brin, and Eric Schmidt all pocketed the same 100
penny salary annually — Jobs has kept his salary at $1 since 1997, the year he became Apple's lead
executive. Of his salary, Jobs joked in 2007: "I get
50 cents a year for showing up, and the other 50
cents is based on my performance." In early 2011, Jobs owned 5.5 million shares of
Apple. After his death, Apple shares were valued at
$377.64 — a roughly 43-fold growth in valuation
over the last 10 years that shows no signs of
slowing down. He may only have taken in a single dollar per year,
but Jobs leaves behind a vast fortune. The largest
chunk of that wealth is the roughly $7 billion from
the sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006. In 2011, with
an estimated net worth of $8.3 billion, he was the
110th richest person in the world, according to Forbes. If Jobs hadn't sold his shares upon leaving
Apple in 1985 (before returning to the company in
1996), he would be the world's fifth richest
individual. While there's no word yet on plans for his estate,
Jobs leaves behind three children from his
marriage to Laurene Jobs (Reed, Erin, and Eve), as
well as his first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. This article originally appeared on Tecca
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