Who was Steve Jobs the man?

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ASHER MOSES

iCON: Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the new AppleTV and iPhone during his keynote address at MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco in August this year.

We know he was driven, ambitious, demanding and a technical genius. But what was Steve Jobs like as a man?

How did his temper stack up to his sense of humour? Was he fair-minded or judgemental? Did he make friends easily and did he keep them?

We do know that, outside of his corporate duties, he was an intensely private man.

Jobs had a complex personality and to dismiss it as arrogance appears to be selling him short. Rick Lucas, managing partner with Lucas Design in the 1980s, described him as soft-spoken and gracious.

“In my entire experience with Steve I found him to be soft-spoken and gracious to the point of being deferential,” Lucas, who worked alongside Jobs for several months, recalled.

“What others have characterised as bluntness struck me as simply an efficiency of words. Each word spoken by Steve furthered an objective.”

Estranged father hoped for just a coffee with Jobs

Born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, Jobs was adopted soon after birth by accountant Clara and machinist Paul Jobs. It was only later in life that he discovered the identities of his estranged parents – graduate student Joanne Simpson and Syrian Muslim Abdulfattah John Jandali, who left the US at age 18 but is now the vice president of a casino in Reno, Nevada.

The life and times of Steve Jobs

Jobs never met his biological father, despite Jandali telling The Sun in a rare interview after Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO in August that “I live in hope that before it is too late he will reach out to me”.

“Even to have just one coffee with him just once would make me a very happy man,” said Jandali, who bears a striking resemblance to his son.

Jandali, who said he was too proud to reach out to Jobs first, said Simpson’s “tyrant” father had forbade her to marry him due to his Syrian heritage. He says he had no say in the decision to put Jobs up for adoption.

Jandali and Simpson did eventually marry and had a daughter, the successful novelist Mona Simpson, who was close with Jobs and in 1997 described him as “one of my best friends in the world”.

Contacted by the Gazette-Journal about the passing of his son this week, Jandali told the paper that he didn’t have anything to say.

High school romance with unintended consequences

Jobs himself was also estranged from a child he fathered early in his life. His high school girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan gave birth to a daughter in 1978, when Jobs was 23. Jobs denied he was her father for two years and even swore in court that he was infertile but he eventually acknowledged that Lisa Brennan-Jobs was his daughter and she lived with him for a time as a teenager.

Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California in 1972 and enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He dropped out after one semester.

“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,” he said during a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.

Jobs: the hippie years

After dropping out Jobs dropped in to classes for 18 months but was poor, sleeping on the floor in friends’ rooms and returning coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits. He and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak dressed up as Alice in Wonderland characters in a mall in San Jose for $US3 an hour in 1972.

Jobs also flirted with Buddhism, grew his hair long and bummed meals from a Hare Krishna temple.

Soon after he worked as a designer for video game company Atari, where he helped create one of the best known video games, Breakout. He travelled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment and returned with his head shaved and wearing Indian attire, Britain’s Telegraph reported.

Jobs dabbled with both psychedelic drugs and primal scream therapy, according to Time magazine, and he has described his experiences with LSD as “one of the two or three most important things I’ve done in my life”. In an interview he once remarked that Bill Gates would be a broader guy “if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”.

Before making his transition to family man Jobs briefly dated the American folk singer and activist Joan Baez and actress Diane Keaton.

Finding his soul mate

Jobs married his wife Laurene Powell in a Buddhist ceremony in Yosemite National Park in 1991. The pair met in 1989 while Jobs was speaking at Stanford University, where Powell received an MBA, and later went on to have three children together.

Jobs has recounted how he skipped a business meeting to go on his first date with Powell. “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,” he said.

A true family man

Jobs’s love for his family comes through in many of the anecdotes told by those who knew him in recent months. He guarded their privacy more heavily than his own and blew a fuse when Fairfax Media journalist Garry Barker mentioned his love for his children in an article.

Jobs’s neighbour, Lisen Stromberg, wrote on her blog that she wouldn’t be pondering the MacBook Air or the iPhone when considering the impact of the Steve Jobs era.

“I will think of the day I was him at his son’s high school graduation. There Steve stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, his smile wide and proud, as his son received his diploma and walked on into his own bright future, leaving behind a good man and a good father who can be sure of the rightness of this, perhaps his most important legacy of all,” Stromberg wrote.

