Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is an American business magnate and inventor. He is co-founder,^[11] chairman of the board, and former chief executive officer of Apple Inc.^[12][13] Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in the 1995 movie Toy Story as an executive producer.^[14]

In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula,^[11] and others, designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven graphical user interface which led to the creation of the Macintosh.^[15][16] After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1984,^[17][18] Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its CEO from 1997 until 2011. In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios.^[19] He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1% until its acquisition by The Walt Disney company in 2006.^[3] Consequently Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7% and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.^{[20][21][22][23]}

Jobs' history in business has contributed much to the symbolic image of the idiosyncratic, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design and understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.^[24]

On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation from his role as Apple's CEO to Apple's board of directors. In his letter of resignation, Jobs strongly recommended that Tim Cook be named as his successor. Per his request, Jobs was appointed chairman of Apple's board of directors.^{[25][26][27][28]}

obs was born in San Francisco, California^[1] and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian)^[29] of Mountain View, California, who named him Steven Paul. Paul and Clara later adopted a daughter, whom they named Patti. Jobs' biological parents – Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian^[30] graduate student who later became a political science professor,^[31] and Joanne Simpson (née Schieble), an American graduate student^[30] who went on to become a speech language pathologist^[32] – later married, giving birth to and raising Jobs' biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson.^{[33][34][35][36][37][38]}

Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California,^[24] and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.^[39] In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,^[40] he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.^[18] Jobs later stated, "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."^[18]

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.

Jobs then traveled to India with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.^[41][42] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".^[43] He has stated that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.^[43]

Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700 (instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.^{[44][45][46][47][48][49]}