# Steve Jobs **Steve Jobs** (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) co-founded [[Apple]], was pushed out of it, came back to rescue it, and turned it into the template for the modern consumer-technology giant. In the Right Wing KB he matters less for the products than for the mythology: he is the original of the visionary-founder archetype that [[Silicon Valley]] now uses to justify concentrated, unaccountable corporate power, and the man for whom the phrase "[[Reality Distortion]] field" was coined. His fortune, through [[Laurene Powell Jobs]], now funds [[Emerson Collective]] and owns [[The Atlantic]]. ## Career | Year | Event | |---|---| | 1976 | Founds Apple Computer on April 1 with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne | | 1984 | Macintosh launches on January 24 | | 1985 | Loses a boardroom fight with CEO John Sculley and leaves; founds NeXT | | 1986 | Buys the computer-graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million; it becomes Pixar | | 1995 | Pixar releases *Toy Story*, the first fully computer-animated feature | | 1996–97 | Apple buys NeXT for $400 million in December 1996; Jobs becomes interim CEO in September 1997 (permanent in 2000) | | 1997 | [[Microsoft]] invests $150 million in Apple; Jobs and [[Bill Gates]] share the Macworld stage (see [[Microsoft Timeline]]) | | 2001–10 | iPod (2001), iPhone (2007), iPad (2010) | | 2006 | [[The Walt Disney Company]] buys Pixar for $7.4 billion, making Jobs its largest individual shareholder | | 2011 | Resigns as CEO on August 24, handing Apple to [[Tim Cook]]; dies on October 5 in Palo Alto of complications of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, aged 56 | ## The reality distortion field Apple engineer Bud Tribble coined the phrase in 1981, borrowing it from *Star Trek*, to describe how Jobs could convince a room, and himself, that an impossible schedule was achievable. The vault uses it as a general concept for charismatic leaders who bend others' perception of facts (see [[Reality Distortion]] and [[Charismatic Authority]]). The Jobs version is the benign-seeming prototype; the same frame is now applied to [[Elon Musk]] and [[Donald Trump]]. ## The other ledger The founder myth tends to leave out conduct that bears directly on the vault's antitrust and labor themes: - **No-poach agreements.** From 2005 to 2009 Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm agreed not to recruit each other's engineers; the class complaint described an interconnected web of agreements, each with the active involvement of a company under Jobs's control. DOJ obtained a consent judgment in 2011, and the companies paid $435 million to settle the workers' class action in 2015. - **Manufacturing.** The iPhone era was built on [[Foxconn]]'s assembly lines in China. - **Options backdating.** Apple's 2001 stock-option grants to Jobs were investigated in the mid-2000s backdating scandal. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2022. ## Why the myth matters Jobs is the figure the [[Great Man Theory]] of tech history is built around: a single genius whose taste and will made a company great. That story is what later founders invoke when they demand super-voting shares, deference from regulators and immunity from the norms that bind ordinary executives. [[Paul Graham]]'s 2024 essay "Founder Mode," which takes Jobs's management as its model, and [[Elon Musk]]'s self-presentation both draw on it. ## See Also - [[Apple]] · [[Tim Cook]] · [[Laurene Powell Jobs]] · [[Emerson Collective]] - [[Reality Distortion]] · [[Great Man Theory]] · [[Charismatic Authority]] · [[Big Tech]] - [[Microsoft Timeline]] · [[History of Computing]] · [[Silicon Valley]]