Steve Jobs Trivia | 50 facts about the entrepreneur

Steve Jobs was an entrepreneur, industrial designer, business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple.

Let’s find out more about him!

1. His full name was Steven Paul Jobs.
2. He was born on February 24th, 1955.
3. He died on October 5th 2011.
4. He was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, business magnate, media proprietor, and investor.
5. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple, the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar, a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar, and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT.
6. He is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
7. Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco to a Syrian father and German-American mother.
8. He was adopted shortly after his birth.
9. Steve Jobs attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year.
10. In 1974, he traveled through India seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism.
11. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer.
12. Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers.
13. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI).
14. This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI.
15. The Macintosh introduced the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.
16. In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple after a long power struggle with the company’s board and its then-CEO, John Sculley.
17. That same year, Jobs took a few Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets.
18. In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm in 1986.
19. The new company was Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer-animated feature film Toy Story (1995) and went on to become a major animation studio, producing over 25 films since.
20. In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company’s acquisition of NeXT.
21. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with English designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the “Think different” advertising campaign and leading to the Apple Store, App Store (iOS), iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iTunes Store.
22. In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with the completely new Mac OS X (now known as macOS), based on NeXT’s NeXTSTEP platform, giving the operating system a modern Unix-based foundation for the first time.
23. Steve Jobs started wearing his signature black turtleneck because his employees didn’t want to wear a company uniform.
24. The sleekness of Apple’s product design translated to Jobs’s well-known wardrobe. The majority of pictures of Jobs show him in a black turtleneck paired with jeans and sneakers. He didn’t wear just any black turtleneck – the famous top was by the innovative Japanese designer Issey Miyake.
25. Jobs was originally inspired to start dressing in uniform when he visited the Tokyo headquarters of Sony in the ’80s and admired the minimalist Miyake-designed uniforms the employees wore.
26. Jobs loved the uniforms so much, in fact, that he commissioned Miyake to design uniforms for Apple, but his employees hated the idea. Jobs compromised by adopting the signature Miyake turtleneck.
27. He owned around 100 of them, and while the exact style he wore was discontinued after his death, Miyake later released a similar black turtleneck as an homage to the unlikely fashion influencer.
28. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
29. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.
30. In 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
31. Steve Jobs’s earliest computer was recently auctioned for nearly $500,000.
32. It’s hard to believe a computer from 1976 would still work today, but Apple’s first desktop model, the rare Apple-1 (originally sold for the devilish price of $666.66) recently made it to an auction at Christie’s in working condition.
33. The bulky, oh-so-’70s piece of machinery was sold to an anonymous buyer for around $470,000.
34. A decade before he met his wife, Laurene Powell, Jobs dated folk singer Joan Baez in 1982.
35. Jobs described their connection as “a serious relationship between two accidental friends who became lovers.”
36. Baez had famously dated Bob Dylan and performed with him in the ’60s and ’70s.
37. It just so happened that Jobs was also a huge Dylan fan—he and Wozniak originally bonded over their fandom for the prolific artist and collected his bootleg recordings.
38. Steve Jobs finally met his musical hero in 2004, but their topics of conversation remain unknown.
39. He and his friend and future employee, Daniel Kottke, would frequently trip on LSD during college in the ’70s. Kottke described himself and Jobs as “monk-wannabes.”
40. Jobs was very influenced by Be Here Now, a 1971 book on meditation by spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and practiced Zen Buddhism. The Buddhist principles of mindfulness even supposedly helped inspire Apple’s simple yet effective product designs.
41. Steve Jobs wasn’t so into the concept of the “Genius Bar.”
42. Apple stores are known for their sparkling white aesthetic and “Genius Bar” for customer service. Not every element of the stores was specified to Jobs’s liking, though.
43. In 2000, Apple hired Ron Johnson to run their first retail stores. Johnson was responsible for coming up with the now-signature Genius Bar, and recalled that when he told him about his idea, Jobs called it “idiotic” and said, “Ron, you might have the right idea, but here’s the big gap: I’ve never met someone who knows technology who knows how to connect with people. They’re all geeks! You can call it the Geek Bar.’”
44. Steve Jobs wanted the original iPhone to be primarily used as… a phone.
45. It’s somewhat surprising to learn that the original iPhone was primarily meant to be just that: a phone. At the 2007 keynote introducing the product, Jobs said, “We want to reinvent the phone … What’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls. It’s amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones.”
46. Steve Jobs’s final words were “oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”
47. Jobs didn’t meet his biological sister, Mona Simpson, until they were in their twenties.
48. Steve Jobs likely had an IQ roughly 160 or above. In Walter Isaacson’s biography, near the end of 4th grade, Jobs was tested. Jobs said: ‘I scored at the high school sophomore level. ‘ This means he was a 4th grader performing at the 10th grade level.
49. He had a net worth of $10.2 billion the year of his death
50. Steve Jobs was a pescetarian for most of his life, later becoming a fruitarian, which is a form of veganism that only includes fruit, nuts, seeds, and vegetables.