On February 24, 1955, Steve Jobs was born, the visionary co-founder of Apple who changed the world with products like the iPhone.
Eleven years after his death, and although his life has been the subject of dozens of books and movies, there are still many pieces of his story that are unknown to many, but they helped make Jobs so great.
Fortune magazine named him the most important businessman of our time in 2012.
Here are 20 things you did not know about him:
1. Steve Jobs was adopted shortly after he was born. Biologically, he was half Arab, as his real father was Syrian and his mother who gave birth to him an American.
2. While still a student, his biological parents were not married, as their relationship provoked reactions in their families. So they gave the baby to Clara and Paul Jobs for adoption. Their only demand was that the adoptive parents send their son to university – but he had a different opinion, as it is known that he never completed his studies.
3. Years later, his biological parents married and had a daughter. Jobs spotted his biological sister, Mona Simpson, as an adult, and the two developed a close relationship, as they had much in common. “Anywhere But Here”, starring Susan Chardon and Natalie Portman, is based on a book written by Simpson and dedicated to Jobs.
4. In 1974 Jobs traveled to India in search of spiritual guidance. He spent seven months traveling the country, experimenting with LSD and eventually adopting the practices of Zen Buddhism, which greatly influenced his later life. At one point, in fact, he thought of becoming a monk in Japan.
5. Jobs met Steve Wozniak in high school when he was 13 and his partner’s 18.
6. Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple, but there was also a third partner, who even designed the first logo of the company. Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake in the company just two weeks later for $ 800 in a move that cost him billions.
7. Jobs stole Wozniak. When they created the Breakout game for Atari, they had agreed to split the payout 50-50. But while Atari gave Jobs $ 5,000 for the game, he told his partner he had only received $ 700, and thus gave him $ 350, keeping the remaining $ 4,650 for himself.
8. While working at Atari, he was transferred to the night shift due to complaints about his poor hygiene. Jobs rarely took a bath because he believed that because of his vegetarian diet (he had various strange eating habits, as he only ate apples and carrots for a while) he did not smell. Obviously, as his colleagues found out, he was wrong.
9. In 1985, Jobs was fired from his own company. He later admitted that this did him good, because he had the opportunity to experiment with other things, such as Pixar, the company that eventually made him a billionaire.
10. Shortly after leaving Apple, he applied to fly in the Space Shuttle as an astronaut, but was turned down.
11. At age 23, Jobs had an illegitimate daughter, Lisa Brennan. For years he denied that it was his, with the result that her mother raised the girl based on social welfare benefits. Eventually, Jobs accepted Lisa as his child and she changed her name to Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
12. Although he denied that Lisa was his child, shortly after his birth he gave the name to Apple’s new computer (at the time, he claimed the name meant Local Integrated Software Architecture).
13. Jobs was a difficult and demanding boss. In 1993, Fortune magazine named him “America’s Hardest Boss.”
14. From 1997, when he became CEO of Apple, Jobs received a salary of $ 1 a year. In 2007 he joked: “I get 50 cents a year because I show up at work and the other 50 cents based on my performance.”
15. Unlike most CEOs of large companies, he was not a philanthropist at all. At first, Apple cut off the company’s charitable programs, saying it would start all over again when the business was more profitable. But despite its huge success, the charitable programs never returned.
16. Jobs always drove his silver Mercedes without license plates. How did he do that? Under California law, a new car owner has six months to get a license plate. So Jobs changed cars every six months, getting the same model every time, so he could drive without license plates.
17. Although he was one of the few people to influence the tech industry, he never learned to write code, as Wozniak revealed.
18. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. But instead of following the doctors’ advice for an immediate operation, he resorted to alternative medicine, following a vegan diet, taking various herbal medicines and taking advice from a psychic. After nine months he withdrew and agreed to have the operation. Many believe that this delay played a significant role in his untimely death.
19. His last words before he died were “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow ». He said it with his whole family gathered around him.
20. The flags on the buildings of Apple, Microsoft and Disneyland (he was a major shareholder of Disney) were waving at half-mast for Jobs’s death.
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