The Biography of Steve Jobs - His Time with Apple, Net Worth,

 “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

 “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”

-       Steve Jobs

Late inventor Steven Paul Jobs was chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Apple Inc., and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT.He was an American business magnate, industrial designer, investor, programmer, and media proprietor who was the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar and The Walt Disney Company's board. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s,1980s which was driven by his desire for personal computers along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Steve Jobs's Net Worth : 

Mr. Steve Jobs was the former Apple (AAPL) CEO before he died of pancreatic cancer. His net worth was listed at $10.2 billion when he died.   Pancreatic cancer is deadly disease and it's mostly incurable. 

Early life and Education

Steven Jobs was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali university students who gave him up for adoption. Adopted by Paul (a coast guard and machinist) and Clara(an accountant). His father was a machinist and fixed cars as a hobby and encouraged Steve to attempt taking tech gadgets apart. Jobs remembers his father as being very skilled at working with his hands. After the adoption of Jobs' sister Patricia in 1957, the family moved in 1961 to live in Mountain View, California, an area that would later become Silicon Valley.

Job's early school years were riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. He attended Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View and was dubbed "a prankster" in the school. Due to boredom, he was often bribed to study by his fourth-grade teacher.

In 1968 Job attended the Homestead High School where he strengthens his developed interests in Technology and literature. Introduced his high school friend Fernandez, Jobs and Wozniak became friends having been introduced. Jobs worked for the summer at HP, where Wozniak too was employed, working on a mainframe computer. While in high school Jobs attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard plant.

In mid-1972 Jobs left home for Reed College Portland, Oregon to drop out later returning only by auditing his classes to include calligraphy which he reports as vital to the uniqueness of the Macintosh.

Career History & Interest

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. In 1975 Jobs joined a group known as the Homebrew Computer Club where Wozniak was a member. Wozniak was particular about building a small computer but Jobs was fascinated with the marketing potential of such a computer.

By March 1976 the first design of the Apple I computer had been completed by Wozniak and on April 1, 1976, Steve and Wozniak together with Ronald Wayne formed the Apple Computer Company, in memory of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. They raised $1,300 in startup money by selling Jobs’ microbus and Wozniak's calculator.

 In 1977 the Apple II went to market, with impressive first-year sales of $2.7 million. The ''entirely new market sales - personal computer'' grew to $200 million within three years. This was one of the most phenomenal cases of corporate growth in U.S. history. Early in 1983, he unveiled Apple LISA named after his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs born by Brennan his high school sweetheart. It was designed for people possessing minimal computer experience.

Contributing to his resignation (but remained as chairman of the board) in 1985 was the lack of basic business feature in the earlier (1984) revolutionary model of tech "the Macintosh" although the use of computers became easy with this innovation, the user pointed at an icon and clicked a button using a new device called a mouse.

Later in 1985 Jobs founded NeXT Inc. with $7 million and some of his former employees as staff. In 1986 Jobs purchased a small company called Pixar that specialized in computer animation from filmmaker George Lucas. In 1995 Pixar released successfully Toy Story, subsequently Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life, which Disney distributed Monsters, Inc. In 2006 Pixar merged with Walt Disney making Jobs a major stakeholder.

Jobs continues to market Next products to financial, scientific, and academic community 1988 through 1990, he released the NeXT computer and workstation (tech advanced) and craftily designed product for the education sector. Priced at US$9,999 it was largely dismissed as costly for educational firms. Same year English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee used the Next computer to invent the World Wide Web at CERN in Switzerland.

In 1993, NeXT transitioned fully to software development releasing NeXTSTEP/Intel. The company reported its first yearly profit of $1.03 million in 1994. Next was acquired in 1996 for $429 million by Apple Inc. In September of 1997 Jobs was named interim CEO of Apple. Through Jobs’ ingenious products (like the iMac), effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs the incorporation revitalized.

In January 2000 Jobs unveiled Apple's new Internet strategy whilst announcing that he was becoming the permanent CEO of Apple. For the next 10 years, Jobs could not stay on course as CEO Tim Cook was often delegated to fit the description. With the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone on June 29, 2007, with ingenuity Apple entered the cellular phone business.

How Steve Jobs Got Fired from Apple

Jobs and Wozniak had founded Apple in 1976. Jobs was the business and ideas guy while Wozniak was the technical guy. Though they both had a passion for the company, neither of them really had a good experience of heading/running a company. Through what seemed to be a good idea at the beginning, Jobs and Wozniak gave Mike Markulla, one of the company’s early investors the liberty of getting involve d with the running of the company. Markulla brought on board Michael Scott, a more experienced CEO to head the affairs of the company while the founders worked on other aspects of the company. In 1981, Scott stepped down as CEO and Markulla immediately assumed the position. By 1983, Jobs wanted to become the CEO of the company but the board didn’t deem him fit for the role yet as he was perceived “difficult to work with.” Still, in 1983, Jobs recruited John Sculley, the PepsiCo CEO at the time to become CEO of Apple.

Though Apple had released the Apple Lisa and Macintosh under Jobs’ influence, the expected revenue wasn’t still generated and the PCs' influence wasn’t standard enough to compete with IBM. It can be said that Macintosh was a failure because of its use of a low-performance chip though Jobs had earlier warned Sculley of the implication of using low-performance chips. The Macintosh product was not only low performance but also overpriced. Jobs was blamed for the flops as investors were unhappy about the turnout. Sculley, in turn, took Jobs out of the Macintosh team. Jobs, infuriated by this, directly confronted the board only to discover that the board supported Sculley’s decision. Different reports hold that Jobs was fired from the company, whereas other reports hold that Jobs voluntarily left the company after the Macintosh incident. Jobs later had this to say about the unfortunate incident, “we had just released our finest creation- the Macintosh- a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired front eh company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then, our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him…”

What was Jobs doing after leaving Apple?

On leaving Apple, Jobs’ next stop was founding NeXT, another computer company that he hoped would do better than Apple. Without being under any pressure from investors, Jobs had the liberty to use his own innovations and creativity to design one of the greatest GUIs at the time. It was only a matter of time before top competitors like Microsoft followed suit.

Back at Apple, Sculley got fired due to the losses he cost the company through the failures of the Newton MessagePad personal assistant, PowerPC, and high Mac prices. On exit of Sculley, Michael Spindler, a long-time Apple employee replaced him. Spindler lasted for three years and was soon replaced by Gil Amelio. Under Gil Amelio’s leadership, Apple had plans to buy NeXT for $429 million. That way Jobs would be an indirect partner of Apple once again. Before Amelio’s plan could actualize, Apple faced another downturn due to Jobs’ $1.5 million share sale. A short while later, Amelio voluntarily resigned from his role as CEO.

This vacant CEO role at Apple gave Jobs ample time to make amends and get back on board of Apple. After reconciliation with his long-time competitor, Bill Gates, Apple got a $150 million investment from Microsoft (MSFT). And by 1998, Apple’s next big thing was introduced, the iMac. In 2000, Jobs was finally made the CEO of his company. January 17, 2011 Jobs resigned due to pressing health challenges and Tim Cook took the reins.

What killed Steve Jobs? 

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In July-2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas and underwent surgery. The relapse of his tumor occurred in 2006 and in 2009 when he had a liver transplant. Serious health concerns rose again in January 2011 before his resignation. On October 5, 2011, Jobs died at his Palo Alto, California home around 3 p.m. after a long fierce battle against complications and relapse of his treated islet-cell pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.

Jobs was married to Laurene Powell since 1991 and died leaving 4 children including Lisa Brenner-Jobs.