Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs was a college dropout when he teamed up with Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell personal computers assembled in Jobs’ garage. That was the beginning of Apple Computers, which revolutionized the computing industry and made Steve Jobs a multimillionaire before he was 30 years old. He was forced out of the company in 1985 and started the NeXT Corporation, but returned to his old company in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Steve Jobs soon became Apple’s chief executive officer and sparked a resurgence in the company with products like the colorful iMac computer and the iPod music player. Steve Jobs was also the CEO of Pixar, the animation company responsible for movies like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock; the deal made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney stock. Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and had surgery in July of 2004, and was criticized by some for not disclosing his illness to stockholders until after the fact. His health was in the news again in 2008, when his extreme weight loss sparked rumors that his cancer had recurred. Jobs refused to speak publicly about his health, but in January of 2009 he took a formal six-month leave of absence from Apple, saying that his health problems were “more complex than I originally thought.” He had a liver transplant later that year and returned to work at Apple in June of 2009. In January of 2011 he again announced, without offering details, that he was taking a medical leave of absence, and in August of that year he resigned as CEO.  He died five weeks later; his official death certificate reported that Jobs died of respiratory arrest resulting from pancreatic cancer that had spread to other organs.