Shocking Facts About Steve Jobs That You Haven’t Heard Of

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple has managed to keep little or less off the public. In this article, we’ll list the mind-blowing, intriguing, and inspiring shocking facts about Steve Jobs that you haven’t heard of.

Steven Paul Jobs was an American inventor, designer, and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, chief executive, and chairman of Apple Computer. Apple’s revolutionary products, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, dictate the evolution of modern technology. 

Before we go on to list the shocking facts about the Apple founder, we’ll give you a brief rundown of his life and times.

Life and Times of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was born to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, the University of Wisconsin graduate students on February 24, 1955. The couple gave up their unnamed son for adoption by Paul and Clara jobs shortly after his birth.

Born in San Francisco, California, Jobs lived with his adoptive family in Mountain View, California. The area later became known as Silicon Valley.

As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

While Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, he didn’t enjoy the formal education system. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school — a proposal that his parents.

After high school in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Still faced with a lack of desire, Jobs dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.

In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

In 1975 Jobs joined a group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. One member, a technical whiz named Steve Wozniak (1950–), was trying to build a small computer. Jobs became fascinated with the marketing potential of such a computer. In 1976 he and Wozniak formed their own company. They called it Apple Computer Company, in memory of a happy summer Jobs had spent picking apples. They raised $1,300 in startup money by selling Jobs’s microbus and Wozniak’s calculator. At first they sold circuit boards (the boards that hold the internal components of a computer) while they worked on the computer prototype.

Jobs and Laurene Powell married on March 18, 1991. The pair met in the early 1990s at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children: Reed, Erin, and Eve.

Jobs also fathered a daughter, Lisa, with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan in 1978, when he was 23. He denied the paternity of his daughter in court documents, claiming he was sterile.

Steve Jobs died in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, after battling pancreatic cancer for nearly a decade. He was 56 years old.

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Shocking Facts About Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is a genius and a modern-day tech revolutionary. While his history may be out for all to see, you’ll be shocked to read these shocking facts about Steve Jobs listed below:

1. Steve Jobs was adopted shortly after being born.
2. Jobs was, biologically, half Arab. His biological father was Syrian and his mother was American.
3. Jobs’ biological parents wanted Jobs to be adopted by two college-educated people — which wasn’t entirely the case. The biological parents eventually found out that neither Clara nor Paul Jobs had ever graduated from college, but the adoption went through when it was promised that Steve Jobs would receive a university education.
4. During his single year of study, Steve Jobs had a considerably low GPA of just 2.65.
5. Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak met in high school–Wozniak was 18 and Jobs was just 13.
6. Jobs was a pescetarian, he ate no meat except for fish.
7. He was an official college dropout but continued his education by informally auditing classes.
8. One class Jobs audited was a calligraphy course, which he says was instrumental in the future Apple products’ attention to typography and font.
9. While unofficially attending classes, Jobs struggled to get by. He slept on his friends’ dorm room floors, returned Coke bottles for money, and survived off free meals from the local Hare Krishna temple.
10. He spent seven months traveling around India, experimenting with psychedelic drugs and eventually adopting the practices of Zen Buddhism.
11. Jobs has called experimenting with LSD “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”
12. Jobs stole from partner and co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak. When the pair first created the Breakout game for Atari, they planned on splitting the pay 50-50. Although Atari gave Jobs $5,000 for the game, Jobs told Wozniak they got $700, leaving Wozniak to take home $350 while Jobs pocketed the other $4,650.
13. Jobs was moved to the night shift when working at Atari due to complaints about his hygiene. He rarely showered and would walk around barefoot in the Atari offices.
14. There was actually a third founder of Apple–Ronald Wayne, who even designed Apple’s first logo. Wayne sold his 10 percent stake just two weeks after partnering with Jobs and Wozniak for only $800 (talk about regrets).
15. The original Apple I computer was priced at $666.66. Don’t worry, there was no devil worshipping going on–Jobs and Wozniak just wanted the Apple I to cost one-third more than wholesale ($500).
16. Jobs was pushed out of his own company in 1985. Despite the fallout, he later recognized the coup as a blessing in disguise, as it gave him a chance to experiment creatively and purchase an animation studio, which would later be known as Pixar. Eventually, he was reenlisted as Apple’s CEO in 1997 to restore a dying company which he did.
17. Shortly after being shooed out of Apple, Jobs applied to fly on the Space Shuttle as a civilian astronaut (he was rejected) and even considered starting a computer company in the Soviet Union.
18. Jobs had an illegitimate child, Lisa Brennan when he was 23, whose paternity he denied for years. Lisa’s mother had to use welfare checks to raise her child. Eventually, Jobs did accept Lisa as his legitimate child, and she changed her name to Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
19. Despite initially denying paternity, around the time Lisa was born, Jobs named a new Apple computer the Apple Lisa (although Jobs claimed it simply stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture).
20. While at Apple, Jobs always kept his annual salary at $1. Don’t worry, with 5.5 million shares of Apple stock and as the majority shareholder of Disney stock (from selling Pixar), he wasn’t quite what you’d call a starving artist.
21. Jobs later connected with his biological sister, Mona Simpson, with whom he grew very close with. Both were naturally artistic and shared much in common.
22. The movie Anywhere But Here is based on a book written by Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson. The movie is dedicated to Jobs.
23. Jobs was no philanthropist. In fact, in Apple’s early days, he cut the company’s philanthropic programs, saying they would return when the company was more profitable. Despite Apple’s enormous success, the charitable programs were never reinstated.
24. Jobs had an entire team devoted to packaging who studied the experience of opening a box to learn how to achieve the excitement and emotional response that is now common with Apple products.
25. A well-known egomaniac, Jobs was infamous for being difficult and demanding. In 1993, he held a spot on Fortune‘s list of America’s Toughest Bosses.
26. Jobs was not always friendly with journalists and the media, wanting to retain total control of Apple’s impression on the public. Apple even sued teenager Nicholas Ciarelli for his Think Secret blog, where he revealed rumors and secret details about upcoming Apple products.
27. Jobs is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor for 346 United States patents related to a range of technologies, with most of the patents being for design.
28. Jobs had romantic relationships with Joan Baez and Diane Keaton.
29. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak notes that Jobs never learned how to code.
30. Bill Clinton once invited Jobs to spend the night sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House.
31. Steve Jobs started wearing his signature black turtleneck because his employees didn’t want to wear a company uniform.
32. Jobs hated PCs, and is quoted as saying to one friend, “I’d rather sell dog shit than PCs.”
33. He never put license plates on his silver Mercedes (despite driving it constantly). How did he do it? California has a rule that a car owner has six months to put plates on a new car. Jobs just changed cars (to the identical model) every six months, allowing him to drive without plates.
34. Jobs often parked in spots reserved for the handicapped.
35. STEVE JOBS’S FINAL WORDS WERE “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

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Final Thoughts

With much to be learned from the life of Steve Jobs, the idea of having each possible information of his illustrious life, times, exploits, and even secrets documented is undeniably inspiring.

The sheer hubris of the entrepreneurial spirit in Jobs as expounded in this article is proof that you can do something bigger and better than he ever did.

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