Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (1955-2011) is regarded as one of the most influential people of the 21st century. His name has become synonymous with creative thinking and innovation, particularly within the context of technological entrepreneurship. Adopted as a baby to working-class parents, Jobs demonstrated an incredible aptitude for wanting to know how things worked even from a young age. He had a natural intellectual curiosity, which eventually led him to Reed College, Eastern spirituality, LSD, and eventually to co-founding Apple, which in time became the world’s most valuable company.

While Jobs is widely regarded as a business genius, he often struggled to maintain healthy relationships in his life, obsessed by his professional pursuits to the point where he could be intensely hurtful and aggressive in his communication. For Jobs, reality often bent to his own desires, which allowed him to accomplish an incredible amount through his work, but that often made him a hard pill to swallow for others in his orbit. Jobs had a child, Lisa, born to his former girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, who he refused to acknowledge for the early years of her life. Later, he would marry Laurene Powell, with whom he had three children, Reed, Erin, and Eve. Just as Apple was experiencing unprecedented success, largely due to Jobs’s vision at the helm of the company, he passed away in 2011, after a long battle with cancer.

Steve Wozniak is one of the co-founders of Apple, who met Jobs during Wozniak’s college years, while Jobs was still a high school student. Wozniak had a brilliant, intuitive mind when it came to technology, and the two bonded over circuitry and other electronics. They first truly collaborated on a project called “Blue Box,” which allowed people to make long distance calls. Later, out of Jobs’s garage, they founded Apple, which eventually became the most valuable company in the world.

Wozniak’s technological expertise led to the creation of the foundational circuit boards, which Jobs figured out how to package and market. Throughout the years of their partnership, Wozniak would often bristle at Jobs’s leadership style, which he considered harsh and outright mean at times. Wozniak wasn’t motivated by money, but by the possibilities of creating new computers, while Jobs had a mind for business and marketing that Wozniak lacked. From their experience working together, it is apparent that the pair complemented each other, according to their own strengths.

John Sculley is an entrepreneur who served as the CEO of Apple from 1983 to 1993. Prior to working at Apple, Sculley had most notably been the president of PepsiCo, and had solidified himself as a brilliant marketing mind. Jobs and Sculley clashed often about business strategy at Apple, which eventually led to the end of their friendship after disagreements escalated to the point where Sculley removed Jobs from a managerial role in the name of profitability.

This move struck Jobs as a personal betrayal. According to Isaacson, Jobs had at one time regarded Sculley as a father figure. Now, Jobs felt that he had been abandoned by him, having been ousted from his own company. As Jobs slowly recovered from his unplanned departure from Apple, his “anger at Scully, his feeling of betrayal, deepened” (208). The two would never reconcile.

Bill Gates is widely regarded as Steve Jobs’s greatest professional rival, a symbolic figure of the countercurrent to Apple. Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft, at one point was the most valuable tech company in the world until it was surpassed by Apple. While Gates and Jobs share many similarities in terms of their ambitions and accomplishments—and even the fact that they are both notorious college dropouts—they are vastly different in their temperaments.

While Jobs had the “uncompromising temperament of an artist” (173), Gates was a “smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst” (173). Though Microsoft and Apple would at times find common ground in business, both Jobs and Gates believed they were smarter than the other, which often resulted in personality clashes. Eventually, however, Jobs and Gates would learn to respect each other in their own way. Before Jobs passed away, for instance, Gates made a point to visit him at his Palo Alto home.

Clara and Paul Jobs were Steve Jobs’s adoptive parents. Paul was a Coast guard veteran who later worked as a machinist, among other things; Clara was an accountant. Prior to adopting Steve, they made a promise to Jobs’s biological parents that they would provide him with every opportunity to succeed in life after his birth mother, Joanne, insisted that her child be adopted by college graduates. More importantly, Paul and Clara instilled Jobs with the idea that they had chosen him to be their son, that he was not abandoned but selected.

As Isaacson writes, “Paul and Clara Jobs were loving parents, and they were willing to adapt their lives to suit who was very smart—and also willful” (11). They were both intensely dedicated to his education and upbringing, making sure that his interests were stoked and that his intellectual needs were being met. Clara taught Steve how to read even before he started elementary school, and Paul introduced Steve to the world of mechanics and electronics through cars he would fix. Eventually, Jobs would start Apple out of Paul and Clara’s garage, perhaps the strongest representation of their unconditional support.

Chrisann Brennan started dating Jobs in high school, in 1972, and for five years on and off after that. In 1977, Brennan and Jobs shared a house together with a friend named Daniel Kottke. During this time living together, Brennan got pregnant, just as Jobs was starting to gain traction with Apple. Jobs refused to acknowledge that he was the father, even demanding that his paternity be confirmed via DNA test. When the results confirmed that he was the father a year after the child, Lisa, was born, he had no choice but to help support Chrisann and their daughter.

Chrisann and Lisa had a life completely separate from Jobs’s, with Apple taking off and Jobs having only reluctantly accepted that he was Lisa’s father. Jobs had wondered if the child had ever been his to begin with, to which Chrisann responded by saying, “He was trying to paint me as a slut or a whore…He spun the whore image onto me in order to not take responsibility” (91). Years later, Jobs would remorsefully remember the experience with Chrisann and his refusal to embrace fatherhood, in a rare show of contrition.