KC Bradshaw, a former contractor with JumpSport Trampolines, met Jobs in 2004 when he installed a trampoline at his house, which Bradshaw described as “more like a Buddhist-nice than a Trump-nice”.

Jobs, known to be a keen gardener, had a grove of apricot trees and planted vegetables in his yard.

Bradshaw recounted how Jobs’s obsession with detail even extended to the trampoline, with Jobs grilling him on “the company that built it, the manufacturing process, or how the trampoline could be simplified and improved upon”.

That day Jobs’s daughter was having a birthday party and Bradshaw described watching as Jobs jumped up on the trampoline and started bouncing around with his daughter. “It was really sweet,” he said.

Perfecting ‘the look’

One of Jobs’s trademarks is his look – he almost always appeared in public wearing a black mock turtleneck, Levi 501 jeans and New Balance 992 sneakers. In his earlier years at Apple he often wore suits and bow ties but, according to long-time Apple journalist Matthew Powell, switched to his new more casual outfit “so that he didn’t waste time thinking about what to wear when he should be thinking about Apple.”

Jobs drove Apple’s Beatlemania

Jobs’s favourite musical artists included Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Powell said Paul McCartney gave him a recipe for a vegan chocolate cake.

Beatles tracks regularly featured in Apple product launches and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has recounted how the pair would drive huge distances to meet people who had “pictures or interviews with Bob Dylan”.

When the death of George Harrison was announced in November 2001, former director of product marketing for applications at Apple, Mike Evangelist sent Jobs an email suggesting that the company put up a tribute to Harrison on the home page.

Evangelist didn’t hear back for hours and thought Jobs wasn’t interested but later that evening, back at his desk, Apple product manager Tom McDonald told him the entire web design group was working overtime because of his idea. Late that night, the Apple homepage led with a photo tribute to Harrison.

“It was one of my proudest moments at Apple: to be part of a company that let its heart guide its actions. And the company is built that way because of Steve,” said Evangelist.

‘Dumbest f—ing idea I have ever heard’

Jobs has often been described as an abrasive, arrogant man who doesn’t suffer fools lightly. Part of the reason for this is that he was never afraid to tell people what he really thought.

ESPN president George Bodenheimer, at a Disney board meeting just after the company bought Jobs’s other company, Pixar, introduced himself to Jobs. At the time, in 2006, ESPN was launching a mobile phone in partnership with Samsung.

According to the book, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, Jobs just looked at Bodenheimer and said nothing other than “your phone is the dumbest f—ing idea I have ever heard”, then turned and walked away. Jobs was right – the phone flopped spectacularly.

After Apple collaborated with Nike on the Nike+ project, Mark Parker, Nike’s president and CEO, asked Jobs if he had any advice for him.

“Nike makes some of the best products in the world – products that you lust after, absolutely beautiful stunning products. But you also make a lot of crap,” Jobs told him, according to Parker.

“Just get rid of the crappy stuff, and focus on the good stuff.”

Employees have described how presenting projects to Jobs struck fear into their hearts as he would often immediately narrow in on a tiny user interface quirk that he didn’t like and launch into a tirade. But employees universally agree that Jobs was always correct in his reasoning.

‘Soft-spoken and gracious’

Jobs had a complex personality and to dismiss it as arrogance appears to be selling him short. Rick Lucas, managing partner with Lucas Design in the 1980s, described him as soft-spoken and gracious.

Lucas joined Jobs’s “inner circle” when he was developing a third-party software product for NeXT, the company Jobs created during his decade in exile from Apple. Lucas worked alongside Jobs over a period of several months.

“In my entire experience with Steve I found him to be soft-spoken and gracious to the point of being deferential,” Lucas recalled.

“What others have characterised as bluntness struck me as simply an efficiency of words. Each word spoken by Steve furthered an objective.”

As the world reflects on all that Jobs has achieved in his career, and his ruthless business mind, it is these obscure details of his life and personality that help reveal how he grew to become one of the most celebrated business leaders of our time.

– Sydney Morning Herald

9 things you didn’t know about the life of Steve Jobs

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/8-things-didn-t-know-life-steve-jobs-172130955.html

By Taylor Hatmaker, Tecca | Today in Tech

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.

Reed College

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.

Breakout for the Atari

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.”

Joan Baez

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 confirmedthe 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.

[Image credit: Ben Stanfield, Heinrich Klaffs]

This article originally appeared on Tecca

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