The purpose of this page is to describe Steve Jobs’ personality, and explain his myth to people who are not familiar with it.


Relatives

Parents: adoptive parents Paul and Clara Jobs, both deceased. Steve discovered his biological mother Joanne Simpson in his early thirties, after years of search. She is deceased as well.

Siblings: adoptive younger sister Patti Jobs, and biological younger sister Mona Simpson. While Steve never felt real close to Patti, he is said to have become very close to Mona ever since they met in 1986.

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Mona Simpson

Laurene & Steve Jobs

Family: wife Laurene Powell (whom he married on March 18th 1991), and the three children she gave him: Reed Jobs (born September 22, 1991), Erin Siena Jobs (born August 19, 1995) and Eve Jobs (born in May 1998). Lisa Brennan-Jobs (born May 17, 1978), daughter of Steve’s girlfriend Chris-Ann Brennan, has lived with him and his new family during her teenage years.


 Friends

Steve’s only public friend is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Some of his early friends are also known to us: Bill Fernandez from Junior High, Dan Kottke — the friend he traveled to India with — from Reed College, and of course Apple-cofounder Steve Wozniak.


 Father figures, role models, idols

In his youth, Steve idolized Bob Dylan. He used to spend hours playing some of Dylan's tunes on his guitar in the backyard of his parent’s house. He is still a huge fan of Dylan's today.

As a foster child, Steve Jobs has always felt a sense of quest of parenthood, and his life and career are filled with father figures. The first one is his spiritual leader, Zen guru Kobin Chino, the one who advised him to become a businessman instead of escaping and becoming a Zen monk in Japan. Kobin Chino has kept his influence on Steve until his death, he has even orchestrated his wedding ceremony in 1991. In business, Steve’s father figures included Andy Grove, president and founder of Intel, George Fisher from Motorola, John Warnock from Adobe and Pat Crecine, administrator of the University of Carnegie-Mellon.


 Personal Beliefs

• individuals are “noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart”, but Steve is said to loath people in groups and humanity in general.
• you can make people do great things if you give them great tools — that’s what he finds best in computing.

Political orientation: Democrat. He has thought about getting into politics in 1985, after leaving Apple, but has given up later. He has stated: “I am not a party-oriented person. I am people-oriented.”
Steve Jobs is often heard voicing his opinion on education. He strongly opposes the rigidness of the American education system, exemplified by the impossibility to fire teachers.
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At Stanford University in June 2005


Public persona

Steve Jobs has a very distinctive public image.

First of all, if you hardly know him, you must learn that he does not make public appearances very often. As a matter of fact, Apple being such a secretive company, it only communicates with the world with press releases or by hosting large media events. The most famous events that still exist today are the San Francisco-based Macworld conference, held every January, and the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), every summer.

It is during these shows or during staged events for the media that Steve makes his world-famous keynote speeches. Steve’s keynotes are prepared weeks in advance, they can last up to three hours and let you witness his remarkable charisma, a.k.a. his Reality Distortion Field. The term was invented in the early 80s, when it became clear to an increasing number of analysts and Apple employees that he had the power to seduce almost anyone and convince them of almost anything, even beyond common sense.

Indeed, Steve Jobs has this gift that very few people have, which makes his audience want to keep on listening to him, and he can captivate a roomful of people like nobody else in corporate America can. In fact, he is said to be a lot more effective in front of thousands of people than in a one-to-one chat. He also makes public display of an incredible salesmanship, combined with a genuine talent for explaining the arcane side of technology to mere mortals like us. In short, he is an high-tech evangelist.

If you want to learn more about the way Steve prepares his keynotes, I suggest you to read this very interesting article from one of Apple's former employees, Mike Evangelist, who has worked for the company for many years, and been involved in the making of a couple of keynotes: The Wizard of Pods - Behind the Curtain with Steve Jobs.
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Steve during and after one of his stage performances

In addition to that, there is, and there has always been, a very dark side to Steve’s persona. Biographist Alan Deutschman liked to call it the Bad Steve, in opposition to the Good Steve, the very picture of charm he incarnated in public.

Steve is said to be tyrannical toward his employees, to often use public humiliation and to fire people at will. He is said to have once fired someone because he had brought him the wrong brand of bottled water... In reality, such episodes don't happen very often, and they were a lot truer during the early part of Steve's career than they are today. But of course when one of these outbursts occurs, it gets told and re-told and amplified, and that’s how Steve’s reputation was built.

As a result, for example, when Steve came back to Apple in 1997, the word spread that he could enter a meeting+room full of employees, call their work “shit” and then fire them all on the spot. People who didn’t know him got afraid to be trapped in the same elevator as him, because they feared they would be jobless when the doors opened...

Steve is also known to have bad habits, such as using handicapped spots in the Cupertino parking lot (read this Folklore story about it).

Again, I invite you to read the following article from Mike Evangelist about the real Steve, or how much truth there is in Steve's public image: Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article.
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How do you know this is Steve's car?
1- it's a Mercedes, which he loves
2- it has no plate
3- it's parked on a handicapped spot


Steve's atypical lifestyle has also left a strong mark on his public persona. It dates back to the early mentions of his spiritual trip to India. Steve doesn’t like to talk about it — especially when asked by journalists — but he does play with it by sometimes using typical Zen expressions. For example, in his youth, he often said that with Macintosh, “the journey was the reward”; at NeXT he talked about “having a beginner’s mind”; and when he introduced the iTunes Music Store, he said that piracy gave you “Bad Karma”.
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Cross-legged 27-year-old Steve in his empty house of Palo Alto (by Diana Walker)
“This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light,
and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.”

Steve is also a militant vegetarian, and drinks almost only mineral water or his favorite juice, Odwalla’s 100% pure pressed carrot juice. His aesthetic tastes are in accordance with his spiritual beliefs, as he is known to enjoy austere minimalism. That, combined with his desire to surround himself with the absolute best, is why his homes have almost always been lacking of any pieces of furniture. For many years, he has slept on a mattress, without a bed, only surrounded by large Ansel Adams prints, black-and-white pictures of personalities he admired and an expensive hi-fi stereo system, even though he was a millionaire!

Finally, he expresses his disdain for corporate uniforms by almost always dressing in a pair of blue jeans and a black mock turtleneck, including during his public appearances. Once asked why he did so, he answered: "So that I don't have to waste time every morning wondering what I'm going to wear."