Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (born Steven Paul Jobs) was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco and died on 5 October 2011. He was an American inventor and businessman, and a co-founder of Apple.

At university he devoted himself to art and Zen Buddhism, then dropped out and started a company during the late-1970s personal computer boom, designing and selling the Apple II series with Steve Wozniak and others. In the early 1980s he recognised the commercial potential of the mouse-driven graphical user interface at Xerox PARC and brought the idea into the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh, which greatly improved the usability of personal computers.

After losing a power struggle on Apple's board he left in 1985 and founded NeXT, which focused on the higher-education and business markets. In 1986 he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm and founded Pixar, and he became known as an executive producer of Toy Story. When Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, he became Disney's largest individual shareholder and joined its board.

Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and he returned to the company, becoming its CEO in 2000 and leading it through the iPod, iPhone and iPad era, spreading a design philosophy that put simplicity and aesthetics first. He battled a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour for eight years, stepped down as CEO in August 2011 and became chairman. In 2022 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.